Melco International has been awarded a Top Workplaces 2024 honor by The Denver Post Top Workplaces. This list is based solely on employee feedback gathered through a third-party survey administered by employee engagement technology partner Energage LLC.

The Westminster, Colorado-based apparel decoration solutions provider has always put emphasis on quality company culture, according to Dale Sanders, CEO and president. When he stepped into the role in 2016, he really ramped up efforts to dig into employee and customer experiences with Melco. “I’ve always been curious about how the people internally here feel about us, as well as externally [with customers],” Sanders explains.

He says that in 2023, the internal team dove into the Top Workplaces program to get insight on employee feedback, but his curiosity really peaked with the COVID-19 pandemic. “COVID threw such a change into the culture,” Sanders states. “Everyone was working from home … we ended up adapting that hybrid structure. There’s always [that fear] that you lose some of that culture — people visiting around a cup of coffee or having those office conversations. It was important to me to get an understanding of how the company felt the culture is.”

The Top Workplaces insight gave Sanders and team a strong sense of how people stand, both internally and externally. The confidential survey uniquely measures the employee experience and its component themes, including employees feeling Respected & Supported, Enabled to Grow, and Empowered to Execute, to name a few.

Sanders explains that this aligns with the goals he had coming into his position in 2016. “For me, it was trying to break down some barriers and make myself accessible,” he says of building internal relationships. “It’s about engaging people and building trust among the people that work here. You don’t know if that sticks with people until you ask them. So it’s about seeing if changes work.” Leadership at Melco has worked hard to empower employees to make decisions and hold individual meetings.

For him, this mindset also applies to external relationships with customers, a mindset that starts with employees and spreads outside a company’s doors. “Everyone [needs] to understand our values and rhetoric,” believes Sanders. “[Industry] recognition sometimes gets lost, but it’s part of being a team and part of offering solutions. What does the outside world think of us as an organization? We want to add value to the community.”

The Top Workplaces award also brought out a few areas that Sanders and team would like to improve on. “The great part about the survey was, we all have blind spots, and some came out in the survey, and it’s ok. There are things we need to do better.”

In that sense, the Melco team has big goals for the future. Sanders notes that they want to continue to strengthen their internal values and grow their presence in the industry. “We make sure we have strong recognition in the industry, and we want to continue on that path,” he says. “We continue to provide a strong value to our customers as well as employees. We believe in partnerships, growth, and win-win scenarios, which are important internally and externally. It takes time and dedication — those are things I see us continuing to work on.”