Running a business in Alaska’s travel industry is a unique challenge. Here at Alaska Riverways we operate tours on traditional sternwheeler riverboats and offer guests an experience that allows them to discover the rich history of travel, trade, and discovery in Fairbanks and the surrounding area. It’s a highly seasonal business; we flex from 15-20 full time employees year-round up to over 200 for the summer season. Operating boats in Alaska and Canada has been my family’s way of life for over 125 years and five generations and that experience and history have shaped Alaska Riverway’s identity since 1950. Despite the specificity of our operation, we still face many of the same challenges that most businesses do. Maintaining culture is one that, as an Evergreen® business, is of the utmost importance, but also one that can be particularly challenging with the ebb and flow of a seasonal workforce.

In the years before 2020, when I was a member of the executive team and then company president starting in 2019, we began addressing the question of culture. Since we bring in so many new employees year after year, we must pay extra attention to this. We have been lucky in that, over time, we have had a very high return rate for our summer employees – 60%-70% – and our culture was strong and positive. But we noticed that every year, despite our careful hiring process, we nevertheless had a certain number of employees who ended up not being a match. Most of them didn’t make it through a full season. Although the number wasn’t high, we wondered if we could do better.