23 May The Life of an On-Site Consultant

By Ben Glickstein and Emily Powell

Katz & Associates has built a niche practice of placing our skilled communications practitioners on-site at our clients’ offices to work alongside the employees and project consultant team members. Working on-site takes our client relationships to whole new level. Our close proximity provides a unique opportunity to get to know our clients as people and professionals, which allows us to better anticipate their needs. Serving as an in-house representative of our client creates a smooth working relationship and provides our staff with a thorough, first-hand understanding of the working environment of public agencies.

Are there challenges to working on-site? Certainly. As we participate in lunch hour, employee morale events and water-cooler chat, we maintain the same degree of professionalism that we would with clients off-site. But it is precisely these unique day-to-day interactions and relationships that allow our on-site staff to provide an unparalleled level of service. We are able to think like expert communicators but speak the language of the engineers across the hall. By combining the experience of our senior practitioners with up-to-the-minute information of our officemates, our clients get the best of both worlds.

Because of an on-site consultant’s unconventional definition of “office,” one challenge is to find ways to continue building a Katz & Associates team culture. For example, our San Francisco team of five on-site specialists spends time outside of the office together, whether attending a San Francisco Giants home game or collaboratively painting a landscape of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. At our company meetings and after-hour events, Katz & Associates stands out for its distinctive company culture. But as an on-site consultant, one of the greatest compliments is being mistaken for a client employee.