Innovation & Job News

SoapBox named Best Place to Work

Jessica Vomiero | Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Brennan McEachran believes that the vision for a company starts from the ground, up.

According to McEachran, the founder and CEO of the innovation management company, SoapBox, organizations need a way to productively organize employee ideas to have a better chance at solving problems that are seldom known to upper management.

“We see pretty overwhelmingly, across the board, that the ideas we get are overwhelmingly positive,” said McEachran.

McEachran started the company when he was just 19 years old and a student at Ryerson University. Once he recognized that students knew the conflicts faced by other students better than any university official could, he went to work developing a way to harness these ideas.

After meeting with the school’s then-President Sheldon Levy, he became the first undergraduate student to develop his business idea in the Digital Media Zone, which is now the country’s most successful university incubator.

“I felt like it was a duty for me to prove that I could graduate with a degree in one hand and a company in the other,” says McEachran, who graduated in 2012.

By the time of his graduation, SoapBox had already hired eight employees.

The Canadian-grown innovation-management company Soapbox was recently named the best workplace in Canada by Great Place to Work for its "high-trust, high-performance workplace culture."

The statement shared with YongeStreet goes on to describe SoapBox as a company that’s anchored in facilitating the constant communication between frontline employees and leadership.

"I am very proud of the company we've built. Since our first days in the Ryerson DMZ, we believed that culture and happy employees were the key to keeping our customers happy and growing our business,” said McEachran in a statement sent to YongeStreet.

Since 2012, the company has grown to include 29 full time employees and now occupies an office in downtown Toronto. The company has gone on to work with brands like Cocoa Cola Canada, BMO and Kijiji. However, that doesn’t mean McEachran is through making SoapBox even better.

“Now what we’re doing is iterating and adding features. We’re exploring what it would look like from the manager’s side.”

He goes on to explain that SoapBox has proven its mandate, the next step is to allow managers to more efficiently spot problems in the workplace. When employees recognize a workplace issue, said McEachran, isn’t the right time to fix it. Managers will soon be able to use the system to spot trends and upcoming conflicts as well.

Furthermore, McEachran wants to improve the quality of the ideas submitted.

“We’re really working on building strong best-practices into the product. We’re building in a couple of features that allow employees to submit ideas that are significantly more relevant.”

To consolidate all of this, the company is working on developing an app for employees and managers to easily communicate on the platform.

His goal, he says, is to harness the energy of a younger workforce and directing it towards pushing entire companies forward, by allowing all companies to compete in the modern-day marketplace.

“We’re trying to build a product that allows all companies to act like the most successful company of the 21st century.”

Source: http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/-2117501.htm

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