On the heels of the announcement it had been named to The Washington Post Top Workplaces for the 4th straight year, we caught up with Alpha Omega’s new Chief Human Resources Officer Tanja Betzler-Guerra to learn about this company’s growth trajectory, how it is working to maintain culture and retain talent, and how M&A may factor in.
Culture Ingrained
Having spent her first 60 days with the company on a listening tour, early indications about the culture within this company have been confirmed. “Everyone talks about culture, but it is very different to see it as something lived, not just talked about. For Gautam (Ijoor, President and CEO) it is part of the foundation of why this company is here, cemented in its core values.”
Symbolized in the company’s logo, explained in the acronym for its core values – HEART – each decision, action and forward movement is grounded in balance between job, family, community service, and personal enrichment; and through defined dimensions of success that include happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy.
Having HEART
As part of ensuring it lives its core values, that employees are engaged, Alpha Omega recently partnered with Happyly, a “workplace well-being and connection benefit for the intersection of work and life” which is intended to ensure the company engages and connects effectively with its dispersed remote team.
“We are encouraging things like making a meeting a walking activity. Happy hours are great, but they don’t suit everyone, so what other creative and healthy ways can we find for people to connect?”
The platform is also focused on volunteerism, helping to source volunteer opportunities for each team member based on their zip code, what they can do individually or with their families, and what they may be able to engage their team in.
“It was important to Gautam that this effort be authentic and the founder of Happyly, Caitlin Iseler, really puts her heart and soul into this, is really committed to making a difference for teams and communities. Part of this effort will be a scorecard we can look at after a year to measure how we did from an engagement perspective, from a usability view, and from a community impact view.”
Among its core values, Harmony may be the most challenging to define. “This value, and this pilot project, is about ensuring work/life balance, ensuring physical and mental well-being, that people take time away to take care of what is important. It requires that our leaders buy into and exhibit these behaviors themselves and infuse it down into the organization.”
Forward Movement and Growth
With defined growth plans in place, including growing Alpha Omega to a $1B company by 2030, the addition of Tanja represents a next stage in that progress plan and one focused on ensuring the continuity of its team and the company’s culture. “Knowing where we want to go and the kinds of senior leaders and skillsets we will need to get there, no interview, no recruiting is conducted that does not include what comes next and that culture view. Gautam is clear he wants to move forward with this leadership team and has articulated the plan so that everyone across the company understands what comes next.”
M&A
That lens of culture will also be applied to any future M&A activity that will support the company’s long-term vision and goals. “When you are buying a company, you are really looking for the skillsets of the people, but you have to look beyond the hard skills to the culture because when that doesn’t align there are retention and other issues that can undermine what you are looking to achieve.”
Alignment includes understanding the role of leadership and employees as it applies to culture. Part of ensuring a good fit with any future addition, as with any relationship, is fully understanding who Alpha Omega itself is. Even with a clearly defined mission and values, founded as it is with intent, this team is still talking about, refining, and ensuring it stays true to its values and intent.
Talent Factory
In the world of government contracting, many are drawing from the same pool of professionals. For Alpha Omega, this has initiated an effort to be creative, to seek out the purple unicorns wherever they may reside, including amongst its existing team. Alpha Omega has launched its Talent Factory, an innovative approach to closing the skills gap and broadening available resources. The initiative prepares internal talent for their next challenging assignment through strong mentorship, industry certifications, and upskilling. “Gautam is big on ensuring that working at Alpha Omega is a career, not just a job so as contracts end, we work to redeploy our talent. Sometimes that may require upskilling or reskilling but it’s an investment we are willing to make.”
The Talent Factory also focuses on external recruiting to identify, onboard, and upskill military Veterans, career changers, and early talent. The highly scalable, market-ready platform has been instrumental in Alpha Omega sourcing $364M in new contract wins over the past 12 months. The company has established a series of strategic university alliances with schools like the University of Virginia, George Mason University, Virginia Tech, Howard University, and others to build bridges between education and tangible labor market needs. This included assisting in the creation of a DevSecOps course at the UVA School of Continuing & Professional Studies. Additionally, Alpha Omega has created trade school internships to provide input into how those curriculums produce market-ready talent. These alliances tie directly into the company’s mission of serving the US government, addressing critical shortages in the labor market for Cyber, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation talent, and ensuring a prepared workforce.
Additional alliances include the UVA Guaranteed Interview Program and Alpha Omega’s $10,000 Annual Cloud Scholarship. Targeted engagement of professional groups like Virginia Association of Colleges & Employers (VACE) are cultivating burgeoning relationships with other Virginia universities to meet faculty and staff. Talent Factory partnerships will help students graduate with career preparedness and skills sets that are in demand. With technology’s exponential evolution, Alpha Omega is seeking talent with a strong foundation and a passion to keep learning and evolving as its customers’ needs and technology stack changes.
The company is also looking to engage talent outside of its geographic area, tapping into emerging markets like Kansas City and Fort Collins as Cyber & Digital Transformation hubs. “We are also looking at people in non-traditional careers, giving them exposure to government IT contracting. Alpha Omega is also working with universities and providing mentorship and other opportunities.”
While this may be viewed as a challenge, Alpha Omega takes it as an opportunity to communicate to and share with its customers, an expanded pool of talent, of knowledge, and of perspectives. They also engage partners and industry SMEs who may have stepped away from full-time roles but are not ready to retire, to inspire and guide this next generation of entrants into GovCon.
Development of its leaders and future leaders is also a focus for Alpha Omega, helping business and techy savvy people develop the softer skills that will allow them to have difficult conversations, to mentor and guide their teams, to gain, and maintain, trust.
Change is to be Expected
A common mantra when companies merge is that ‘nothing will change’ but that is very rarely the reality. Even if it is subtle, even if it does not touch everyone, the inevitable change somewhere within an organization will create a ripple effect.
“What is important is that you acknowledge that, communicate what that change will be and how it will look and then people can decide if they are in the right roles to continue moving forward. Spending money to acquire talent and then having that talent leave because you have done a poor job with communication or change management, is a poor investment.”
Empathetic Change
As it looks to celebrate and recognize those employees who have brought the company to its current position, Alpha Omega is also looking to begin the task of growing its team, of automation, scaling and streamlining processes. And underlying this will be empathy-driven change management.
Building on the shoulders of a hand-picked leadership team ready to roll up its sleeves to take the company to its next level, adding more leaders who can move the company in the direction it has set, the team will also apply both tact and strategy to its automation and improvement efforts.
“The best comment I heard related to AI was in response to the question ‘am I going to lose my job to AI.’ The answer was you might not lose your job to AI technology, but you might lose your job to someone who knows about AI. Whether it is internally or for our clients, we all have a responsibility to understand what AI is and how it could potentially impact workflow, and then adjust accordingly and thoughtfully. Only people bring authentic leadership and humanity to the work, so that is something we need to ensure is protected.”
Next Steps
Bringing Tanja in to support and help grow an organization that has already nearly doubled in size over the past year, it is clear Alpha Omega is marching with focus towards its next steps, along the way ensuring customer and employee satisfaction.
“This kind of growth can be scary for employees, not knowing what to expect. But Alpha Omega has a strong foundation, backed by a small business mentality of engagement and people first, and a CEO committed to those people. We know who we are, are maintaining clarity about that, and are committed to not losing that.”
About Tanja Guerra
Tanja is CHRO of Alpha Omega and was most recently the Parsons Corporation VP of Human Resources Defense & Intelligence Market. Prior to Parsons, she worked at SAIC as the VP, Human Resources for the Defense and Civilian Market as well as led the Enterprise Talent and Leadership Development organization. Tanja was part of Engility Corporation through its acquisition to SAIC, and began her career at CACI International as an intern. Tanja’s experience as a seasoned talent and culture strategist and HR executive within the Government Contracting community equips her with a great deal of perspective for how to navigate change and promote scalability within a fast-growing company like Alpha Omega.
About Alpha Omega
Alpha Omega’s mission is to support federal agencies with tailored digital transformation and cybersecurity solutions for US national security and global leadership. We achieve that via advanced capabilities in the areas of Design & Product Management, DevSecOps & Cloud Engineering, AI & Data Management, and Cybersecurity. Alpha Omega is committed to service excellence and continuous process improvement as demonstrated by our Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Maturity Level-5 (ML-5) for Development and Services, as well as ISO/IEC registration for 20000-1:2018, 27001:2013, and 9001:2015. It is our commitment to customers to not only deliver quality products, but to also be a www.alphaomega.com
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