While the Williams Lake and District Chamber of Commerce organizes the annual Business Excellence Awards banquet coming up on March 14, the chamber members themselves do not actually judge this event.
This task is performed by a panel of five judges, who independently assess the nominations, and whose identity is only known to the Business Excellence Committee chair who appointed them.
“The nomination process is the single most important component of the awards,” says chamber executive director Claudia Blair.
“The process has been tweaked a little over the years making changes that the judges deemed needed attention or would improve the process.”
Every year the chamber strikes a Business Excellence Committee to oversee all aspects of the event including the awards nomination and judging process.
The actual judging of nominations is done by an independent panel of five adjudicators selected by the particular year’s Business Excellence Committee chair.
Blair emphasizes that chamber board members are never involved in judging.
The committee chair normally chooses the judges from the city proper area in recognition of volunteer time required.
In order to maintain a completely unbiased process the names of the judges are only known to the committee chair, Blair says. The judges’ names are not known to each other, or to any other chamber members or staff.
In order to try and prevent any conflicts in selecting the judges, the committee chair reads all of the nomination papers before selecting the judges.
That way he or she can try to select judges that are not nominated themselves for an award, did not nominate anyone for an award and are not in conflict in other ways such as being an employee of a company nominated.
“It isn’t a perfect system by any means, especially when we work in a small community where most everyone knows everyone,” Blair says. “We have changed it up a little over the years and tried to get better at what we do to be as fair as possible.
Each judge selected is given a package with all of the nominations in it, along with the judging criteria and a point system with which to evaluate each nomination.
Each judge reviews and evaluates the nominations independently and tabulates their marks on the judging sheets provided. Judges may also add comments or concerns.
The committee chair re-checks the judge’s tabulations before giving them to Blair and her staff to check again. The highest score wins the award in each category.
The Business Excellence Awards night is coming up at the Elks Hall on March 14.
Businesses nominated for the Business Excellence Awards do not have to be chamber members. Anyone can also nominate a business for an award.
“Sometimes the biggest challenge in the nomination process is getting people to nominate others,” Blair says.
