Q&A with the 2025 Best Place to Work winner, Olson Zaltman
Editor’s note: Olson Zaltman is the winner of the Best Place to Work award, a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. The award winners were announced during a virtual celebration on November 19, 2025. To learn more about the awards, visit https://www.quirksawards.com/.
The Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards’ Best Place to Work award category honors a marketing research organization with a proven track record of investing time and resources into the better of all employees.
The 2025 Best Place to Work award winner is Olson Zaltman.
At Olson Zaltman, diversity and open-mindedness are highly valued. These values and an emphasis on building a diverse staff have created an environment riddled with new and creative thinking. A place where ideas from everyone matter.
Which initiatives have had the biggest impact on your company culture?
Olson Zaltman has always had a deeply rooted employee-first mentality. With open-mindedness and 360-degree empathy as two of our core values, being people-centric is simply part of our DNA. But the real turning point came when we fully embraced the evolution of the “post-COVID” workplace and took a hard look at what employees truly needed coming out of such a challenging period.
One of the most impactful steps was creating a dedicated head of culture role – someone whose primary focus is to stay connected to the pulse of the organization and ensure employees have meaningful ways to engage with one another.
The perks we offer – inspiration budgets, bi-weekly lunches, quarterly company retreats and more – are all intentional pieces of a larger puzzle; sustaining strong, authentic relationships across every level of the company.
That commitment to connection, above anything else, has been the driving force behind building and maintaining such a strong culture here.
How does Olson Zaltman drive creative thinking?
Once again, I’d turn to two of our core values.
In this case, passionate curiosity and intellectual devotion play a central role. They’re foundational to how we approach our work and a key reason we’re able to generate such distinctive and impactful insights.
This thinking carries through to our hiring process.
We’ve intentionally built an incredibly diverse team – culturally, academically and experientially. For example, our staff members come from disciplines ranging from anthropology and culinary science to engineering and psychology. This intentional diversity ensures we approach problems from multiple angles, leading to perspectives we simply wouldn’t arrive at otherwise.
Of course, diversity alone doesn’t create innovation – psychological safety does. Unique ideas only flourish when people feel respected, heard and encouraged to contribute. We work hard to create an environment where every idea, no matter who it comes from, is genuinely considered.
Lastly, our physical workspace plays a huge role. Bold colors, open collaborative areas and creative “micro-break” opportunities – whether it’s placing a puzzle piece, engaging in a quick chess match or joining an impromptu Nerf battle – help our team push through creative roadblocks.
At the same time, each employee has a private office, allowing them to shift smoothly between collaboration and deep focus. It’s this balance of openness, diversity of thought and thoughtfully designed space that truly fuels our creativity.
What advice would you give companies looking to build an outstanding workplace culture?
Don’t underestimate the power of small things.
You don’t need a massive budget to create a great culture. What you do need is organizational open-mindedness, a willingness to listen and, most importantly, a willingness to act. Those qualities cost nothing, yet they’re the foundation of every successful culture.
It’s also critical to diversify your outreach. Not every event or engagement opportunity will resonate with everyone, and that’s OK. Employees are individuals, each with unique preferences for how they build community and connect with the organization.
Our activities range widely: Murder mystery dinners, duckpin bowling, book club, office yoga, our annual “super bowl” potluck and spontaneous Starbucks runs. By offering a variety of touchpoints, we give every employee the ability to engage in a way that feels authentic to them.