Canada's Top 100 Employers (2025) Magazine - Flipbook - Page 4
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( 2025 )
There is no limit on the vacation allowance available to employees at St. John’s-based Verafin Solutions, provided they get their work done.
As Time Goes By
Over the past 25 years, Canada’s Top 100 Employers have vastly improved time off for their staff
W
hen editor Richard
Yerema was working
on the first edition of
Canada’s Top 100
Employers 25 years ago, he recalls a
recurring thought passing through
his mind. “I remember talking about
how one day there’ll be four-day
work weeks,” he says. “In fact, I
remember even earlier, in high
school geography, talking about how
this will come.”
Well, we’re still not quite there yet,
even as now-executive editor Yerema
and his colleagues at Mediacorp,
which runs the annual competition,
celebrate the Top 100’s quarter-century anniversary. But it’s fair to say
that vacation and time-off policies,
always closely watched by job-seekers, have improved dramatically
since the year 2000.
“We’ve looked back at the data,”
says Yerema, “and in 2000 a starting
vacation allowance of four weeks
was offered by just eight per cent of
the employers. It was a very small
sliver, and mostly restricted to
software and tech companies. Three
weeks was the norm and a major
chunk of the employer applicant
pool gave people just two weeks to
start.”
Today, you can almost turn
around the figures. Fully 31 per cent
of this year’s winners provide at least
four weeks to start, and a mere seven
per cent are still hanging back at two
weeks. Moreover, notes senior editor
Kristina Leung, “it’s four-plus weeks.
Some companies offer a lump sum
of, say, 25 working days that can be
used flexibly. And a few are moving
to ‘unlimited’ time off, saying ‘we’re
not putting any sort of parameters
on how you use this time.’”
What has driven the change? For
one thing, the unchangeable. “Time
is limited for all of us,” says Yerema.
“It’s one of the most important
variables that an organization can
offer and that people will value.
Many employers compete on
vacation time.”
He notes that Canada’s Top 100
Employers itself has been influential
in offering transparency to the
process. He remembers when one of
Canada’s largest employers learned
through the competition that others
were moving from two weeks to
three and it had to match them.
“Once you shine a light on it, the
idea that two weeks was acceptable
to recruit new talent or compete just
couldn’t hold, and you might need to
up your offering.”
As you might imagine, the biggest
turning point came at the start of
this decade, sparked by the lockdowns for the pandemic. “There was
a notable shift coming out of the
pandemic, in the sense of folks
feeling like they lost time,” says
Leung. “They were realizing the
value of their time, whether it’s
through vacation policies or hybrid
work in general, because they lost so
much time commuting, they lost so
much time staying at home. They
really wanted to reclaim that time
and have a little bit more time off.”
As it happens, that period
coincided with the advent of Gen Z,
born from 1997 onward, coming into
the job market. “There’s quite a bit of
literature that talks about Gen Z
valuing time off and flexibility above
financial compensation,” notes
Leung. “So that may be driving some
of the trend as employers respond to
the needs of younger job seekers.”
She notes another very modern
concept – inclusion – has also had an
effect. “There’s paid leave for
Indigenous employees to attend
cultural and spiritual events, which
used to be unpaid and offered
sparingly. And there are often
flexible statutory holidays so you
don’t have to use them on the
standard days, since not everyone
celebrates Christmas, for example.
There’s been an overall expansion of
‘how can we make our benefits more
inclusive?’”
Among Top Employers offering
unlimited time off is Calgary-based
