2017 Optimas Awards

Creative Outlets

This year’s Optimas Award winners prove that savvy organizations must get inventive to solve complex workplace issues.

As workplace challenges grow more complex, creative solutions to resolve these issues become increasingly crucial. What was evident among our 21 Workforce Optimas Award winners is the clever ways they addressed their problems.

Now in its 27th year, the Optimas Awards celebrate HR’s success at solving some of the biggest business challenges of our time. Each year, the Optimas Awards are given by Workforce magazine to recognize human resources and workforce management initiatives that achieve business results for the organization.

One company acknowledged the prevalence of the gig economy outside its corporate walls and created an internal gig economy for employees to build their skillsets. Another, much in line with the growing trend of rewarding employees for volunteering, created an initiative that aims to help combat local and global inequality.

The gold winner for Benefits is a global organization with some 27,000 employees that was able to reconcile the necessity of streamlining benefits on an international scale while also being mindful of unique local needs. This company shows that balancing large-scale and small-scale needs, though it can seem impossible, can absolutely be accomplished.

And then there’s the 2017 General Excellence winner, Webasto Roof Systems Americas, which faced an all-too-common problem: sliding financials coupled with a toxic workplace culture. It was so bad that Webasto’s corporate culture was ranked by McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index among the “worst ever seen” in 2014. It took the initiative to improve its organizational and financial health and employee satisfaction, and, just three years later, the impact they’ve made is truly impressive, as witnessed with the General Excellence honors.

Congratulations to all of our 2017 Optimas Awards winners, which tackled these modern-day challenges with great resourcefulness. We look forward to what these companies will accomplish in the future.