Canada’s best small and medium employers announced

Fifty organizations from across the country have been selected as the Best Small & Medium Employers in Canada in a study released by Queen's Centre for Business Venturing (QCBV) at Queen's School of Business in conjunction with Hewitt Associates, a global human resources consulting and outsourcing company. Canadian organizations with between 50 and 399 permanent employees are eligible to participate in the ranking.

“Despite the challenging economy over the past year, employee engagement among the 50 organizations selected as the best rose to the highest level seen in the study’s six-year history,” says survey co-ordinator Einar Westerlund, director of project development at QCBV. “This reflects employers' attention to the ‘people side’ of their enterprises during both the good and the not-so-good times. The best continue to achieve success by paying disciplined attention to the basics of effective human resources management, with special strength shown in how their people's performance is managed.”

The Best Small & Medium Employers in Canada study focuses on measuring employee engagement, and allows employers to discover the degree of intellectual and emotional commitment employees have in their workplace. Each organization’s results are benchmarked; this allows companies to gauge their strengths against others in their specific industry or overall.

“The businesses and public service institutions selected for this year’s list provide a reflection of the true diversity of the SME sector in Canada – a community which by far includes more employees than any other sector in the country,” says Westerlund.

Click here to view the 2010 list of top SMEs.

While this year's list of the Best Small & Medium Employers has just been released, the next study is already underway with registration now open. For more information or to register for the upcoming survey, please visit http://business.queensu.ca/bsme.

Based at Queen’s School of Business, Canada’s leading business school, QCBV's mandate is to become the leading and definitive source of knowledge and expertise in the creation, leadership and management of new ventures. It will accomplish this by developing innovative curriculum, providing access to pools of capital to fund new ventures, conducting applied research, brokering and being a hub of SME and new venture knowledge, and by playing a key role with decision-making bodies.