Tech company takes staff on exotic team-building junkets

Link to original article.

Date: January 16, 2015

Published in: Winnipeg Free Press

Below is an excerpt of the full article.

We’ve all heard about workplace perks -- free snacks, on-site massage therapists and game rooms -- to lure people with hard-to-find IT skills in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

But the Canadian wireless retail point-of-sale specialists, iQmetrix, has a whole other proposition -- how about four days in rural Nicaragua digging trenches and building schools.

For several years, iQmetrix has been taking its staff -- not just a chosen few, but its entire workforce who’ve had at least one year on the job -- on getaway trips to places such as the Mexican Riviera for team building and some collective fun in the sun. In the past, they’ve had groups as large as 300.

This year’s trip will be a little different. At the end of the month, about 200 of them will head off to Granada, Nicaragua, a small city southeast of Managua. And rather than bond by the pool at an all-inclusive resort they’ll spend quality time building additions to a couple of schools and laying pipe for a water service in a small village nearby.

The company has more than 200 employees, including more than 50 people in Winnipeg.