By ThirdQuarter

Take a walk around one of Global Relay’s five offices around the globe and something jumps out immediately.

No Cookie-Cutter Employees
No one looks the same.

Their 300-strong workforce is made up of people of all different ethnicities, gender and age. There’s no cookie-cutter employee. The company, which provides messaging and archiving technology services to the financial sector, has embraced and leveraged diversity from day one.

It’s one of the keys to its success, says founder Warren Roy, who started the company in 1999.

“I think in a growing business you typically surround yourself with like-minded people. So…you tend to hire others like you. But it’s the wrong way to think,” Roy says. “Hiring like-minded people doesn’t bring in diverse views and diverse views is what gives companies their strength.”

Today that strength is evident. Global Relay successfully competes in more than 90 countries, against multinationals like IBM and Microsoft. The company has also won its share of awards including Best Companies to Work for in BC, BCBusiness’ Most Innovative Companies, Deloitte Fast 50 and Deloitte Fast 500 and Profit 500.

Those accolades are only possible with a strong and happy workforce built with employees of all backgrounds and ages.

Celebrate and Leverage Differences
While other companies grapple with how to manage a multi-generational workforce by focusing on the challenges and conflicts, Global Relay rejects ageist prejudices and has instead created an environment that celebrates and leverages people’s differences and their similarities.

“We are in the tech sector and it tends to foster people who are more into thinking, problem solving and collaboration, so there’s a natural flow among the people regardless of age or background,” says Kelvin Ng, the company’s director of business operations. “There’s huge mutual respect for the guidance of the other because neither would be successful without the other.”

While technology feels almost obsolete the moment it hits the market, Global Relay’s management and team are not so quick to dismiss it. On the contrary: the company values its symbiotic relationship with cutting-edge innovation.

The Best of All Worlds
“We hire a lot of co-op students in their 20s. The methodology they’re taught these days is an ‘agile development’ process. So essentially, every two weeks, they add a new feature to their application. That’s how they’re taught to develop and evolve technology,” Roy says.

“The older employees, who came from such organizations as Thomson Reuters or Nortel, are the infrastructure builders. They look at the world from a very different perspective. So the young guys are building apps with agile development and the older guys are building platforms over a couple of years. They’re building the platform that creates the environment that makes it possible for the younger guys’ apps to be successful.”

It is not just behind the scenes where an age-diverse workforce is a plus, says Shannon Rogers, the company’s president and general counsel.

“Everyone here has that entrepreneurial spirit. Everyone is very smart so it doesn’t matter how old you are,” Rogers says. “We have common things we’re building and we’re better off together. That’s why it works so well.”

ThirdQuarter is a Canadian non-profit organization that specializes in recruitment services for job seekers aged 45 and older. This article was extracted from their recently published comprehensive handbook, A Guide for Human Resource Professionals: The Business Case to Hire Experience.