Revealed: Just who are the best games companies to work for in Canada?
Relic's Heidi Eaves named Canada's Best Boss
The winners of the Canada GamesIndustry.biz Best Places To Work Awards 2021 have been revealed.
The event is all about making the games industry a better place to work, and the awards themselves are decided by an in-depth survey of employees.
Revealed during a special 35-minute online ceremony (which you can check out below), there were 17 Canada Best Places winners, and a series of special winners.
Square Enix and Eidos picked up three wins in total. Meanwhile, Heidi Eaves, the COO of Relic Entertainment, was named Canada's Best Boss after a huge number of nominations from the Age of Empires studio.
The awards come ahead of Canadian business event MEGAMIGS. GamesIndustry.biz will be taking part in the conference, which takes place this week, with a special panel featuring some of the winners.
The highest scoring small companies (10 - 50 staff) are: Affordance Studio, Certain Affinity, Eidos Sherbrooke, Evolve PR, ManaVoid, Trebuchet Studio and Triple Boris.
The top sized companies (50 - 200 employees) are: Compulsion Games, EA Full Circle, Frima, Hyper Hippo, Phoenix Labs, Snowed In Studios and Square Enix Montreal.
And the best large companies (200+) are: Behaviour Interactive, Eidos Montreal and Relic Entertainment.
All 17 winners went through the Best Places To Work Awards judging process. Each participant had to fill in an employer form that asked questions around pay, holiday, benefits, social activity, and lots more. This is marked by our team and was worth 25% of their final score.
The bulk of the awards are based on an employee survey. We sent over 50 statements to staff for them to agree or disagree with. The survey covered numerous topics including working environment, work/life balance, management, diversity and more. This was worth 75% of the final score.
In addition, we perform extra checks to ensure any issues that may only affect a small number of employees (primarily issues around discrimination and crunch) are identified.
Alongside the badge winners, we also revealed a number of special awards. The winners of these categories are:
The Health & Wellbeing Award: Hyper Hippo The Corporate Social Responsibility Award: Square Enix/Eidos The Environmental Award: Gameloft Montreal The Education Award: Behaviour Interactive UK Best Boss Award: Heidi Eaves, Relic Entertainment
The awards were revealed in a special video ceremony that featured numerous employees talking about their experiences in the games industry. Check out the video below.
