The Financial Post Selects the 100 Best Companies to Work for in Canada

Robert B. Shortly was a chartered accountant in Toronto.

This book is a result of a year-long project undertaken by The Financial Post, a leading Canadian business newspaper. The impetus for the project came from the theory that a successful industrial company in Canada, faced with ever-increasing global competition, must have an “extra push” beyond equipment and technology and that this must stem from the people in the organization.

The authors set out how they chose the top 100 companies (library files, interviews with management consultants, journalistic contacts, employee responses from ads in the Post, word of mouth, etc.) and how they judged them (tangible elements such as pay benefits and job security and intangible elements such as job satisfaction, environment, communications, etc.). Their results are summarized in five management-style sections (“Pace-Setters,” “Challengers,” “Mainstream,” “Classics,” and “In a Class of Their Own”). Each company in the sections is evaluated on both its tangible and more intangible elements in simple terms such as poor, average, excellent, and so on, followed by a three- to five-page elaboration of the more salient features. Based on their findings, the authors conclude there is no one “right” type of organizational structure, but that the characteristics of a good work place are rooted in attitudes, not on the organizational chart. However, the authors provide some common denominators that identify good places to work (e.g., team spirit, incentives, mobility, pay, and benefits).

This book is journalistic in style, easy to read, almost gossipy in content and simplistic in analysis and conclusions. As to its value to the job-hunters, managers, and business people to whom the book is directed, well, let us say, it might be at best one very small aspect of their decision-making process. But for that matter, Zena Cherry’s social column in The Globe and Mail would be just as useful.