ITA Group Continues Innovation and Globalization to Serve Employees, Clients

People are the center of our business at ITA Group, including our clients, their audiences (employees, channel partners and customers) and our own team members. We’re focused on motivating, inspiring and engaging every audience to change the way people connect with brands they work at, work with and buy from. We help organizations understand their business, industry, audience and objectives and exceed their desired business goals with one-of-a-kind engagement solutions. At its simplest form, we’re humans helping humans achieve their highest potential.

That’s why we’re excited to announce we recently made two acquisitions that continue our focus on creating meaningful connections between audiences and brands. These acquisitions include a new employee experience technology platform that will reduce turnover and improve productivity and a new global office to better support our clients and participants in that region. Both acquisitions help us provide convenient, culturally relevant and people-centered services.

To stay relevant, we must also remain adaptive, which is especially important as younger generations join the workplace. Two elements will remain constant: people engagement and technological integration.

People Engagement Remains Top Priority

ITA Group’s goal is to provide the best possible programs and strategies to engage people who matter to our company and to our clients. If we can do that, we retain talent, accomplish business goals and impact the lives of many people around the world. We’ve spent years developing quality services, innovating to stay ahead of the curve and growing (our offerings and our presence) to ensure we deliver the best.

Engagement remains one of the top issues facing employers today. We’ve all worked with a colleague who wasn’t invested and felt the lasting negative impact of that experience on our own perspective and career. In fact, Gallup estimates that disengaged employees are not only detrimental to company culture, but they also cost the world $8.8 trillion dollars in lost productivity.

As if that wasn’t a big enough problem for companies and leaders, engaging employees, channel partners and customers is more challenging than ever due to a changing workforce, dispersed audiences, technology and customer demands and expectations. The office birthday lunch with a card signed that morning by everyone in the department is no longer the answer to keeping employees engaged. We build our custom engagement solutions to proactively address those challenges for our clients, so they experience increased sales, purchases, retention, referrals and alignment.

Technology to Improve Ease of Employee Engagement

Technology remains essential to work, communicate and stay connected. It also remains an essential tool in employee engagement. Our recent acquisition of Cooleaf Technologies, an employee engagement platform, provides our clients with turnkey software that makes it easy to plan onboarding, celebrate anniversaries and recognize good work. Combined with ITA Group’s wide range of research, strategy, engagement and experiential learning services, clients have a single-source agency that can partner and scale with their organization’s growth.

The platform lets companies gauge employee sentiment, recognize and incent performance and measure employee experience in real time with easy-to-use dashboards. The technology also provides a seamless way to report on key engagement metrics. It provides administrators with ways to interpret and act on the data to increase overall employee engagement, identify opportunities for improvement and solve problems. With pre-built integrations, the technology connects easily with other systems and initiatives, making it a part of a holistic engagement strategy. This increases retention and attracts top talent which allows companies to do more, be more and see more success.

Global Expansion for Culturally Centered Engagement Solutions

Human connection and understanding remains an important part of how we design and execute culturally relevant engagement solutions. Our experts around the globe have been leading the industry for years because they’re focused on our clients and their needs, while employing overall best practices. However, continued physical expansion is the best way to provide in-market support for our clients and their audiences.

As an example of this in action, ITA Group recently acquired an engagement solutions provider in Australia, extending our reach and bolstering our offering for current clients with an established presence or program participants in Australia and New Zealand. This marks the latest chapter in the global expansion of our company and services, with the focus of these efforts being singular: to provide the best engagement experience possible. We do this through a combination of technology, knowledge and presence. ITA Group’s Australia office helps us offer culturally relevant services to our clients in this region, while continuing to leverage the expertise and proven solutions we are known for. It’s something we plan to continue to focus on as our business grows.

Supporting and Rewarding Global Team Members

As we continue to make Greater Des Moines (DSM) the best place to live and work, we focus on creating a supportive and rewarding internal employee experience — and for our team members around the world.

We practice what we preach. We use our own solutions to engage our employees, and our services and solutions are proven and tested because we see it firsthand. In addition to creating a workplace culture that’s supportive and growth-minded (and one that drives engagement through accountability and incentives), we also provide perks to our employees aimed at expanding their skills, prioritizing their career and personal growth and fostering a welcoming and safe environment where each person is respected and has the power to impact our organization, our clients and each other. This creates an inclusive culture where team members feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work. As we know, when people feel valued and appreciated for who they are, they enjoy work more, feel more loyal to their employer and can innovate new strategies, offerings and opportunities for clients.

ITA Group is 100% employee-owned so, every team member has a vested interest in their own success as well as the company’s success. We also offer sabbaticals, work abroad opportunities and flexible and remote options, among other perks. Our own employee recognition program helps us celebrate each other’s achievements in meaningful ways and receive trending award options in our award catalog.

This fall, we’ll move to a new campus in West Des Moines that reflects what our employees need in a physical environment to be inspired and how we collaborate both in-person and remotely with our global colleagues and clients. We do this because it’s our business, but more importantly, we do this because it’s the right thing to do. For our employees, our clients and our company.

Photo Caption: ITA Group, a global leader in engagement solutions, acquired Performance Incentives, Sydney, Australia, to better serve the Australia and New Zealand markets with culturally relevant and locally managed solutions. Brent Vander Waal, President and Chief Executive Officer, welcomes Mari Kauppinen, Managing Director, ANZ – ITA Group, to lead this new team to serve clients in the region and collaborate with global ITA Group clients.

Success Today Drives Plans for Tomorrow

The two recent acquisitions are strategic investments in our products and services. More tools and locations increase our ability to effectively serve our clients and make an impact on their business and ours. In addition, these investments are indicative of our future. The way engagement solutions look and how they’re delivered will change. Trends will come and go, and learnings will inform best practices and key performance metrics.

However, two things will always be part of the mix: technology and physical presence. Making connections is easy through technology but making them count when needed by delivering in-person solutions provides an approach that engages the whole person. It takes constant innovation to remain relevant to our employees and our clients and we’re always looking for new and better ways to best support them.

We’re proud to be part of the Greater Des Moines Partnership community, Iowa and the global community, and we’ll continue to do what we do best — motivate, engage and inspire people to continue driving success.

Learn more about ITA Group on our website.

With the #7 Lowest Cost of Living in the U.S. and a Top Metro for Number of Economic Development Projects (among metros with a population of 200,000 to 1 million), Greater Des Moines (DSM) is a region where you can have it all. Learn more about what it’s like to live here.