Best Companies to Work for in the Benefits, Pensions, and Institutional Investment Space | Top Employers 

There is a particular accountability that comes with working in this industry. When your organization’s purpose is helping employers take better care of their people, your own employees are watching. They know what good looks like. They know what the research says. They know when the culture matches the pitch and when it doesn’t.

The 10 organizations named among Canada’s best companies to work for in the benefits, pensions, and institutional investment space for 2026 passed that test, not according to their leadership, but according to the people who show up every day to do the work.

Benefits and Pensions Monitor identified the best companies to work for in this space through its fourth annual Top Employers survey. Organizations were first invited to participate by completing an employer form detailing their offerings and practices. Employees from nominated companies then evaluated their workplace anonymously across five dimensions: benefits, compensation, culture, employee development, and commitment to diversity and inclusion.

To qualify, each organization had to reach a minimum response threshold based on its size. Those achieving a 75 percent or greater average satisfaction rating were named Top Employers for 2026.

This year, 10 organizations earned that distinction.

“Firms in our space face a unique credibility test,” says Terri Botosan, HUB International Canada’s president of employee benefits, retirement, and life. “We’re in the business of telling employers how to take care of their people, so our own employees hold us to a higher standard. The firms that are winning the talent game in benefits and pensions right now are the ones where employees feel trusted, invested in, and like their work has meaning beyond the day to day.”

They range from organizations with fewer than 25 employees to those with more than 1,000, spanning pension administration, group benefits, asset management, and specialty insurance.

Their workforce skews experienced: nearly half of survey respondents have been with their organization for five years or more, and three quarters are aged 30–59, the core of any organization’s institutional knowledge. Across every size and structure, one finding holds: when employees feel genuinely supported, the numbers show it.

The scores bear that out. Vacation leave, medical and dental coverage, and retirement plan ranked as the three highest-rated benefit categories across the cohort, with average scores of 4.89, 4.85, and 4.83, respectively, on a five-point scale.

Flexible work options scored 4.60, reflecting a sector that has largely normalized hybrid and remote arrangements. The lowest-scoring categories, including paternity leave, sabbaticals and loyalty programs, point to the next frontier of benefits design for employers looking to push beyond the baseline.

What the scores cannot capture, but what the employee comments make unmistakably clear, is the texture of these workplaces. Across hundreds of open-ended responses, the same themes recur:

• leaders who are accessible and human
   

• recognition that is both formal and spontaneous
   

• flexibility that is trusted rather than policed
   

• a sense that the organization sees the whole person rather than just the employee 

In a sector defined by its commitment to other people’s financial security, the top employers of 2026 have made that commitment personal. 

Three years of data reveal a workforce recalibrating around security. Vacation leave, medical and dental coverage, retirement plan, and flexible work options have been among the top four preferences in those years, making them the unmovable foundation of any competitive total rewards package.

Around them, the shifts are telling. Vision coverage has climbed from 4.55 in 2024 to 4.72 in 2026, the steepest upward move in the top 10, while life insurance and disability benefits recovered strongly in 2026 after dipping in 2025, pointing to growing employee focus on income protection.

Flexible work options, meanwhile, have slipped from a joint-second ranking in 2024 to sixth in 2026. They have not become less important so much as less remarkable. Flexibility is now an expectation, not a differentiator.

Development programs have edged down similarly, from 4.31 in 2024 to 4.19 in 2026. When economic pressure builds, employees prioritize health and financial security first. For employers, the data delivers a simple message that the basics must be exceptional before anything else registers.

Hybrid work is the dominant arrangement among employees at this year’s top employers, with 63 percent currently working in a hybrid model. But when employees are asked what they would actually prefer, that number drops to 44 percent, a 19.6-point gap that is the largest in the dataset.

The preference shift flows in two directions: toward full remote, which jumps from 19 percent current to 28 percent preferred, and toward complete employee choice, which nearly triples from seven percent to 20 percent.

Taken together, the data suggests that hybrid, while widely accepted, is not widely chosen. Employees at even the best employers in this sector want more autonomy over where they work than most organizations are currently providing. For employers who consider a hybrid policy a settled question, these numbers are a prompt to reopen it.

At first glance, the retention picture at Canada’s top employers looks strong. Eighty-five percent of employees are not actively looking for a new role, a figure that reflects the genuine investment these organizations make in their people.

But BPM’s data introduces an important qualification: 45 percent of employees say they would consider changing jobs if a role offered working arrangements that better suited their preferences. That is nearly half the workforce at organizations that have already cleared a high satisfaction threshold.

The implication is significant. Retention is not simply a function of how happy employees are today, but of whether the daily reality of how and where they work matches what they actually want. Working arrangements have become a departure trigger, not just an attraction factor, and employers who treat flexibility as a solved problem may be underestimating the risk sitting quietly in their own satisfied workforce.

Compensation is the primary driver of attraction in Canada’s labour market, and the salary review data suggests that top employers may have an emerging gap to close. Sixty-three percent of employees currently receive a salary review once a year, the clear industry norm.

But among employees who expressed a preference, 55 percent said they would like that frequency increased. That is a majority of engaged, satisfied employees at organizations that have already earned recognition for their workplace culture, signalling that the appetite for more frequent compensation conversations is not a dissatisfaction problem but an expectation problem.

Annual reviews were designed for a more stable economic environment. In a period of persistent inflation and rising living costs, employees are recalibrating what regular looks like. For employers, the cost of addressing this is far lower than the cost of losing talent to organizations that already have.

The cost of getting workplace benefits wrong has never been higher. According to an Express Employment Professionals/Harris Poll survey, the average cost of employee turnover in Canada has climbed to $30,680 per person, up from $29,234 just a year ago, and more than one in four Canadian hiring managers expect departures to accelerate in 2026.

Among larger organizations with 100 or more employees, that figure rises to 37 percent. When 46 percent of hiring managers point to enhanced benefits and perks as their single most effective recruiting tool, according to Robert Half’s 2026 research, organizations are no longer competing on total rewards. They are being judged by them.

Yet Canada’s broader retirement security picture reveals a structural gap that the best employers are being asked to help close. A February 2026 IG Wealth Management annual retirement study found less than half of non-retired Canadians, just 48 percent, have any employer-sponsored pension plan, whether defined benefit or defined contribution.

Three decades after large employers began phasing out DB plans, the burden of retirement planning has shifted almost entirely to individuals, most of whom are ill-equipped to carry it. Only 11 percent of non-retirees know how much annual income they will need in retirement. More than half report negative feelings about their financial futures. The organizations recognized in this report are doing something meaningful about that.

According to HOOPP’s 2025 Canadian Employer Pension Survey, 88 percent of employers offering a DB pension say it has directly helped them recruit and retain talent.

More striking: 57 percent of employers who invested in retirement benefits in the past year reported better-than-normal employee productivity, compared with just 12 percent of those who made no employee investment at all. Eighty-two percent of employers agree that offering retirement benefits improves employee mental health and reduces burnout.

Prescription drug costs in private plans rose 14.1 percent between 2022 and 2023, the most recently published private-plan figure, and the pressure shows no sign of easing, with public drug spending rising a further 9.3 percent in 2024. Long-term disability claims are rising and the workforce itself is aging. More than 5.4 million Canadians over 55 are now active workers, representing 21 percent of the total workforce and double the share in 2000, bringing higher per-capita health costs and succession challenges in their wake. (Sources: PMPRB, February 2025; CIHI, March 2026; and HUB International, 2026)

Among workers aged 18–30, the number consulting a mental health professional doubled between 2017 and 2025, with antidepressant use rising at 2.5 times the rate seen in other age groups, driven by high living costs, precarious early-career prospects, and financial stress that has become structural rather than episodic.

Beneva’s Connecting the Dots health report, published May 4, 2026, also revealed that for mid-career employees aged 31–50 who are carrying mortgages, childcare costs, and aging-parent responsibilities, short-term disability claims tied to mental health have risen eight percent since 2019.

“Mental health support is still the headline, but the conversation has matured,” says Botosan. “Employees aren’t just asking whether an EAP exists, they’re asking whether it works. Virtual therapy access, realistic session limits, and coverage for a broader range of practitioners are the differentiators.”

Manulife data shows fertility medication claims rose 21 percent over the past five years among its plan members. Yet, fewer than one percent of employers with Manulife plans cover IVF treatments, even as 75 percent of women say they want benefits that address reproductive and women’s health needs across their full careers, including menopause, an issue 68 percent of employed adults now say deserves explicit workplace acknowledgement.

The pattern extends beyond reproductive health. A third of the Canadian workforce is now balancing paid work and caregiving responsibilities for children, aging parents, and family members with complex needs, and the productivity toll is measurable.

“Caregiver-friendly employers have a real recruitment and retention advantage in today’s competitive talent market,” Christa Haanstra, national lead of the Working Caregiver Initiative at the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence, said in a May 2026 Benefits Canada article. Leading employers are responding, building lifecycle flexibility that includes career re-entry programs, hybrid schedules, emergency childcare reimbursements, into their benefits architecture.

Botosan sees the same demographic segmentation playing out across the industry.

“We’re seeing strong demand for financial wellness programs, particularly among younger employees who are dealing with housing affordability and student debt,” she says.

“Younger workers tend to prioritize flexibility in how benefits are structured and accessed, and increasingly whether they include things like fertility support or gender-affirming care. Mid-career employees are focused heavily on mental health and dependent care. And for employees closer to retirement, the ask is clear guidance – ‘Am I going to be okay?’ That’s where pension adequacy, drawdown planning, and financial counselling become critical.”

Employers still designing benefits around peak productivity years are designing for a workforce that no longer exists. Underpinning all of it is a benefits equity imperative that the most forward-thinking organizations are only beginning to address.

“Employees from diverse backgrounds are increasingly asking whether their plan reflects their needs,” Botosan says. “There’s also a growing focus on whether the experience of accessing benefits is equitable – are there language barriers, is the navigation process harder for some employees than others?”

The most thoughtful employer responses, she argues, go beyond adding a checkbox benefit. “They’re asking employees what’s missing and then building those gaps into their plan design and renewal conversations.” For employers in a sector that holds itself to a higher standard of care, that is not a diversity initiative. It is a baseline obligation.

The retention calculus has shifted. Work-life balance has overtaken pay as the primary reason Canadian workers stay in their roles, cited by 46 percent of Canadian talent, ahead of compensation at 23 percent, according to Randstad’s Workmonitor 2026. Nearly half say they would not accept a new position without flexibility in work location or hours.

The organizations named in this report have met a high bar of 75 percent or greater employee satisfaction threshold across compensation, culture, benefits, development, and inclusion.

The firms that pull ahead, Botosan argues, are those that have moved past performative wellness and built cultures where leaders model the behaviour they ask of their people, normalizing conversations about mental health at the leadership level, being transparent about workload and burnout risk, and genuinely supporting flexibility rather than just permitting it.

“In the benefits and pension space, specifically, there’s also an interesting dynamic: our industry is asking clients to take care of their people, so there’s an accountability there to walk the talk internally.”

In an environment where the gap between employer confidence and employee optimism has rarely been wider, where 95 percent of Canadian employers expect growth this year and only 51 percent of workers share that outlook, closing that gap starts with how organizations treat the people they employ.

 

Founded in 2015, Equiton is a vertically integrated private real estate investment and asset management firm with strategies spanning the risk-return spectrum. The firm partners with institutional investors through flexible structures, including joint ventures, club deals, separately managed accounts, and closed- and open-ended funds. In addition to bespoke real estate partnerships, the company’s platform extends to a suite of professionally managed funds designed to give individual and advisor-supported investors access to assets spanning rental apartments, income-producing commercial properties, real estate debt, and residential development. With a leadership team averaging more than 20 years of industry experience, Equiton’s platform combines investment management, development, construction, and property management capabilities, enabling disciplined execution from acquisition through asset optimization.

For Equiton, scoring about 80 percent for three consecutive years is not the result of a single standout program or a trend-driven culture initiative. It reflects a long-standing philosophy that has shaped the organization’s approach to employees, leadership, and workplace culture from the beginning.

“We've always operated in a very flexible environment,” says Helen Hurlbut, co-founder, president and CFO, and the executive who also leads the company’s people and culture function. Her dual mandate gives her a uniquely broad perspective of what has evolved over time and what has remained constant.

“We understood long before hybrid work became mainstream that employees have full lives outside the office,” says Hurlbut. “Whether it’s caring for a sick child, waiting for contractors at home, or managing unexpected personal responsibilities, people need flexibility. We’ve always operated with that understanding.”

When the broader push toward formalized hybrid arrangements arrived, Equiton was not scrambling to catch up. The company codified what was already in practice, establishing two flexible remote days a month.

Tania Angemi, vice president of people and culture, who joined Equiton just over a year ago, points to the transparency and accountability that underpin the company’s approach to remote and hybrid work.

“It's not really about the policies, it’s the culture behind them and how we show up,” she says. “We have defined expectations, manager alignment, and that trust and accountability is there. We've got managers who are equipped to manage staff who are not always in the office.”

The result, she notes, is perhaps counterintuitive. Many employees choose to come in, valuing the real-time dialogue and decision-making that in-person collaboration enables.
 

The same intentionality applies to employee development. Despite its tenure, Equiton has formulated a growing set of employee development programs comparable to firms several times its size. It has built out mentorship and mentor circle programs, made LinkedIn Learning a structured part of individual growth plans, and recently completed a skills and training needs assessment across all departments to identify common gaps and build from them.

In 2025, employees completed 9,149 training hours of LI Learning, plus in-classroom training, up from 4,334 in 2024, the year it launched LI Learning.

The company has also launched a talent management framework, mapping existing capabilities against future needs and building development pathways accordingly.

“We're trying to be more intentional,” says Angemi. “Not just what a company requires, but what are those individual pieces that each department needs.”

Hurlbut frames the commitment in broader terms. “We want to make sure everybody’s got an opportunity to have a voice,” she says. “Whether it's technical learning or the human side – stress, what people are dealing with at home – we can't ignore that.”

Lunch-and-learns on mental health, which are held virtually so no one is excluded, sit alongside product education sessions and leadership development programming. The goal, as Hurlbut describes it, is to prevent silos from taking hold and to dismantle them quickly.

“Silos are not productive. We’re transparent about who we are, what we want to achieve, and where we're headed.”

Fidelity Investments Canada is one of the country’s most recognized investment management firms, serving more than 2.2 million Canadian investors with approximately $380 billion in AUM. Its product range spans mutual funds, ETFs, managed portfolios and sustainable investment solutions, with dedicated offerings for individual investors, financial advisors and institutional clients. The firm is a subsidiary of Fidelity Investments, one of the world’s largest privately held financial services companies.

That Fidelity Canada has employees who rank their retirement plan as their single greatest source of workplace satisfaction, at a firm whose business is helping Canadians secure their financial futures, is not incidental. It speaks to an organizational culture that, according to Diana Godfrey, senior vice president, HR and corporate affairs, is built on consistency between what the firm offers its clients and what it extends to its own people.

With an overall employee satisfaction rating of 83 percent, and with diversity and inclusion and a safe work environment rounding out the top three, the results reflect a workplace that employees experience as genuinely aligned with its stated values.

For Godfrey, that rating is the cumulative result of getting the daily experience right.

“We aim to build a culture of care, clarity, and opportunity,” she says, “where leaders listen and learn from employee feedback, where teams collaborate and celebrate one another, and where employees feel they have the flexibility and support they need to do their best work. Day to day, it feels valuable, inclusive, and focused on growth – and that’s what drives satisfaction.”

Underpinning that daily experience is a long-term investment in people that Godfrey describes as sustained rather than sporadic. At Fidelity Canada, that means clear career paths, continuous learning, and genuine mobility across roles – supported by coaching and strong leaders.

“It also means investing in well-being, inclusion, and recognition, so people feel valued today while building the skills to grow tomorrow,” Godfrey says.

The approach reflects an understanding that retention is not secured in a single benefits package or annual review cycle but accumulated through consistent signals that the organization is paying attention.

On flexibility, Godfrey draws a distinction that cuts to the heart of what separates top employers from those simply ticking a hybrid box.
 

The framing is telling: flexibility, at its best, is not a concession to employee demand but a design choice with measurable upside. That shift in framing – from policy to lived experience – runs through Godfrey’s read on what employees now expect from employers more broadly.

“The bar has moved from policies to lived experience, and employees are looking for employers to meet them where they are in their career and life journeys," she says.

At Fidelity Canada, meeting employees where they are has translated into a satisfaction rating that places it firmly among the best workplaces in the industry.

Founded to serve Ontario’s education community, the Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan (OTIP) is a member-focused insurance provider offering group benefits, auto, home, life, travel, and retiree health coverage to education workers across the province. Governed by trustees representing major education organizations, OTIP operates on the principle that the people who educate Ontario’s students deserve tailored, accessible protection, and extends that same care-first philosophy to its own workforce.

That internal alignment between stated values and daily practice – and what makes OTIP one of the best companies to work for in Canada’s benefits and pensions sector – sits at the heart of an 85 percent employee satisfaction rating, one that, according to Lisa Marko, executive vice president of employee experience, tracks closely with OTIP’s own internal engagement data.

Employees who took part in the BPM survey gave their highest marks to diversity and inclusion, health-care benefits, and a safe work environment, the last of which Marko recognizes as increasingly meaningful in a post-pandemic workforce still processing the residual weight of that period.

“The burnout is real,” she says. “I can’t help but think that had some influence on what we’re seeing today and how people are feeling, even three or four years past COVID.”

The concept that Marko returns to most consistently is what she calls a culture of care, a phrase that emerged not from leadership but from employees themselves, when OTIP undertook a formal review of its employee value proposition.

“What came through resoundingly clearly was caring about our members, caring about our teammates," she says. “That culture of care came glaringly through in the feedback. It was obviously our number one pillar.”

What makes that finding credible, she argues, is that it is backed by behaviour. OTIP has built what Marko describes as systematic listening strategies, mechanisms designed not just to collect employee feedback but to act on it visibly and consistently.
 

One concrete example she offers was when employees told Marko shortly after she joined that they wanted more opportunity to give back to their communities. OTIP introduced a paid volunteer program and made it flexible by design.

In addition to corporate partnerships with organizations such as Nutrition for Learning, employees are free to direct their volunteer time toward whatever matters to them personally, whether that is their child’s school or a local sports team.

“We try to embed that flexibility,” she says. “It’s their choice.”

On flexibility more broadly, Marko draws a distinction that goes beyond the now-standard hybrid debate. OTIP operates on what she calls an activities-based model, one that does not prescribe a fixed number of office days but instead asks what kind of work is being done.

“We don’t mandate people to come in when the work doesn’t warrant it,” she says. “When there’s team building, brainstorming, strategy sessions, or client-facing work, that’s when connection matters.” Leaders are trusted to make those calls within clear expectations. “It’s trust, not control.”

Long-term investment in employees follows the same systemic logic. Rather than deploying standalone programs, OTIP maps learning across the full arc of an employee’s tenure from onboarding through to retirement, with personal growth pathways that employees are encouraged to own themselves.

Leadership development is deliberate and broad in scope, designed for emerging leaders and individual contributors as much as for people managers.

“We see everyone as a leader in the organization,” Marko says. “We’re planning for the future, not for the present, and developing the next generation of leaders here at OTIP.”

Established in 1939, the Alberta Teachers’ Retirement Fund (ATRF) is a provincial corporation that serves as trustee, administrator, and custodian of the Teachers’ Pension Plan and the Independent School Teachers’ Pension Plan for Alberta’s education community. With more than 80,000 plan members, ATRF manages a defined benefit pension plan jointly sponsored by the Government of Alberta and the Alberta Teachers’ Association, with a mandate to invest assets prudently and maintain full funding over the long term.

That sense of purpose does not stop at the member-facing side of the organization. For CEO Rod Matheson, it is the defining feature of life inside ATRF – and a key reason it ranks among the best companies to work for in Canada’s pensions and institutional investment space – and the most compelling explanation for an 89 percent employee satisfaction rating in this year’s survey, a figure that closely mirrors the 87 percent employee engagement score recorded in the organization’s own internal survey.

Employees gave their highest marks to health-care benefits, the retirement plan and team building and social activities, a combination that reflects both the strength of ATRF’s total rewards offering and a workplace culture that invests visibly in connection.

“There is a real sense of purpose at ATRF,” Matheson says. “We are an organization that truly understands and is motivated by what we do and who we do it for, serving the teachers in the province of Alberta. Every day, we come into work and we know why we’re coming to work.”

What strikes him most, he adds, is not just the purpose itself but the passion it generates.
 

That shared sense of mission is reinforced through deliberate practices designed to keep the organization connected across teams and functions. Lunch-and-learns, town halls, small-group coffees with the CEO, and interdepartmental information sessions are all part of a continuous learning culture that Matheson sees as doing double duty – building knowledge and building community at the same time.

“If you’re on the pension administration side, you’re learning about what’s happening on the investment side, or what’s happening with IT,” he says. “It enriches their time at ATRF and enriches their wanting to come to work.”

On flexibility, Matheson’s approach goes beyond the standard hybrid formula. ATRF staff can work remotely up to two days a week, with the additional freedom to modify their schedule in discussion with their supervisor, including which days they work remotely.

The organization also offers what it calls ‘Work from Anywhere’ weeks, a program that allows employees to work remotely for up to two weeks at a stretch, effectively allowing them to extend a vacation, visit family, or simply change their environment without using leave.

“It’s been very popular with staff,” Matheson says. In a northern climate where snowstorms are a regular reality, the ability to call a supervisor and simply choose to work from home that day is, as he puts it, an expression of "openness and willingness within the organization.”

Employees also receive two paid volunteer days annually, used at their discretion for a cause or community organization of their choice. At the organizational level, ATRF supports Ronald McDonald House as its corporate charity of choice, with fundraising and volunteer activities running throughout the year. Individual departments also organize their own team-based community activities.

“There’s quite a focus on our place in the community,” Matheson says.

Long-term investment in employees follows a similarly integrated model. Annual goal-setting conversations between staff and supervisors always include a dedicated discussion on learning and development, but the real investment, Matheson emphasizes, is in what happens in between.

External training, conferences, and an active internal learning program serve all levels of the organization, with targeted leadership development sessions running alongside broader staff programming.

“Learning is continuous, accessible, and embedded,” he says. “We do put a lot of focus on development here at ATRF.”

Four years into BPM’s Top Employers report, the picture is coming into focus. The best companies to work for in the benefits, pensions, and institutional investment space are not necessarily those with the most generous benefits budgets or the most elaborate wellness programs. They are the ones that have figured out something simpler and harder to replicate: consistency. Consistent listening. Consistent follow-through. Consistent signals that the people doing the work are seen, valued, and invested in over the long term.

The 2026 data adds texture to that finding. Employees in this sector are not asking for the extraordinary. They want their health covered, their retirement secured, their time respected, and their contributions acknowledged. They want flexibility that is real rather than performative, compensation conversations that happen more than once a year, and leaders who model the culture they ask their people to live. When those things are present, satisfaction follows. When they are absent, even the most competitive benefits package will not hold talent for long.

The 10 organizations recognized here as among Canada’s best companies to work for in the benefits, pensions, and institutional investment sector have cleared a high bar. But the most valuable thing this report offers is not a list of winners. It is a mirror that reflects, with precision and candor, what employees in this sector actually need from the people who employ them. For the organizations on this list, that is validation. For everyone else, it is a roadmap.

 

Consistency. The best companies to work for in the benefits, pensions, and institutional investment space are not necessarily those with the most generous benefits budgets or the most elaborate wellness programs, but those with a consistent daily experience across every dimension of work life. Employees at this year’s recognized organizations describe leaders who are accessible and human, recognition that is both formal and spontaneous, flexibility that is trusted rather than policed, and a genuine sense that the organization sees the whole person. Benefits and retirement programs are table stakes in this sector – the organizations that clear the bar go further by explaining and actively communicating what they offer, building development pathways that are real rather than performative, and acting visibly on what employees tell them. The phrase that recurs most across hundreds of open-ended responses is some variation of feeling heard. That is what separates the best from the rest.

The process has two stages. First, organizations operating in Canada’s benefits, pensions, and institutional investment space are invited to participate by completing an employer form detailing their offerings, programs and practices. Second, and more importantly, employees from each nominated organization are asked to evaluate their workplace anonymously across five dimensions: benefits, compensation, culture, employee development, and commitment to diversity and inclusion. To qualify, each organization must reach a minimum response threshold scaled to its size, ensuring the results reflect a meaningful cross-section of the workforce rather than a self-selected few. Organizations achieving an average satisfaction rating of 75 percent or greater across all five dimensions are named Top Employers. The employee survey is the decisive measure – employer submissions inform context, but the rankings are determined entirely by the people doing the work. 

Participation is open to any Canadian organization operating in the benefits, pensions, and institutional investment sector, regardless of size or structure. This year’s cohort includes organizations with fewer than 25 employees and others with more than 1,000, spanning pension administration, group benefits, asset management, and specialty insurance. The only requirements are completing the employer nomination form and meeting the minimum employee response threshold based on organizational size. Recognition is not awarded on the basis of scale, tenure, or profile – a smaller organization with highly engaged employees can and does outscore a larger one. Organizations interested in participating in future surveys can contact the BPM editorial team directly. 

Three years of BPM survey data tell a consistent story: employees prioritize security above everything else. Vacation leave, medical and dental coverage, and retirement plans have held the top positions across every year of the survey – the unmoveable foundation of any competitive total rewards package. What has shifted is the tier below. Vision coverage has climbed sharply, while life insurance and disability benefits recovered strongly in 2026 after dipping in 2025, pointing to growing employee focus on income protection. Flexible work, meanwhile, has slipped in the rankings, not because it matters less, but because it is now an expectation rather than a differentiator. Employers who still treat hybrid arrangements as a selling point are behind the curve. The baseline has moved, and employees are evaluating everything else against it. 

It factors in significantly, but the picture is more complicated than most employers assume. Among employees at this year’s top employers, 63 percent currently work in a hybrid model. When asked what they would actually prefer, that figure drops to 44 percent, a gap of nearly 20 points. The preference shift runs toward full remote work and, most notably, toward complete employee choice over working location. The data suggests that hybrid, while widely accepted, is not widely chosen. Employees are tolerating an arrangement rather than embracing it. Separately, 45 percent of employees say they would consider leaving their current role if another offered working arrangements that better suited their preferences – nearly half the workforce at organizations that have already cleared a high satisfaction threshold. Flexibility has become a departure trigger, not just an attraction factor, and employers who treat it as a settled question may be underestimating the risk in their own workforce.

The retention calculus has shifted in ways many employers have not yet fully absorbed. Work-life balance has overtaken pay as the primary reason Canadian workers stay in their roles, cited by 46 percent of employees ahead of compensation at 23 percent. At the same time, the average cost of employee turnover in Canada has climbed to $30,680 per person, up from $29,234 just a year ago. Organizations that retain talent are not simply paying more; they are building cultures where the daily experience matches what employees were promised. That means leaders who model the behaviour they ask of their people, compensation conversations that happen more than once a year, flexibility that is real rather than permitted on paper, and development investment that is sustained rather than sporadic. Employees at this year’s recognized organizations have largely been with their organization for five years or more – that kind of tenure does not happen by accident. 

Start with the basics and make them exceptional. The data is unambiguous: health coverage, retirement security, and time off are the foundation. No investment in culture, recognition, or development will compensate for gaps at that level. Once the foundation is solid, the differentiators become listening mechanisms and follow-through. Employees do not expect perfection – they expect to be heard and to see action taken. Organizations that survey employees and then visibly close the loop on what they find consistently score higher than those with better programs but weaker feedback cultures. On compensation, consider increasing review frequency; 55 percent of employees in this year’s survey said they would prefer more frequent salary conversations than the annual norm. On flexibility, examine the gap between what you offer and what employees actually want – the two are often further apart than leadership assumes. And finally, invest in managers. The most well-designed programs in the world are experienced through the person an employee reports to, and organizations that equip their managers to lead with trust and accountability see it reflected in their scores.

 

 

Methodology

To find and recognize the best employers in the benefits and pensions industry, Benefits and Pensions Monitor first invited organizations to participate by filling out an employer form, which asked companies to explain their various offerings and practices. Next, employees from nominated companies were asked to fill out an anonymous form evaluating their workplace on a number of metrics including benefits, compensation, culture, employee development, and commitment to diversity and inclusion.

To be considered, each organization had to reach a minimum number of employee responses based on its overall size. Organizations that achieved a 75 percent or greater average satisfaction rating from employees were named Top Employers for 2026 in the fourth annual report.