Want a job that goes out of its way to make you happy? You’ve come to the right place
Do you get four weeks of holidays to start? How about an eight-week paid sabbatical every 10 years? Do you get your salary topped up to 100 per cent when you go on maternity leave? Subsidized on-site daycare? You don’t? Then you need to look closely at this year’s list of Canada’s Top 100 Employers.
For the eighth year running, Maclean’s has partnered with Toronto publisher Mediacorp to bring you Canada’s most comprehensive independent study into workplace benefits. After reviewing the recruitment histories of more than 75,000 employers, and inviting about 16,000 of those to apply, Mediacorp managing editor Richard Yerema has produced a list of the 100 employers in Canada who offer the best places to work. To produce this listing, Yerema and his team assigned grades in seven key areas, including work atmosphere, family benefits, vacation and performance management. The result is a detailed picture of the latest trends in workplace perks, which is now available free of charge — complete with the reasons for each selection — on Mediacorp’s job-search site, Eluta.ca.
Also online:
• How backstabbers, evil bosses and dumb rules taught our top firms what not to do
• Diversity or death: Some firms are slowly realizing they’ll need minorities to survive
So what’s new this year? The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, for starters. Spies need benefits too, and for the first time ever, CSIS has made the Top 100 cut — thanks in part to its ethnic recruiting drives and maternity leave top-ups to 93 per cent of full pay. (Trican Well Service, another Top 100 company, offers even more, with top-ups to 100 per cent of pay.) Also new this year are several environmentally friendly programs, such as transit subsidies, secure bicycle parking facilities and even showers for workers who bike.
Many of the best benefits from prior years, such as longer vacations, on-site gyms and the option to convert unused benefits to cash, are back too. And yes, public relations firm Hill & Knowlton Canada returns for another year with their famous weekly office beer cart. Along with the in-house band for company functions offered by SAS Institute Canada Inc., that may be one of the least likely perks to catch on. But it’s nice to know that it’s there.
Go to: The top 100