Best Places To Work Runner-up By Roy Moore Nashville Business Journal November 17, 2005

Collaboration is common among technology companies, and industry veteran Cliff Duffey aims to retain that culture as he grows Cybera Inc. into a multimillion-dollar business.

Every time the telecommunications firm lands a client with unusual needs, such as requiring a secondary connection to a disaster recovery center, an exception meeting is held at Cybera. Employees from throughout the company offer their suggestions for handling the non-standard items.

Input from the lower levels of the company is valuable and helps make Cybera a great place to work, CEO Duffey believes.

"This is an environment where everyone feels they have a voice to contribute in the company," he says. "Even at the lowest level of the company, everyone's voice is heard."

As the company has grown into one of Nashville's rising tech players, new contracts require the formation of teams consisting of billing, order entry and executive-level workers. It's the lower level workers that provide many of the ideas.

"If you're responsible for the after-hours support or the order entry or the project management of the implementation, ultimately you know your job better than your managers," Duffey says.

His company provides broadband private networking services that enable clients to connect their disparate offices. The company's SmartNetwork is being used at retailers Mapco Express, Krispy-Kreme and Books-A-Million, which have multiple sites that must transfer data securely.

When Cybera adds a worker, the new hires most commonly cite the 48-employee company's reputation as a great place to work, says Amanda Cecconi, the company's vice president of marketing.

"We are young, tech and doing well with a business that actually has happy customers," she says. "We all look forward to coming into work. We all share the same objective and work as team to make progress every day.

© 2005 American City Business Journals Inc.