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How can you ensure your staff are happy and engaged at work? Katherine Lawrey takes a tour of G Adventures’ head office in Toronto with ‘mayor’ Dave Holmes to find out how they do it the G way
G Adventures’ Toronto HQ is known as Base Camp, London is The Summit, Melbourne is The Outpost and Boston is The Frontier. Our tour guides are CEOs – chief experience officers. We want to attract people who will go out of their way to seek spontaneous opportunities for our guests. We had a tour group who stumbled across the set of Game of Thrones in Seville, and the CEO – Carlos – asked whether they could have a tour as there was no filming at the time. It’s not something we can guarantee is going to happen every time a tour goes to Seville, but it’s pretty cool when it does happen.
Get together as a company and agree on a set of core values. Here at G Adventures, we love changing people’s lives [through travel and our non-profit organisation Planeterra]; we lead with service; we embrace the bizarre – one of our CEOs once dared me to eat a fermented duck egg; we create happiness and a sense of community; and we do the right thing.
Our founder Bruce Poon Tip believes that traditional HR does not inspire people to do great things. So we declared death to HR – we even gave it a funeral – and we created two new teams: Talent, which looks after recruitment and career development, and G Force, which looks after company culture and spreading those values.
We have 2,000 employees in 109 countries, so it’s not easy, but we keep people engaged with our online communities. Our CEOs have their own system – G Nation – so everyone can see what’s happening on the tours. I’m the anchor for GNN, a bi-weekly live newcast, where we share news and do spoof interviews. I tweet from the mayor’s account and anyone can email me on mayor@gadventures.com. I love to hear from our travel agent partners, our CEOs and our travellers.
Every Friday at 4pm, the office fridges are magically filled with beer, cider and wine. It’s part of my team’s job to come up with fun ways to surprise people, whether it is drinks, popcorn, ice cream or something entirely new.
We held a Zombie Apocalypse in Las Vegas, when Bruce handpicked a number of team members to go on a secret mission to a think tank, where we incubated new ideas. This is how it works: send your staff an email from a fantasy character – we used zombie@gadventures.com. Instruct them to show up at a specific airport at a specific time and whether to dress for a warm or a cold climate. Keep it a top secret, until they get on the flight, and use the time away for team bonding and/or brainstorming.
We asked our staff to nominate themes for our meeting rooms, based on people who have changed the world or been on great adventures. We have a Steve Jobs room – the light fittings are repurposed Macs. There’s a Wright Brothers room (where the chairs are ridiculously comfortable) and a Diane Fossey jungle room. The Star Wars room has light sabres and a Chewbacca suit – anyone’s welcome to put it on. London has a James Bond room, and Cusco a Paddington Bear room.
Before we hire a new starter, we put them through the G Factor. This is an interview with three randomly selected members of staff to assess whether they fit with, and would contribute to, our company culture. The interview takes place in a meeting room that’s also a ball pit, and there’s a big spinning wheel with questions provided by staff, such as “how much of the theme tune to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air can you remember, and can you prove it?” The point is to see how people react when put in unusual situations. The three interviewers go back to their desks and fill out a survey with a choice of green, yellow and red lights. Any red lights, and you don’t get hired.
We have 32 in-house software developers in our “bunker”. We have 800 itineraries and deal with 42 currencies, and we want to do things our way. Our global connections officers work in our “boombox”, more commonly known as the call centre. Numbers go through to here, to London, to Vancouver and Australia, so we can man the phones 24/7 and offer seamless service. Coming soon to all our call centres is a big red button – whenever the button is pressed, music plays and you have to get up and dance – this was inspired by our younger team members who say they get job satisfaction from being able to randomly celebrate and party.
Our marketing and brand team are a strong contender for this – they get to travel around the world, finding fun ways to tell our story. Our new videographer went to Costa Rica on day three. But the Insight team think they have the best job reading customer evaluations. There were 55,000 last year and they read every one. When people do a good job, they share it across the company, and when there’s room for improvement, they act on it. They also have the power to enact random acts of G. For example, when a traveller lost their camera and asked for a letter for their insurance company, we reached out to the rest of their group and sent a photo book of the best photos.
We turned our Toronto roof patio into a “partio”. It has hammocks and cushions, and a barbecue. We host events up there, and every two weeks in summer we have a staff movie night. There’s a Wi-Fi booster up there, so if staff want to bring their laptops up and work outside during the day, they can do so.
Occasionally, our creativity hits a brick wall. It’s never Bruce who rejects our ideas, but facilities team. They vetoed the idea of a multi-storey slide and a golf driving range on the roof terrace – on health and safety grounds. Spoilsports!
