IT Authorities Ranked Best Place to Work in Tampa

May 18, 2010 - PRLog -- In an objective, data-based competition conducted by the Tampa Bay Business Journal (TBBJ), in April, 2010, IT Authorities was chosen as the overall winner as Tampa Bay’s Best Place to Work after first winning the designation as best place to work for a company with 10 -25 employees.

The TBBJ did not subjectively choose companies to be honored. Companies were evaluated in a rigorous statistics-driven process.

IT Authorities scored 99.15, while the second and third ranked businesses tallied 98.46 and 96.55, respectively.

Do people love working at IT Authorities because they have the co-CEO’s of the Year or because the youngest person ever to work in a leadership role at Cisco now works at IT Authorities? Is it the fact that they are the fastest growing managed services provider in Tampa? Or that they have a room essentially dedicated to “Guitar Hero?”

Jason Caras and Jason Pollner, the company's founders and co-CEOs, create an atmosphere that encourages collaboration and team excellence. Their guiding philosophy is for employees to put bettering themselves even before bettering the company.

“IT Authorities is a place of personal and professional development.  It is a place where employees congratulate each other even when they are competing for the same positions.  It is a place where you can come in one day having had a difficult morning and be able to look to your right and left and see people that you can rely on day in and day out to be a rock in terms of consistency and positive outlooks,” Caras stated.

According to one IT Authorities employee, "I've never had the pleasure of working with a company that values my input this much."

To solicit nominations of companies that might qualify as best places to work, the TBBJ published notices and sent e-mails. Participants responded to a survey at the TBBJ Web site that asked them to share benefits and special perks offered to employees.

After the nominations were grouped into categories according to their number of employees, they were sent to QMR Market Research and imported into a database.

All employees of each nominated company were given an opportunity to complete a survey developed by QMR. No individual passwords were used, allowing each employee to complete the survey in anonymity. The winners were selected based on employee measurement of 40 attributes known to drive employee engagement.

The employee survey statements were each given a value of 1 to 6 points by the individual employees. The statements were broken down into 10 different categories: team effectiveness, retention risk, alignment with goals, trust with co-workers, individual contribution, manager effectiveness, trust in senior leaders, feeling valued, work engagement and people practices. Statements such as, "I enjoy doing my work," "I trust and respect my immediate supervisor" and "I know I can depend on the other members of my team" were all evenly weighed in the scoring.

Each company was given an overall score. To get the score, all of the survey responses were added up and divided by the total number of statements from all surveys completed by each company.

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IT Authorities is a national Managed Service Provider (MSP). The company provides 24/7/365, unlimited onsite and remote support for a fixed monthly fee, which provides its clients with predictable IT expenditures while delivering peace of mind