Greater Toronto's Top Employers (2025) Magazine - Flipbook - Page 4
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CAPITAL ONE
( 2025 )
Capital One Canada employees at the annual ‘Summer Fest’, where they meet many of the over-700 employees who work at the Toronto head office.
The Return of Fun
Greater Toronto’s Top Employers (2025) are bringing social life back to work
I
n 2019, the cool Liberty Village offices
of Vena Solutions Inc. in Toronto
were full of life. Everybody came in to
work each day at the financial
software company, and they could enjoy
foosball and video games and comfy
couches during breaks. Then came March
2020, when offices around the world
abruptly shut down due to the pandemic.
Chief people officer Tracey Mikita
remembers it well – how Vena’s premises
were now empty and devoid of life, with
everyone working from home.
When the lockdowns were over, Vena,
like so many employers, did not revert to
the old ways. Today its employees (some
450 in the GTA) can work as they wish – at
home, at the office, or for most, a
combination of both, coming in when they
want. “That has really worked for us,” says
Mikita. “So we have not mandated folks
back to the office. I know lots of companies have done that over the past year or
two, but we are still having lots of success
with the model that we have right now.”
But something else has happened, too.
After a couple of quiet years in which most
office social life was conducted virtually,
work-based social events are exploding.
Every Thursday at Vena, for instance,
people can come in for drinks, snacks and
music in the kitchen area. “Everybody just
comes in and mingles, and you can come
and go,” says Mikita. “There’s no pressure.”
Recently, too, there was a Take Your
Family to Work day, which ranged from
“people bringing in their babies to people
bringing in their grandparents to see, hey,
what is it that my family member does at
Vena.” Plus there are regular speakers and
programmed months for such themes as
Pride and Mental Health, and plenty of
other events.
“It evolved organically,” says Mikita. ‘I
definitely think there was an appetite for it
from people. After the pandemic, getting
back into the era of in-person connection
and more communication, collaboration
and social interaction was important to us.
We have a really people-oriented culture.
And we know that this drives the engagement of people in any organization. That’s
clearly what the research shows.”
It certainly mirrors the research at
Mediacorp Canada, publisher of Greater
Toronto’s Top Employers (2025), where Vena
Solutions was included on this year’s list.
“In the past few years, employers
applying to the competition have downplayed in-person social events and
activities, in response to the pandemic,”
says Richard Yerema, executive editor of
the Canada’s Top 100 Employers project at
Mediacorp. “For a while, to be honest, they
were very boring. A lot of the fun stuff was
just absent. But this year, we’ve noted a
resurgence. There’s an emphasis on
fostering in-person connections through
the employer. It’s a place where people
come together, not just to work, but to
engage socially. The fun aspect is coming
back.”
