Employees That Play Together Work More Productively Together
Written by: Jason Trussell, Senior VP and Regional Manager, iGATE Canada
It’s actually true – a workforce that has fun together builds trust, engagement – and increased productivity.
Everyone needs a circle of friends – and when employees feel they have compatible peers at the workplace, the workplace is a more comfortable, pleasant, peaceful place to be. At iGATE, we’ve confirmed this through research, and developed several structured employee engagement programs in response. These include peer groups where our employees interact, around favorite sports, favorite teams, favorite TV shows – whatever their interest; and structured employee engagement programs.
For example, we celebrate ‘Thank God it’s Monday’ to kick off the week in a high energy way. Every Monday, lunch is accompanied by our own in-house, all-employee band, which has grown from seven to over 30 employee members. This has been going on over five years, and just keeps getting stronger.
It’s a fun way to get people involved and engaged. We also build camaraderie by eliminating a lot of those irritating aspects of work – we strive to reduce meetings and meaningless paperwork; and many of our peer groups help employees learn new skills and pursue new interests. Our aim is to create a high happiness index and add meaning to our employees’ lives – all 27,000 of them.
At iGATE, we take a comprehensive, integrated approach to people management. We’ve worked to understand what truly motivates the workforce, through numerous surveys and studies, and we’ve developed a best practices approach from leaders around the globe. This approach has inspired outstanding employee engagement, and helped us consistently deliver quality service and solutions to our clients in Canada and worldwide. We’ve received the ‘Practice of Excellence’ award from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), for its Competency based Career Planning and Management System; and we are one of only two companies globally who have been assessed at People CMM® Maturity Level 5 – a framework from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), USA that comprises state-of-the-art, best practices for Human Capital Management.
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This commitment serves us well. See how it works for your business - get a little fun going at your office and see how spirits – and productivity – improve!
Jason Trussell is Senior Vice President and Regional Manager, iGATE Canada, the first Business Outcomes driven integrated Technology and Operations (iTOPS) solutions provider. iGATE delivers effective IT solutions to over 360 Fortune 1000 clients spanning such industries as: banking & financial services; insurance & healthcare; life sciences; manufacturing, retail, distribution & logistics; media, entertainment leisure & travel; communication, energy & utilities; public sector; and independent software vendors. For more information, visit: www.igate.com.
