#1 Large Company: ‘People Here Know We Care About Them’: Culture Propels Berkshire Hathaway C. Dan Joyner to No. 1 on Top Workplaces List
May 11, 2022 05:04PM ● By Donna Isbell WalkerA strong workplace culture, where employees are respected and valued and treated as family, has kept employment steady at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices C. Dan Joyner REALTORS during the Great Resignation.
That’s the way that Danny Joyner, the president and CEO and son of the company’s founder, sees it.
The culture is also what led to the company’s No. 1 ranking among large companies on this year’s Top Workplaces survey. This is the sixth consecutive year that the realty agency has made the Top Workplaces list.
Danny Joyner, who turns 55 in May, was born three years after his father founded in the company in 1964, and he grew up as “a little office rat,” spending much of his childhood hanging out in the office.
“I used to always go up there and play in the office with the agents,” Joyner recalls. “We would have putting contests. I just remember having so much fun.”
By the time he was in high school, Joyner was mowing lawns and painting or cleaning the rental houses, so it was a natural fit to join the company after he graduated from University of South Carolina.
“I saw over the years how happy my dad was with his agents,” Joyner said. “It was just like another family. And that’s kind of what has made us successful – and I think any organization that’s successful, not necessarily just the real estate business – is the culture.”
Joyner credits his father with building a strong culture, which has retained its strength for more than 50 years.
“People here know that we care about them, know that we love them,” Joyner said. “At the end of the day, honestly, you spend more time with the people you work with every day than you do with your immediate family.”
The company, which affiliated with Berkshire Hathaway in 2013, has nine Upstate locations and 452 employees, which includes 425 residential real estate agents. Services include residential sales, commercial sales, rental property management, and HOA management.
“So we’re a full-service real estate firm. If you need it done on the real estate side, we can handle it for you,” he said.
Agents often help one another out, showing a house to a potential client for a colleague if that person is busy, he said.
Joyner says the people who work at Berkshire Hathaway/C. Dan Joyner know that their employers care about them and want them to succeed, and that has helped the company thrive.
In fact, he said, the company has not lost a single employee since the beginning of the so-called Great Resignation, which saw record numbers of employees nationwide leave their jobs, in some cases without having another job lined up.
“I believe strongly that it is that culture” that has helped the company retain all of its employees, Joyner said. “We’ve not had any problem hiring when we’ve had a need during Great Resignation. … We take care of our people really well, and again, they know we care about them, both personally and professionally, and we’ve been really fortunate to have a place where people seem to love working.”