The winners are chosen based on multiple criteria, including compensation and benefits, the work and social atmosphere, the quality of the physical workplace, training and upward mobility and community involvement -- all of which were pushed forward by a healthy level of competition between public- and private-sector employers.

"I think the past year has continued to present very difficult challenges for virtually all employers," said Richard Yerema, managing editor at Canada's Top 100 Employers. "We are now entering year three of this 'new normal,' compounding the difficulty of challenges like navigating new safety protocols and transitioning to remote or hybrid work."

In the nation's capital, public sector employers are major players

The public sector plays a bigger role in Canada's capital region than anywhere else in the country, and this has had a major impact on the behaviour of private-sector competitors.

"The dominance of the public sector," says Yerema, "is the defining characteristic of the region and the impacts are felt across all employers in the region." Public sector jobs are subject to minimum benefits levels, and far less employment volatility, and that can make for stiff competition with traditional employers.

This fact has forced the local private sector to stay aggressive to avoid brain-drain and affected their strategies for retaining talent as much as those for finding and acquiring it.

Dominic Laporte, assistant deputy minister for human resources and corporate services at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, says that remote work has made this trend even more pronounced. "With the increased capability to perform many duties remotely, it has opened up more possibilities for staffing positions with candidates living outside of the National Capital Region… This will also push our department to continue to seek creative ways to maintain the invaluable in-person experience that cannot fully be replaced virtually."

When the going gets tough, the tough get creative

In a tough job market, employees can often suffer from depressed wages -- but as the last year played out, the market saw several examples of how hard economic conditions can instead lead to increased competition among employers. Some fast-food restaurants, for instance, have been forced to raise even low-end salaries in order to compete.

This trend is even more evident in higher-paying and more worker-focused industries like software development, where companies have to get creative to entice the province's top talent. These sorts of companies have leaned into the remote work paradigm, benefiting from the fact that most of their employees can easily transition their work to the home.

As power shifts somewhat to the candidate in more hiring interactions, employers have had to get creative to retain top talent. Attractive benefits packages can often seem to carry more value than they actually cost to deliver, while less standard offerings like increased flexibility in time-off can entice new workers for zero money down.

Megan Paterson, chief human resource officer of the supply chain tech company Kinaxis, says that, faced with the popularity and pandemic-driven necessity of hybrid work, they are allowing each employee to choose between multiple possible working styles: @home-full time, @office-full time, or @flex. They've even incorporated a system offering unlimited vacation. Paterson says that Kinaxis has also "placed a large focus on employee health and wellbeing-offering mental health training, as well as a variety of fitness activities and challenges."

What makes the best the best?

It seems that 2021 was the year in which it became impossible to ignore that building and maintaining strong teams in Ottawa comes down to being the best place to work -- and that means re-investing in those teams, themselves.

Supriya Edwards, director general at the Workforce and Workplace Branch of StatsCan, says that the agency makes a point to help team-members grow and become stronger employees — and candidates. "We nurture and grow our talent with our development programs, career assignment program, talent management plans, mentorship program, leadership development and language development activities." It turns out that even helping employees to move on someday can help keep them from moving on, right now.

The best employers derive their decisions about policies and the work environment from an understanding of what their employees want. Not all types of workers require the same things; younger workers might value pure compensation, for instance, while older workers with children might prioritize extra flex time.

Put simply, there is no one set of benefits that modern workers want; what they want is a company that listens to their feedback and takes whatever steps are necessary to let work integrate easily with the rest of life.

"Necessity often leads to innovation," Yerema says. "That includes everything from introducing greater work flexibility and new work from home policies, to enhancing support for physical and mental health, to emphasizing more open communication with senior leadership."

In the end, Canada's fortunes are Ottawa's fortunes

Nobody, not even public sector employers, can ignore the need to adapt to the changing employment market. Lyne Parent-Garvey, chief human resources officer at Hydro Ottawa, says that, as an employer without an existing work-from-home program, Hydro Ottawa "had to adapt quickly to ensure employees had the tools and technology to stay connected while working virtually. This included rolling-out Google Workspace to all employees, so (Hydro Ottawa) could leverage Meet and Chat for connection."

There was no one formula for success in the Ottawa business world in 2021, but an emphasis on employee experience was a component of every strategy that found meaningful success. By making an effort to offer unique and above all well-targeted benefits for employees, employers were able to stand out from the crowd and retain the best talent on the market.

In a world where pure salary varies by a smaller margin than ever, it's these less monetary differentiators that will determine where the best talent goes, and where it stays for more than just a while.

—Graham Templeton

From the official announcement magazine for the National Capital Region's Top Employers (2022), co-published with the Ottawa Citizen on February 1, 2022. All rights reserved.