This year's winner of the Computer Society of SA (CSSA)/TalentAlign IT Leading Employer of the Year Award has gone to Yellowtail Software.
The Cape Town-based company received the award last week during the CSSA President's Awards Breakfast at the Wanderers Club in Illovo.
Also making it to the podium for the award were Alchemy Software Solutions and SQA SA, who completed the finalists' list.
Marius du Toit, general manager at Yellowtail, says it is an honour to win the award this year. “We didn't expect to win the award at all. Actually, we asked the employees to be as critical as possible of the company so that we would see the areas where we needed to improve.”
Du Toit says Yellowtail employs 30 people at its Cape Town offices. However, he says their market is mainly overseas-based, especially in the Netherlands. He also notes that the company's headquarters are in the Netherlands though most of the directors have worked in SA before.
According to Gail Sturgess, senior consultant at TalentAlign, the purpose of the award is to showcase and reward organisations that not only say that 'people are their greatest assets', but that also inculcate the practices that bring the concept to life in the organisation.
“Many organisations have, as part of their mission statement, the fact that employees are important to the organisation. Most, however, don't actually have the practices in place that give meaning to this.
“The IT Leading Employer of the Year Award seeks to identify and reward those organisations that put their mission statement into practice,” says Sturgess.
Employee engagement, notes Sturgess, is defined as the commitment that an employee has to the success of the organisation.
“Key words are 'commitment' and 'success of the organisation'. Research studies undertaken by Gallup, [as well as other research firms] since the late 1990's, [give] evidence that the level of employee engagement impacts directly on the bottom line of the organisation itself.
“The formula is simple: Higher level of employee engagement equals higher sales plus increased productivity and better customer loyalty. If this is the case, then it is in the interest of all management to have the highest possible level of employee engagement”.
Sturgess believes people-related costs account for upward of 30% of the IT budget today - generally, the highest single element of cost - adding that it is simple business sense to put in place practices that maximise return on this investment.
Explaining how the nomination process works, Sturgess says participating organisation have their employees complete a survey set up for their organisation.
She adds that each participating organisation has the same questions, but each survey is separate.
“On the closing date, the scores of each of the surveys are added up to see which organisation has the highest score. There is a small weighting factor included based on size of an organisation and percentage of participation. The winner is simply the organisation with the highest score.”
This is the third year that the award has been presented. Last year SQA SA claimed the award, while in 2008 it was FoschiniData.
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