Introducing RIVAFlex - The Workspace of Tomorrow

Today we made the internal announcement we will not be asking corporate employees and other offsite employees to return to the office, instead we’re remaining 100% virtual. This past year has shown us all there are better ways to work than the one-size-fits-all model of the past. Instead of dictating when and where our employees should be, we’re empowering them to create a work environment that suits their individual needs, achieve their goals, and maintain work-life balance. For some employees that's working from the office 5 days a week, others will remain 100% virtual, and some will adopt a hybrid solution. 

The future of work is flexibility. 

RIVA is proud to be at the forefront of the GovCon community with the announcement of our new employee-centric approach to work, RIVAFlex. 

RIVAFlex gives employees the ultimate flexibility and choice to work in an environment most productive for them. Work from home, work on the road, or work from our corporate HQ. True flexibility, no strings attached. RIVAFlex empowers employees to make their own choices while ensuring our community continues to focus on career development, collaboration, ideation, team building, and social activities. 

RIVAFlex goes into effect immediately. We’re making this announcement early in order to allow our employees the opportunity to plan for the future and give our leadership and management teams time to build supporting policies, structure, tech stack, and a collaborative environment to ensure our business and our employees are both set up for success. We’ve created a runway to learn, adopt, pivot, and change as necessary to ensure a seamless transition. 

We didn’t make this decision overnight. 

For the past year our leadership team has been in numerous discussions regarding the future of our workspace. We’ve considered every option and kept an eye on industry trends. This decision is really about our people. We feel this flexible approach is the best option for the future of RIVA and our employees. We understand each of our employees has a unique set of needs, personal circumstances, and professional goals; we believe RIVAFlex will help us all grow together. 

We also know that the world is getting flatter, distance no longer needs to be a barrier to employment. Going virtual opens up the talent pool and allows us to hire top talent from other markets which increases our value to our customers and diversifies our workforce. 

Performance and culture are still key.

Talking with my peers, the two biggest concerns industry wide to remaining virtual are impact to performance and loss of culture. For me, I’m not concerned, in fact I’m confident RIVA will continue to grow, our employees will continue to perform, and our culture will remain intact.  

Over this past year we’ve proven we are able to maintain our social, collaborative culture in a remote environment. Now that we’re staying virtual, we’ll have to be more intentional about creating employee engagement opportunities and remaining connected. We’re working to create an employee engagement calendar that includes social, strategic, and collaboration meetings and events to ensure employees remain connected and have opportunities to engage in-person. Employees can expect a range of monthly in-person touch points including: company lunches, happy hours, collaboration sessions, team meetings, workshops, trainings, and more. We’ll host virtual social events for those based outside of the DMV area and we’ll continue to leverage online collaboration tools like Slack, Trello, and Teams, to fuel our daily collaboration and communication needs. 

To ensure our collective growth and performance goals remain on target, we’re taking the next few months to overhaul our employee review and feedback processes, shifting from formal annual reviews to a more fluid quarterly feedback approach. We’ll also be investing in more training for managers to ensure our team has the tools and skills necessary to lead hybrid teams.  

Our people make RIVA, RIVA. I’m excited and proud of my team for pioneering the future of work in the GovCon space. Click here to to read our official program announcement.