Career Services

The Stars 50 Best GTA Employers
Toronto Star: June 18, 2010

For the best employers in the Greater Toronto Area, it all comes down to say, stay and strive.

It’s about having employees who love their company so much that they recommend it to others, rarely think of leaving and strive to do their best.“Our whole point of view is that it’s really employees who know whether they’re working at a good place or not,” says Neil Crawford, principal with Hewitt Associates in Toronto and leader for the annual Best Employers in Canada survey.

About 250 to 300 private and public sector companies from all major industries, sectors and regions register for the study, which is conducted alongside the Queen’s Centre for Business Venturing at the Queen’s School of Business.The Best Small and Medium Employers in Canada study is for organizations with 50 to 399 permanent employees, while the Best Employers in Canada study is for those with 400 or more permanent employees.Companies that have been open for business for three years or more are eligible.

There are three elements: a survey that goes out to either all employees or a random sampling; a slightly different survey for the chief executive and his or her direct reports; and information provided by the company about their industry, benefits and compensation packages.There is no cost to participate and all companies get valuable feedback. The top ones gain national exposure through the best employers ranking, such as the Toronto Star’s Best 50 GTA Employers. Those that don’t make the list are not publicly identified.For the Greater Toronto ranking, Hewitt culls the national survey looking for companies with a local presence.

Ultimately, the study gauges how much of the company’s workforce can be described as engaged, Crawford says. That refers to employees speaking positively about their company, their eagerness to be part of the organization and the degree to which they are inspired by leadership, the culture and what the company is doing for stakeholders and customers.“The bottom line is that when you have high engagement, good things happen in an organization,” Crawford said.

He likens engagement to the difference between a functional and a dysfunctional family. “For a dysfunctional family to move to some higher level of functioning, they have to bear their soul or go through a transformation in terms of thinking and relating to one another, and that’s hard,” he says.

By contrast, organizations that make the list “seem to have it factored into their DNA. But when you get out there and start talking to them, you see that they work really hard at it. But it’s much easier to continue to work at something when you know what it looks like and what the benefits are.”Across the entire study, engagement levels range from 25 to 90 per cent, with the average running at about 60 per cent. The best employers come in at about 70 to 90 per cent.

More than a decade of research into what makes companies tick shows that size does not affect engagement levels, Crawford says.“We see low and high (engagement scores) in the small study and the large study,” he said.

“Large employers say, ‘Oh well, if you’re smaller it’s easier to have higher engagement.’ And small employers say, ‘If you’re large you have the money and the resources to help people have high engagement.’ Both are wrong, and both are right at the same time.”

In fact, engagement starts at the top. “It’s really about what the leadership is doing. Are they effective? Are managers showing people why their work is valuable and talking to them about their future in the organization? Are the ways that work gets done effective?” Crawford says. “It can certainly help to have lots of flexibility in rewards and benefits programs, but it’s not just about the pool tables and shade-grown coffee. That doesn’t create engagement.”

During the recession, companies with already-high engagement levels typically saw an increase, and vice versa.“It’s kind of what you expect,” Crawford says. “The organizations that went into the recession with strength in engagement, they had their people with them. Employees trusted their leaders, the communication is working and there’s a greater sense of teamwork. If they did have to restructure and terminate employees, they did it in the best way they possibly could.”

Click here to view the list.