The Canadian Readers’ Choice Awards for HR

The organization has garnered a reputation for educating the next generation of HR professionals, resulting in awards in multiple categories this year, including:

• HR Certificate Program
  
   

• Leadership and Team Development
  
   

• Labour Relations
  
   

• Management and Executive Development
  
   

With courses on coaching, grievance handling, and labour arbitration, the IRC provides leaders, executives, and managers with the skills they need to manage talent within their organizations.

Focusing on practical education, Alison Darling, director of professional programs, says, “In our HR programs, students do presentations and participate in breakout groups to review case studies. Our courses are built around the need to give knowledge, but you need to practice knowledge, and then you need to be able to take it back to your workplaces.”

 

“We provide professional development training for people across Canada, but we also practice what we preach, making sure that those courses are available for our internal staff as well”

Alison DarlingQueen’s University–Industrial Relations Centre (IRC)

Next-generation HR 

Established in 1937, the IRC constantly updates its curriculum to align with the evolving landscape. 

“Last year, we overhauled our talent management programs to focus on the skills-based approach that more organizations are looking at now,” says Darling. “We also overhauled our leading HR programs to make them more relevant to the skills that an HR leader is going to need in today’s environment, which is very different from five or 10 years ago.” 

Renowned as one of Canada’s premier professional development programs, the IRC proudly showcases:

• 18,000+ students
  
   

• 1,900+ certificates awarded
  
   

• 96 percent satisfaction rate on courses
  
   

Additionally, the IRC is proactive in integrating AI into its curriculum. Darling notes that during the IRC’s Organizational Transformation course, guest speakers specializing in AI engage with students, providing valuable insights. This fall, the IRC will also be launching a new equity, diversity, and inclusion (ED&I) course. 

“We’ve needed to deliver content in ED&I, but I wanted to make sure it was right, that it didn’t just become a checkbox,” shares Darling. “We wanted to give students practical tools so they can build out ED&I strategies in their own organizations, and I’m delighted that this program will finally be coming to fruition.”

Leading by example, the IRC ensures HR leaders within its internal team have complimentary access to their course offerings. This aims to support their ongoing development and reinforce the organization’s commitment to nurturing talent. 

“We’re trying to really embed that culture of we’re all responsible for our work environment and how we show up for each other each day,” says Darling.

 

Winning in the Employee Assessment category, the Edmonton-based firm offers a suite of industry-recognized employee development assessments and selection tests to aid organizations in identifying top candidates and enhancing employee potential.

Setting Psychometrics Canada apart is its onsite team of psychologists who ensure clients are utilizing the correct assessment tools. 

Reflecting on the benefits of using data in HR, president Mark Fitzsimmons says, “If you use objective data to make your hiring decisions, you’re going to naturally get diversity in your staff and diversity in your organization because you’ve removed the bias from the hiring process. And that’s really important today.” 

Working with more than 4,000 different clients, Psychometrics Canada administers a pre-employment selection assessment that helps employers evaluate candidates on the following criteria:

“Being in the talent assessment space, we like to say that we ‘eat our own cooking.’ Having those insights into people naturally leads to better engagement for our staff because we understand the way people tick”

Mark FitzsimmonsPsychometrics Canada

Additionally, the company’s employee development assessment tools enable users to gain a clear understanding of their teams’ strengths, development gaps, work styles, and communication styles. 

“Our assessments assist with the entire employee lifecycle, from pre-hire to onboarding and leadership development and beyond,” adds Fitzsimmons.  

People insights 

By encouraging clients to develop continuous lines of communication with employees, Psychometrics Canada also ensures this is embedded in their internal culture.  

“We do a good job of soliciting feedback directly from our employees through quarterly and weekly meetings,” states Fitzsimmons. “It’s that constant communication where people feel like they can come to you with the issues of the day. You want that feedback in real time so that you can deal with things as they come.” 

Fitzsimmons also highlights the importance of rewards and recognition programs in creating a positive internal culture. Over the past five years, the company has nominated a Weekly Superhero to spotlight those who have gone above and beyond their duty. 

 

Based in Toronto, the firm specializes in emotional intelligence-focused training and has won the Employee Assessment Reader’s Choice Award for HR.

Co-founders Charles Fortier and Angela Payne empower influential leadership behaviours through emotional intelligence assessments, workshops, and coaching. 

“A lot of the journey around developing emotional intelligence comes from reflection, and from practice, which will take time. We try to set up bite-sized learnings for clients with space between sessions, so people have time to digest the content,” says Fortier.

LeedHR’s EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360 2.0 assessments measure emotional social skills that influence the way employees: 

• perceive and express themselves
  
   

• develop and maintain social relationships
  
   

• cope with challenges
  
   

• use emotional information effectively

   

“We make emotional intelligence a topic of conversation, which is something we encourage our clients to do as well”

Charles FortierLeedHR

Fortier explains, “We strongly believe that emotional intelligence skills can lead you to have better influence over people.”  

And he adds, “Organizations today have very aggressive targets and goals that they want to achieve, and you can’t achieve those goals if you don’t bring your people along with you. A lot of our assessments encourage talking and learning about yourself, but they’re also about understanding where other people are coming from.” 

Emotional intelligence 

LeedHR, which has won in additional categories such as Leadership and Team Development, requires all employees to take emotional intelligence assessments. Both co-founders also connect with employees through daily meetings.  

“Our daily stand-ups are our way of checking in with employees, asking how they are feeling, and letting them know that we see them, especially when they work remotely,” says Payne. 

In addition, the firm has built a strong structure through its comprehensive culture map.  

“It’s an outline of what things we reward, what things we care about, what things we want to talk about, and what things we don’t let slide under the rug. And we all have to be accountable for that,” shares Payne. 

LeedHR further strengthens connections with employees through week-long quarterly meetings where employees take time off to focus on big-picture objectives within the business, while also proactively bonding with one another.  

Fortier adds, “We teach emotional intelligence, but at the end of the day, we’re not perfect either. We remain very mindful about what our employees are trying to develop and what they’re trying to improve on in their own emotional intelligence journeys.”