“It’s all about the people, so why not give them the best views? The principals are entitled to offices but when we moved into the space, they decided to sit out in the studio close to the windows and be a part of the team,” says Dean Matsumoto, a principal with Kasian who directed the interior design of the office.

Their democratic approach to office space helps promote equality and team building while making it easy for people to move around after projects are completed.

Built in a soft loft style with around 20,000 square feet, the architecture, interior design and planning firms’ Toronto office is a light-filled collaborative space. The walls are free from fancy prints and motivational sayings. Instead every wall in the office is magnetic, whiteboard or tackable and covered in the work of the moment.

“We’re always pinning up work to look at it, study it. The walls serve a purpose.”

A favourite feature of Matsumoto’s is the “Touchdown” area. It links the boardroom to the reception area with a long glass table. A multi-use area, one day it could be home to a standup project presentation, another it might double as “the best bar in Toronto.”

The first thing you see when entering the office is the view of downtown Toronto.

It’s located west of downtown, near the trendy and newly converted to mixed use Liberty Village. Surrounded by artists and fellow creatives, Matsumoto is very happy with the location.

“There is lots of live-work space around us. It’s a very vibrant neighbourhood. It’s helped us to attract people.”

The open kitchen is incorporated into what Matsumoto calls the “marketplace.” You’ll find the copy machine, fax, printers and office supplies as well as the research library all in the same place. If you have to go up and get some “stuff,” this is where you’ll be going.

Matsumoto, who designed the space, loves how it came together.

“The fact that it’s so bright is energizing right off the bat. One thing about our office is that there is nowhere to hide because it’s so open. The people that you’re working with are immediately accessible.”

The Montreal headquarters of Switzerland Creative Services would make Ikea addicts cringe.

It’s not that the creative boutique, which boasts satellite offices in Toronto and the Bronx, N.Y., isn’t deserving of a second look. It’s just that operations director Ben Pobjoy and creative head Shawn Butchart favour an esthetic that leans toward taxidermy, vinyl LPs and a healthy assortment of vintage junk over the mass-produced, ergonomic furniture popular among firms who trade in type.

“There’s the stereotype of a lot of design offices that are really clean and modern,” Pobjoy says over the phone from the company’s Montreal workspace. “Our office tends to be a lot more Pee-wee Herman in nature.”

Antique tin cans pasted with yesterday’s advertising slogans, pop artwork, prints of old typography, photography and yes, stuffed animals, fill out the space, which doubles as an art gallery come summertime. “There’s a grouse on the wall, which is really wicked because it’s flying, and I think a mallard duck and a pheasant above where we keep cutlery,” Pobjoy says, rhyming off the oddities, which also include a set of mounted antlers (whether moose, elk or deer, he’s not sure).

The strange surroundings belie the hardworking set of artistic entrepreneurs – a graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and visual artist, respectively – that make up the Swiss team. Their current abode is a former ground-level loft that serves as the headquarters for three separate entities: Switzerland Creative Services, the Emporium Gallery and a software development venture called Red Tree.

Recent projects include branding and design work for New York City-based cinematographer Nadia Hallgren, whose credits include the 2008 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning film Trouble the Water, as well as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. 

Pobjoy says his firm’s clubhouse-feel – the office doesn’t have a boardroom, and there’s no secretary to mind the phones – and throwback décor are both intrinsic to the in-house creative processes. The relaxed approach also reflects a business model that’s increasingly nomadic, he notes. “Physical space is important for face-to-face collaboration, but I feel as though it’s less and less important in terms of its traditional use.”

Business these days is conducted wirelessly and increasingly in transit. “That’s how it’s evolved. [The office] is more of a place just to charge your computer than anything else.”

Still, there are pleasures unique to the Swiss digs. “We’re one of the few offices that have at least five or six hundred LPs on hand,” Pobjoy says. (The selection runs the gamut from Hank Williams Sr. to Run DMC).

What constitutes a typical day? “I would say a lot of coffee, a lot of vinyl, a lot of work and a lot of smokes would sum it up.”

By Craille Maguire Gillies | Photography by Pete Aspros, Grip Limited

There is nothing like a big orange slide plonked right in the middle of an office to obliterate hierarchy between upper management and everyone else. But then Toronto creative agency Grip Limited, home to that big orange slide, has never been a place for hierarchy. Grip, whose clients include Acura, Lululemon Athletica and Labatt, has an unusually linear team, with an astounding 11 partners. David Crichton, one of eight founding partners calls it a “flat structure” in which partners work directly with clients, and therefore with their own designers, writers, interactive and technical staff who put together campaigns. “There’s no corner office mentality. There isn’t actually a corner office,” Crichton says, adding that newly hired president Harvey Carroll has the worst digs in the space – a small, drafty office that no one else wants.

Grip’s office – designed by the folks at Johnson Chou and featuring the agency’s signature orange logo – is  spread over two and a half floors, and reflects the open attitude of the agency. (And the fireman’s pole in the atrium is great when you’re running late for meetings.) Crichton spoke with Unlimited about breaking down barriers – and walls.

+ Every Thursday, many of the company’s 100-plus staff gather in the atrium for a 4:30 beer-fuelled news briefing. (It counts Labatt as one of its longtime clients.) “On Thursdays we open up the draft taps and play foosball,” says Crichton. “The atrium is basically stadium seating for announcements.”

+ The company has events called “What’s your story?” when anybody in the company – from someone in the production studio to a creative director –  can present new ideas.

+ They notice the little things. White Astroturf lines one of the boardrooms. “It deadens sound,” Crichton says, “but it’s also not expensive. We like to do things creatively that don’t involve spending a lot of money. It sends a message to clients that you can be creative without being excessive.”

+ That working-class ethos turns up in Grip’s logo, a bright 1960s-style orange circle meant to show the company’s working-class roots. “I would say the culture here is pretty peer-oriented. Our partners work on a client’s file directly, so that means we worked directly with everyone here,” Crichton says. (Click to see a TV reel of some of Grip’s work.)

+ The non-linear structure of the company lets employees move between departments for rare wholesale career changes within the same company. For instance, a longtime studio manager became a designer and later an art director. One former IT staffer went on to become a multimedia editor/producer at Grip’s in-house production facility. The strategy is to “let people make a career change and then keep them in the company. At the end of the day, [the happiness of] a bigger paycheque only lasts two pay periods. If you provide a place where people like to work and are respected, they’ll be happier and more enthusiastic.” U

Stuart Bailey is a private person – at least when it comes to work. In agreeing to speak with Unlimited about his job, for instance, he cheerfully and apologetically said, “I can only speak for myself, not for the government.” That’s because Bailey is an information management and privacy strategist for the Ontario Ministry of Finance, where he navigates the complex, sometimes intangible and often confidential world of data. Not that he’s necessarily trading in top-secret information – “I don’t have a lot of sensitive material,” he admits – but for someone whose work is all about managing, sharing (and sometimes not sharing) information, Bailey is sensitive to the challenges of describing what he does without saying too much. He gives it a try.

The Man Who Wasn’t There: Stuart Bailey’s official office at the Ministry of Finance

“My job is to help regular people in different program areas integrate practice and information into their daily work.” Huh? “Really, it’s helping people deal with information overload,” Bailey adds. Oh, right.

That could range from helping staffers manage email to helping colleagues understand the logistics and legalities around sharing information. “Storage is cheap, but finding it is very expensive,” Bailey says. A gigabyte of storage might cost only 20 cents, but a company will have to shell out another $1,300 or so to manage, share and protect that information. “It’s not just about an object sitting in a space.”

“The type of work I do is about understanding broad abstractions. Information,” he points out, “is always part of something else that you do.” In that sense, we are each de facto information managers, even though we might not consider this part of our real jobs. It is always, Bailey explains, wrapped up in our other tasks.

After earning a BA in cultural studies and philosophy from Trent University, Bailey went on to complete a master’s in information studies at the University of Toronto. Warm and engaging, his philosophy background quickly surfaces. “A large part of the work I do is – pardon me for lapsing into code – to understand basic metaphysics, entities, attributes and relationships. I have to operate in abstract areas. Privacy is not a monolithic object. It’s not a like a shoe,” he says. “A shoe will have certain dimensions, it goes on your foot, you can wear it in certain weather. But privacy could be a whole range of things.”

Bailey’s Virtual Office

Bailey, whose official mailing address is for the Central Agencies Cluster at the Ministry of Finance in Toronto, in actuality divides his time between three offices.

Bailey telecommutes from his couch-office

+ This office in the picture is where I’m stationed, but sometimes I work with the rest of the team in Oshawa. I also work at home. My employer has a great teleworking project and a lot of flexibility. I spend more time focusing on work and less on additional stressors like whether I’ll make it home in time to pick up my daughter before her daycare closes.

+ I have one computer and BlackBerry. It’s not like I produce a certain number of widgets a day. Where I’m located is sometimes not as important. I don’t always have to be tied to a desk, but I do have to ingest, analyze and provide comment on information for colleagues.

+ Yeah, sometimes I can’t find things. It’s like asking a ditch-digger where you put the shovel. Well, you can just find another shovel.

+ That’s a tennis ball on my desk. I bounce it around to relieve stress or think about things in a different way. Sometimes the best way to focus on an abstract problem is not to focus on it. You have to let the brain refresh and let your mind wander.

+ Those boxes are filled with paperwork. Although I work a lot with electronic media, I like the tactile quality of reaching for an article. I have to stay on top of new developments such as the use of wikis or policy development or a recent court decision. I make sure I don’t keep more around than I need. U

Cameron Smith does not bring home the bacon. In fact, he makes it himself. For up to 100 hours a week, six month per year, Smith and Dana Ewart, his partner in both business and life (they sign emails from their work account “Cam and Dana”), make pretty much everything themselves – from peach galettes with fruit that was just plucked from the tree to elaborate al fresco dinners at wineries sprinkled through the Okanagan.

Originally from Ontario, the pair were kitchen competitors at top restaurants such as Toque! in Montreal and Scaramouche in Toronto before ditching their high-stress jobs to take a semi-sabbatical. After a stretch as tree planters, the 30-something pair set up Joy Road Catering in the basement of their home near Penticton.

Cameron Smith and Dana Ewart of Joy Road Catering

The work is still high-stress, and the challenges these entrepreneurs face is a little unusual. “It’s a lot harder dealing with hippie farmers,” Ewart says. As Smith puts it, “In a restaurant there are multiple deadlines and they can seem life or death at the time, but if a farmer has something more important to do they will bring that lamb tomorrow. Or if the raspberry field is wet, they won’t go out and pick the berries even though we’ll be pulling our hair out because we have a dinner that night with a dessert that needs raspberries.”

The perks of self-employment, however, outweigh the frustrations. “The restaurant industry is very fickle. You get a good review one day and the phone rings off hook. But if you don’t get reviewed for two weeks, your restaurant is dead,” Smith explains. “There was a real opportunity for us here. The ingredients were here, the farms are here, the wine is here and the clientele have educated palates and are excited about what we do. I think we’d still be successful in the city, but people here they get it. They see the vines, see where the wine came from, we see the person who grew the carrots.” Lower start-up costs and overhead make catering a smart business move for a chef. The ability to, as Smith puts it, change a menu on a dime, rather than sticking to a stale two-month old menu, for instance, is another benefit.

Ewart and Smith only operate when they can get fresh local food, which packs a year’s worth of revenue and work into half the time of a traditional catering company. They start up in May when the first wild watercress and peas become available and shut down when frost hits in November.

A typical day goes something like this: Wake up at 7 a.m., answer emails, make phone calls and write up shopping and prep lists. Create a schedule for that night’s event, assign staff tasks for the day, and write lists of what equipment and special ingredients they’ll need. At 10 a.m., the four full-time staff arrives (they also have a bunch of part-timers) and everyone preps food until 1 p.m. The staff takes turns cooking for the daily sit-down lunch – no brown bag lunches here – which is often the only chance they have in a 16-hour day for a proper meal. Later in the afternoon, they pack up the vans, triple-check their checklist and head off to the venue, where Smith and Ewart have 10 minutes to make themselves at home in a foreign space. The day ends sometime around 11 p.m. when they drive home, unload coolers, wash dishes and go to bed. Then they repeat that almost every day for the rest of the season.

“It’s pretty nuts. In summer, we’ll stay up all night Friday baking, go to the farmers’ market on Saturday, have our crew prep all the produce we bring home that afternoon and then it’s show time: two different weddings on Saturday and dinners at wineries on Sunday,” Ewart says. All told, they feed about 500 people on a given weekend, then spend Monday – their busiest day – ordering food and clearing through paperwork. “We crash in November.”

Like their schedules, the Joy Road Catering “office” – actually a basement kitchen retrofitted to accommodate Smith, Ewart, four full-time staff and a bunch of part-timers – is unusual. We counted nine pairs of prongs, for starters. Below, Ewart and Smith describe their space.

Ewart (far right) and Cameron Smith (in chef's white) preside over the Joy Road HQ

Anatomy of  a Kitchen

+ The pair went to an auction sale and, as Ewart puts it, “set ourselves up on quite a dime.” The chopping blocks ($75 each) came from an old butcher shop. “They have a history. They’re made with gorgeous piece of wood and have railway ties going through them,” Ewart says.
+ Big French doors lead to the garden and chicken coop. “We have a rocket launcher out back that we bought from our dear friend Angus An at Maenam restaurant in Vancouver. We use it to sear meats and make huge stocks and batches of steamy jam,” says Ewart. Every piece comes with a story. “There’s a crew who moved west and opened our own businesses at the same time. It was neat going through all those growing pains of opening our own business.”
+ Posters from numerous events Joy Road has worked at decorate the walls. Other art includes an oversized photo of an unlikely source of culinary inspiration: Albert Einstein. “It’s says something like great spirits have always encountered violent opposition,” Smith says. “It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it symbolizes how you need to go your own way, do you own thing, you cannot care what the establishment will say.”
+ The best part of the Joy Road headquarters is the view of the Okanagan – not to mention the outdoor beer tap. “That’s also where we keep our fridge,” says Smith.
+ “We prep in this kitchen, but our office is wherever we’ve been hired to go,” Smith explains. “The challenge is to haul around an entire kitchen of equipment and the food that goes with it.” U

In spite of the freedom of setting your own hours, avoiding office politics and working in your slippers, a home office has its downsides. Where to meet customers for those appointments that you can’t schedule at the corner café? How to combat the isolation of being alone all day? Co-working offices – places that try to answer these questions by providing independent workers and entrepreneurs with the space and utilities of a conventional office (think meeting rooms and copy machines, for starters) while letting them keep their autonomy. Though few rules apply, these spaces generally apply the ethos of a social co-op to the business world. “It’s a bit like having roommates,” says Station C co-founder Patrick Tanguay. We check out four spaces across Canada, from an incubator for entrepreneurs in Vancouver to an office in Toronto’s Chinatown, that share not just spaces, but also ideas.

Desk jockeys in the airy office of the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto

The Centre for Social Innovation (CSI), Toronto
What it is: Working and meeting space for about 180 organizations and freelancers with a social mission in a renovated factory warehouse in Toronto’s Chinatown. The building is as progressive as its members: along with indoor bicycle parking and a rooftop garden, the offices have solar water heating and even a biowall. Members include the David Suzuki Foundation, design firms such as BFdesign and media companies such as Spacing magazine.
How it works: Events are held throughout the year, but the best catalyst for collaboration between members remains informal chitchats. “It’s a really stimulating environment,” says tenant Chris Appleton, who works with design firm the Movement. “You might have a conversation in the kitchen that might lead to a collaboration project.” Joint initiatives include Jane’s Walk, a North America-wide event to promote walkable neighbourhoods.
What it costs: Membership packages range from $25 for a one-time pass to $75 per month for access to a shared workstation to up to $1,800 a month for a dedicated office.

Station C in Montreal

Station C, Montreal
What it is: A 2,500-square-foot loft with 19 workstations and three meeting rooms in Montreal’s trendy Mile End district.
How it works: It’s not all business; Station C handpicks members to create a friendly, social atmosphere. Though there most members are male and most work in the web industry, co-founder Patrick Tanguay hopes to improve the selection process as the space receives more applications.
What it costs: $350 a month for a desk, $250 to used a shared workstation and $3 an hour for non-members.

NEXT PAGE: A future home for Calgary freelancers and an entrepreneur’s dream office in Vancouver.

In the 18 years since Smart Technologies introduced its first interactive whiteboard, the company has gone from market obscurity (this was before everyone and their grandmother had a PDA, remember) to impressive market reach (175 countries and counting). Want to book a meeting with a colleague in Malaysia? No problem. After an early hook-up with Intel Corp., Smart Technologies has gone from one interactive whiteboard to an ever-expanding line of hardware, software and services.

But like the education, private business and government offices at which their products are targeted, they needed to find a better way to collaborate: the headquarters were in seven buildings scattered across Calgary. The company recently moved into a new global HQ that gives new meaning to the word collaboration, with more than 90 conference rooms (including one-person rooms where you can make phone calls and a glass-walled dining hall that doubles as a large meeting space). They’ve also tweaked the metrics of your typical office. Most workplaces have 80 per cent private space and 20 per cent shared space. Smart Tech new digs up that ratio to 60/40.

Linda Thomas, the vice-president of marketing, deconstructs Smart’s Extreme Collaboration Room, which she calls a “living lab” to test how clients might use the space.

Photo by John Gaucher

1. People can touch the board, write on it and share, store and email digital notes. The software recognizes the ink as a digital object, like a picture is in a Microsoft Word document. You walk up to that board – which could be projecting a diagram, chart, spreadsheet, anything really – pick up a pen and eraser from the pen tray and circle or cross out other people’s comments. The next time a person opens the document they’ll see your digital ink. You can also use your finger as a mouse to interact with the data.

2. A typical room has two interactive whiteboard systems with a board and projector that act as an integrated system. This room has eight of these systems. It’s great for any type of work situation where there is a lot of information and you want a visual of it all. It’s used heavily by our product development team.

3. Screen-sharing software lets you see thumbnails of all the eight screens at the same time. The information on that screen can be sent to any of the other screens in the room, or you can click on one screen to make it bigger and use it to navigate to others. It’s useful when you have a lot of information displayed at once.

4. The integrated projectors eliminate shadows so people can use the boards without interfering with the display.

5. I can look at the same screen in this room as someone looking at it in our Ottawa assembly facility in, honestly, 10 seconds. One of our customers had their Smart Boards on 24/7 and connected via video conferencing so that the team in the UK could see when people showed up and began working in their office in India. It creates a sense of teamwork by providing a closer in-person experience than talking on the telephone or flipping through PowerPoint presentation.

6. The absence of furniture encourages people to share their ideas at the board, walk around and talk to each other. Walking creates a more energizing environment than people sitting around a table staring at frames. We didn’t find it anywhere in formal research, it was something we thought, “You know what? This would be an interesting way to encourage collaboration.” U

More Great Spaces
Writer Malwina Gudowska and photographer John Gaucher take a curated tour of Smart Technologies and three other companies that reimagine the office.

Extreme Group’s Halifax headquarters – this marketing/multimedia firm also has a satellite location in Toronto – was originally in an old brewery that was, at turns, a firehall and dance studio. Before moving in three years ago, they stripped the space back to its bones and removed the mirrored walls throughout (maybe so graphic designers and account execs wouldn’t practise pliés during client meetings). “We wanted to put a firepole in when we redesigned the space,” King admits. Insurance adjusters quashed the idea.

They didn’t quash Extreme’s creativity. Campaigns include Great Reasons to Smoke, a series of commercials featuring the doofuses from the movie Fubar giving real people’s doofus reasons they won’t quit smoking. “We tried to make smoking very uncool by using unaspirational characters,” says creative director Shawn King. Example: If you quit, how will you meet people?

King, a partner, vice-president and closet Metallica fan, deconstructs Extreme’s “team lounge.”

Photo by James Ingram

1. The pool table used to double as the boardroom table; that’s why it has glass on top. It was always our agenda to make the space inspiring. People sometimes hang around on Friday nights or come in on weekends and play pool.

2. We got the slushie machine one summer because our old office wasn’t air conditioned. It got super-hot in summer. We used to have a Red Bull fridge, but we got rid of it. When Red Bull came and refilled it every month, it was empty the same day. People went crazy.

3. That’s a keg in the back. We have beer-o’clock Fridays at 4 p.m. We have a keg fridge underneath. In our executive lounge upstairs we have a pop machine filled with beer. We don’t charge for it. What kind of beer do we serve? Moosehead. They’re our client.

4. We call the shelves along the back the library. Those are mostly industry books on photographers or illustrators, along with awards annuals. On the right are awards. The regional advertising awards show here is called the ICE Awards. Throughout the office we have close to 50 ice buckets.

5. What you don’t see in the picture are couches and a high-def TV with satellite. People will come down and watch stuff at lunch. Usually big sporting events. There was a time when everyone was watching The Price is Right.

Things We Like About Extreme

Critical Faculties: Idea boards are posted throughout Extreme's office. Photo by James Ingram

+ The best things at Extreme are fun, but also functional. Take the magnetic dry-erase whiteboards throughout the office where staff post mock-ups of new work for people to critique or work by their competitors.
+ The gym. “One of the issues we have isn’t recruiting talent to the agency but recruiting talent to Halifax. We wanted to make the space more appealing, so we put the gym in.” (The only spot for a shower was in a former broom closet. “People seem to have gotten over that.”)
+ An open work area where staff are divided not by department but by client. Graphic designers, account execs and everyone else working on the same account are grouped together.
+ Brick walls, high ceilings and loads of natural light.
+ Extreme is a big-time agency located not in Toronto but in Halifax, which has one of Canada’s most respected design schools, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
+ Did we mention the beer-o’clock Fridays?

Cast Iron Plant
If the guilt over killing that original Chia Pet has put you off indoor gardening, start over with this one. It tolerates lack of water, fertilizer and love. It also hates sunlight, making it a good companion for people whose caves, er, cubicles are lit solely by fluorescent lights.

Chinese evergreen
Nature’s answer to sick building syndrome, this low-maintenance wonder scrubs recycled air of toxins trapped by windows that never open. If NASA is considering it to purify the air in space stations, then it’s good enough for your workstation.

Bromeliad
If you’re blessed with even a little natural light, buy a bromeliad. Then throw an apple in the pot and cover the works with clear plastic for a week to capture flower-inducing ethylene off-gassing from the fruit. Three months later, a blossom emerges. despite your new-found zen-like efficiency, remember to stop and take a look. U

Companies like to talk about the “value proposition” when explaining why you should buy their products. As an employee you’ve got your own value proposition for the companies you want to work for. Perks and incentives, a dynamite benefits plan, a corporate culture that appeals to 20- and 30-somethings – these are all things we considered when judging our Best Workplaces awards, produced in partnership with our sister publication Alberta Venture. Start reading to figure out where you want to work (and how you get a job) at this year’s top shops.

*Best Workplace for Under 100 Employees and Best Workplace for Volunteerism & Community Involvement
Karo Group //

Industry: Marketing services / Locations: Calgary and Vancouver / Employees in Alberta: 48 / Typical jobs: Account managers, project managers, multimedia team (designers and production), graphic designers

Why they won: Back in 1971, around the time many of their staffers were born, Joff and Jürgen Grohne started the tiny Vancouver graphic design firm West Graphika. In the ’80s they did what they’ve done for so many other organizations: they expanded and rebranded. Now they’re a leading image-maker known not just for good design but public service. Karo set itself apart with Karo Kaus. Each year the Calgary wing offers a Creative Services Grant with $50,000 worth of marketing and graphic design services to a local community organization. As president Chris Bedford has explained, “We want to help two organizations develop meaningful brand experiences for their stakeholders and clients – which, in turn, will take them to the next level in attracting public and financial support.”

Highlights: Is your only car a bicycle? On weekends, staff can borrow the company Smart Car. Aside from a friendly team of 24/7 creative types, Karo is home to rooftop beehives and a working industrial elevator that functions as a part-time meeting room. On the community side, the Karo “Tribe” has whipped up campaigns for such groups as Climate Change Central, the Calgary Committee to End Homelessness, and Habitat for Humanity. They also support “creative moonlighting,” says studio manager Melody Taylor. “This year, project manager (and break dancer) Leslie Tettensor is going to Brazil to help disadvantaged girls channel their energy away from the street and into hip hop, graffiti art and DJing.”

Get the edge: Innovative ideas are a given – you’ll be working at what Marketing Magazine voted one of the top creative agencies in Western Canada, after all. To get the edge, come up with “Why didn’t I think of that?” solutions to problems. Karo is looking for people who will fit with the Tribe, so candidates are asked to fill out an online behavioural profile before their interview. Tribe members have degrees from a variety of areas, like marketing, public relations, architecture, arts and communications, along with non-design fields. Planners in the interactive division, for instance, should have a degree in human computer interface or business and experience in areas such as project management and web analytics.

*Best Workplace for 101 to 750 Employees
Agriculture Financial Services Corporation
(AFSC) //

Industry: Lending and risk management/ Locations: 54 branches throughout Alberta / Employees in Alberta: 715 / Typical jobs: account manager trainees (specializing in finance or agriculture), financial and risk management analysts, insurance administrators

Why they won: You don’t get the shockingly low turnover rate of five per cent without putting a lot of thought and effort into retaining employees. AFSC has the strategy down: offer your staff flexible work schedules, provide respectable salary increases (9.1 per cent in 2008) and empower employees (an intranet program to submit ideas to HR is one example). Then there’s the enviable benefit plan that starts not three months after you start, but on your first day, and provides three weeks of vacation in your first year. No wonder AFSC garnered a 90 per cent employee satisfaction rating on a recent internal survey.

Highlights: Maternity leave is topped up to 95 per cent of your salary. AFSC also covers all books and tuition for job-related training, and salaried staff have a $500 “learning and wellness” spending account to go toward fitness equipment, gym memberships or even golf membership for people who think that’s a real sport. For little perks, the company’s social committee doles out coffee and movie vouchers along with annual appreciation awards of $1,000 for three top-performing staff.

Get the edge: With farmers’ needs tied to the capriciousness of weather, new hires need to thrive in a rapidly changing financial environment. They should be eager to learn new things and always ready to shoulder new responsibilities. AFSC’s agricultural niche means that you might want to beef up your commerce degree with some farm studies.