Up Here Business decided to run a little contest. We invited employees from across the North to write in and tell us what makes their company a great place to work. Is it the money, straight up? The perks? What about the opportunities for personal and professional growth? What we got were responses that ran the gamut, but what they all had in common was this: There are some sweet jobs in the North. We wound up with five companies to feature. In alphabetical order they are: Acklands-Grainger, FSC Architects & Engineers, Lawson Lundell, Northwestel Inc., and the NWT Council of Persons with Disabilities. We decided not to try and rank the five companies, for that would have been a subjective, divisive and ultimately futile exercise (and this is none of those). Rather, in the spirit of camaraderie, we decided to simply highlight their various paths to employee harmony, and to draw the winner of the weekend retreat out of a hat. Without further ado, let it be known that FSC Architects & Engineers has won the prize, but we’d like to think all the featured companies feel they’ve won something by making it onto our Top Northern Employers list. Congratulations.
The Editors
So, what happened in Las Vegas?
With offices in Yellowknife, Edmonton, Whitehorse and Iqaluit, FSC heads south for a working vacation.
For the employees of FSC Architects & Engineers, kudos to the company begin with benefits, and those begin in Las Vegas. It was last February, during the long, cold, dark winter, that the company took its 65 employees – plus spouses, who had to pay only the flight – to Sin City for a three-day set of meetings, workshops and pleasures.
As sweet as that is, it’s just the beginning. “They cover all the bases,” says Sandy Birrell, an engineer in the Whitehorse office. “From the smaller material gifts like leather bound books, shirts, hats and great winter jackets, to financial gifts of matching RRSP contributions and recreation funding.”
Shall we continue? There are the usual competitive health and dental benefits, but how about paid time off over the Christmas holidays, an annual golf tournament, legendary summer and Christmas parties, volunteer-matching hours and refreshments during staff meetings? Then there are the professional development opportunities, the long-term service awards and the exceptional performance bonuses.
“And there’s hopefully more to come,” says the human resource department’s Valerie Stark. “We’re doing well as a business so there’s lots of discussion about what can be done on improving benefits.”
And apparently the benefits aren’t all. First-year engineer Gord Stephenson even cites the job as a reason to work for FSC, saying it both challenges and rewards him. FSC hired him four years ago right out of Grade 12, and he worked summers for the company while earning his engineering degree at the University of Alberta. “The first summer they sent me to Kugluktuk to do site inspections at a water-treatment plant,” he says. “They put you in positions where you can get a lot of experience quickly, provide support, and you can understand things better when you go to school.”
Warren McLeod, one of FSC’s nine partners, says the purpose of the company’s generous benefits package is two-fold: to attract top-level talent and to be recognized as one of the top employers in Canada. “The market for employees is a tough one,” he says. “A couple of years ago we were wondering which direction to go to give back to our staff. At the time we thought it was bonuses, but we did an employee survey and what came back was that it wasn’t all about money, it was about having a savings plan and all these perks that we’ve since implemented.”
And yes, the Vegas thing – where everyone was put through a project manager’s boot camp – was a success. “Since then things have really picked up,” McLeod says. “It gave everyone a clearer picture of the business side of our industry, and since then we’ve seen a real change in our numbers.”
Willing and able (and flexible)
At Lawson Lundell LLP, work is important, but so are the people doing it. “It’s a great place to grow and learn in your field.”
When Sylvia Siemens started applying for jobs in Yellowknife back in 1999, she knew she didn’t want to work full-time. She had two young sons and a pilot for a husband whose hours were all over the map. She knew that made for some interesting challenges if both parents were working full-time. Her priority was house and home, and she let it be known she only wanted part-time employment. “I found there wasn’t a lot of interest in accommodating that.”
But Lawson Lundell LLP was different. Siemens applied for a paralegal position at the Vancouver-based law firm’s Yellowknife office and requested her work hours be from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. – instead of the traditional 9 to 5 shift. The company didn’t bat an eye. Now with the firm nine years, Siemens says it’s been a satisfying run. “They’ve always been willing to accept that you have priorities besides work.”
That willingness to work with employees and not against them seems ingrained in the corporate culture at Lawson Lundell, particularly at its small Yellowknife office that houses just 14 employees. Talk to other employees and senior partners here and a theme emerges: Work is important, but so are the people doing it. Stacy Koehler, Lawson Lundell’s office manager for its Yellowknife and Calgary branches, raves about the firm she’s been with for 10 years. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find such a strong, healthy and rewarding culture in a law firm,” she says.
Koehler says the firm encourages and supports employee volunteerism, pays 100 per cent of the costs if employees want to take courses to upgrade their skills, is big on company social events and employee recognition and down on anything that promotes old-school hierarchical thinking. To prove that last point, Koehler notes that when the firm designed its new office space in Yellowknife, all offices were made the same size – 10 by 15 feet.
Sheila MacPherson, one of the senior partners in the Yellowknife office, says that as a single parent, she appreciates the firm’s flexibility and the relatively relaxed vibe at the office. “I’ve always felt comfortable bringing my daughter into my work environment if I had to,” MacPherson says. “I’ve never had any feedback that that was inappropriate – as long as she was well-behaved. At Lawson Lundell, you can have a life and a job.”
Siemens also gives her employers two thumbs up and would vouch for Lawson Lundell if anyone asked her what the firm was like to work for. “I’d tell them to go for it,” she says. “It’s a great place to grow and learn in your field. It’s a very nurturing environment.”
Northwestel’s age of engagement
President and CEO Paul Flaherty is leading Northwestel in a new direction, and it’s paying back with more than just dividends.
For Tracey Taylor, one “aha” moment occurred at 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday last fall. It was at kilometre 150 of the Klondike Road Relay, most of the way back to Whitehorse from Skagway. Taylor was part of Northwestel’s 10-person team. In the dark, by the side of Tagish Lake, Taylor finished her 22.5-kilometre leg and tagged off to Paul Flaherty, her team’s anchor and the president of the company. He was doing the final, longest leg of 25.6 kilometres. “He’s a fit, fast runner,” Taylor says. “He finished just before 7 a.m.”
“I’m not getting any younger,” responds Flaherty, “I’ve done five of the 10 legs, so I’m trying to get the long ones out of the way.”
Flaherty’s participation on the relay team is just one of the novel ways he’s led Northwestel’s 600 employees. Aside from his running ability, Taylor cites the company’s newfound interest in its employees, their ideas and interests, as one of the reasons she really enjoys her job. “We get surveyed, sometimes to death,” she says, “but there are good things that come of it.”
One of those good things was her move to a new, more senior position. Taylor started with the company 10 years ago as a toll operator, then moved into expediting, then shipping-receiving, and was for a time a receptionist. She was feeling stagnant in her last position, and let her bosses know in a survey. “I did some training on my own time, paid for by the company, and now I’m a legal assistant,” she says.
Flaherty says Northwestel, up until a few years ago, had a business culture suited to its monopoly status, “very much focused on rules and process and not as focused on the customer and engaging employees.” So, after consulting with employees about how they saw the future, Northwestel began trying to change the culture, and Flaherty says it started with a new style of leadership. “If we were going to change the culture we had to start leading in a different way from the top of the organization,” Flaherty says. “Many organizations manage tasks but don’t necessarily lead people. I really wanted to focus on how we can lead people differently as we go forward.”
Flaherty’s theory is one of constructive engagement, in which employee input is sought and taken seriously. “Some managers are more command and control, ‘here’s what I want, and I want it now,’” he says. “After seeing a lot of that and seeing the possibilities of this alternate mode, where you work on engagement, I feel strongly the engagement model is much better.”
There are several goals, Flaherty says: raise employee morale; improve customer service; boost the bottom line; and ultimately make it onto the Hewitt Associates 50 Best Employers in Canada list.
Making this one is a solid start.
Summer camp and the call of the moose
For Betty Giesbrecht, working at the NWT Council of Persons with Disabilities is all about a busload of moose-calling campers.
It happened last summer, during a camp the NWT Council of Persons with Disabilities ran for adults with intellectual disabilities. At a campground outside Hay River, the 14 campers cooked on the open fire, fished, and hunted for fossils. They learned about trees and leaves and poisons, and one instructor taught them the harrumph of the moose call. “All the way back into town in the bus and standing in the arena parking lot waiting for parents they were moose calling,” says Betty Giesbrecht, who runs the council’s Hay River office. “When I ask them now what they learned from that camp they say they learned how to make mitts and toques and that they learned to moose call.”
Giesbrecht opened the Hay River office 18 months ago. Together with her 12 colleagues in Yellowknife and one in Inuvik, she supports and advocates for the disabled, young and old, throughout the territory. “It’s a wonderful overall feeling,” Giesbrecht says. “Even if you help just one person a day to accomplish some kind of dream or get them out in the community. It’s a wonderful organization and we’re so lucky to have really good people.” Particularly lucky considering council employees can earn as little as 40 per cent of what they could be making in a similar position with government, and don’t get benefits. “It takes a special kind of person who is concerned more with helping individuals and their community, rather than seeing how much they can save for retirement,” says Doreen Reid, chair of the council’s board of governors. “People who work for organizations such as ours have to have that inner drive to want to contribute to the community.”
Reid got to see the unfairness first-hand a few years ago when she made the jump from a non-profit to basically the same job in government. “My salary went up $15,000 for the year,” she says, “plus I had all the benefits that government employees have.”
There’s no money this year for the Hay River summer camp, a misfortune suffered all too often by the council’s programs because of a lack of stable funding. Reid says the council would love to be out in the communities more, but every time it wants to do something it has to first write a proposal. It takes up a tremendous amount of the council’s time.
But even those frustrations can’t blunt the satisfaction Giesbrecht draws from her work. “It’s never ending but it’s very rewarding,” she says. “People with disabilities just need to be out among each other and in the community to show that they’re here, not just for employability, but just like everybody else.”
When bigger (and better) is best
Acklands-Grainger is a huge company, but manages to focus both on satisfying its customers and employees.
The numbers surrounding Acklands-Grainger’s business are impressive: 2,200 employees, revenues of $700-million a year and a customer base of 65,000. But perhaps what’s even more impressive about Canada’s largest supplier of industrial, safety and fastener products is what its employees think about this company with 155 branches across the country – including ones in Yellowknife, Inuvik and Whitehorse.
The company’s human resources advisor, Leanne Bonnar, says despite being so big, management allows employees to think for themselves. “In this organization we are given autonomy to think and try different things out to see how it can benefit and grow our success and staff,” Bonnar wrote in an e-mail to Up Here Business.
The company also provides a suite of benefits for full-time regular employees that makes Acklands-Grainger an enticing employment option even in an era when prospective employees in much of Western and Northern Canada have their pick of high-paying jobs. Some of the benefits include medical, dental and extended health care coverage, a pension plan, 15 days annual vacation in the year of hire, annual salary reviews, educational reimbursement for approved, post-secondary education in related fields, employee recognition awards and even an employee-referral award, a $1,500 bonus to the employee who’s referral results in a lasting hire.
Overseeing it all is 35-year-old company president Court Carruthers. Bonnar says Carruthers is a big reason why she thinks Acklands-Grainger should be considered a top Northern, and Canadian, employer. “He’s a leader who believes in the company he works for,” she writes. “He inspires and leads by example.”
