Celebrating Exceptional Employees: The Recent Winners Of Our Standing Ovation Awards

Every quarter, we recognize employees who follow our core company values: Crave Greatness, Own the Outcome, Deliver Awesome, and Embrace Community. We also celebrate strategic sales team members and those who have created value for our team and/or customers. This is an opportunity for team members to nominate the coworkers they think best exemplify these values, and our COO, Sarah Hagan, and CEO, Trevor Gruenewald, announce the winners in our global Town Hall Meeting.

The winner and runners-up of these awards receive High5 points, which can be redeemed for gift cards or other goods. These awards are a great way to unite our company, celebrate our team members' achievements, and remind one another of the values we carry in our company.

Crave Greatness Award Winner—Travis Edgar 

The Crave Greatness Award recognizes a co-worker who demonstrates innovation. They bring new ideas, processes, or tools that allow us and our customers to achieve greater success. This quarter, we are excited to recognize Travis Edgar on the global IT team as someone who craves greatness in the workplace.

Travis has a great eye for innovation! He uses his talents to drive innovation in our new global hire pre-boarding process. He collaborates closely with HR and IT across multiple time zones and countries to meet critical deadlines for new automation and data integration initiatives. Because of Travis, we now have automated, globalized communications for hiring managers and new hires to share critical next steps, which enables clear insights for our hiring managers. 

While he’s already accomplished so much, Travis continues to provide additional ideas for innovation and automation throughout the onboarding process. Thank you, Travis, for your work in creating a seamless onboarding process!  

Own the Outcome Award Winner—Andrew Dams 

This award is all about accountability and teamwork. The Own the Outcome Award is given to a coworker who demonstrates their ability to put the good of ECI ahead of their responsibilities to drive improved performance for the company and better serve our customers. They go above and beyond their typical job description to deliver exceptional performance for their team and our customers. The Own the Outcome Award winner is the Manager of Security Operations, Andrew Dams !  

Andrew’s dedication to our company’s security and success is commendable. One of his most notable achievements is his commitment to developing risk management strategies. His knowledge of today’s security landscape has provided insights that better our security positioning. This proactive approach allows us to mitigate and eliminate potential risks to our security structure.   

Andrew’s impact extends far beyond the Information Security team and into our sales enablement efforts. Through implementation, Andrew has automated the production of customer security reviews, saving time. His dedication to providing stakeholders visibility into ECI’s security posture is nothing short of exemplary. It is no surprise that this security expert is our Own the Outcome quarterly winner!  

Deliver Awesome Award Winner—Fengning Yu 

If you’ve ever experienced customer service that goes above and beyond, you’ve found yourself a nomination for the Deliver Awesome Award. This award recognizes a coworker who provides superior customer service for one or multiple of our dealers/strategic alliances. This award highlights external excellence and recognizes someone within ECI who constantly works to improve and uplift the team and company. Congratulations to this quarterly award winner, Fengning Yu , product marketing manager.  

Fengning is a hardworking and dedicated individual! Not only does she work internally to help her teams, but Fengning sets customers up for success with all the ideas she brings to the table. She is devoted to our customer base and helping small job shops. Her development of the “Ask the Expert” program has helped our customer base grow while reducing churn. Fengning is someone you can count on to put the customer first, and we thank her for all she does.  

Embrace Community Award Winner—Souad Ben Salah 

There is so much in life that we take for granted. The Embrace Community Award goes to someone willing to step outside and care for their community. It is for an individual who donates their time, energy, and talents toward making a difference in the world around them. We are so excited that the quarterly Embrace Community winner is Souad Ben Salah , a customer experience specialist.  

Despite living in the Netherlands, Souad has embraced the northern Moroccan region where her mother is from.  In this area, it is common for a young girl’s education to end after elementary school. Souad and her family are devoted to helping as many girls from as many villages as possible continue their education, and they have a special connection to the school her grandfather built. Their slogan is, “If you educate one girl, you educate a whole village.”   

But it doesn’t end there. When Souad and her family heard that a child needed heart surgery, they stepped up and stayed nearby to help the parents during the surgery and with recovery. Souad’s willingness to help others sets an example that we all hope to follow.  

Strategic Sales Award Winner—Scott Stanford 

This award does not recognize the highest seller but those sales professionals who drive high-quality sales. Our newest Strategic Sales Award winner is Regional Sales Executive Scott Stanford !  

CEO Trevor Gruenewald nicknames Scott “Mr. Consistency” since he meets quota every year. Scott finished last quarter as the number one new system sales rep for the entire year. Each new customer he brought on board capitalized on multiple applications so they could leverage a fully connected software solution.  Scott is an “industry consultant expert,” as described by Trevor.  

Value Creation Award Winner—Michael Kotlikov 

The Value Creation Award is a newer award added to the ECI Standing Ovation recognition. This award promotes creativity in how we work with people, technologies, and processes with the goal of increasing economic value for all stakeholders. Our quarterly Value Creation Award winner is Michael Kotlikov , senior development ops engineer.  

We all face the disruption of Teams chats and questions but sometimes getting quick answers to those questions is critical to our success. Michael has created a solution for his team to stop this problem! He was able to compile an ECI knowledgebase chatbot that pulls from knowledge-based articles to answer team members' questions. This internal tool is a huge productivity boost for support teams and anyone with internal “how-to” questions.  

Michael is also a team player who, after completing his regularly scheduled work, works nights and weekends to free his colleagues from any extra pile-on work. It is safe to say the value Michael has created for his team is award-winning.  

Congratulations to all our winners!