Employees at Rubicon Strategy enjoy breakfast with colleagues before starting the day.Supplied
Daniel Pascucci, vice-president with Rubicon Strategy Inc., is looking forward to being at home full-time with his 10-month-old daughter. He plans to be on paternity leave from April to June “taking lots of walks and changing lots of diapers and working on nap times. My plan is to watch my daughter grow and to be a part of it — and know that she knows that her father is there at this juncture of her life.”
Pascucci is taking this break thanks to a generous benefits package that, among other perks, offers employees on paternity and maternity leave a top-up to 100 per cent of their salary for up to 78 weeks.
A 30-person lobbying firm based in Toronto and Ottawa, Rubicon’s main business is helping Canadian companies deal with governments in six select areas of practice: health, energy, defence, mergers and acquisitions, transportation and labour.
“We are a professional services company,” says Kory Teneycke, Rubicon’s co-founder and CEO. “Our product is the knowledge and expertise of the people who work with us. Recruiting and retaining the best people in the market is critically important to our business.”
Top-up pay for parental leave is one element of a suite of employee benefits all designed to handsomely reward Rubicon’s hard-working, devoted staff, Teneycke says, adding, as the father of an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old, that “paternity leave wasn’t a thing in my day.” But today, Rubicon’s leave top-up differentiates it from other employers and is geared to Rubicon’s largely millennial employees, Teneycke says, noting “many staffers are in their peak child-rearing stage of life.”
Overall, incentives are used to reinforce a united workforce, Teneycke says. “Our workplace culture is important. We want to bring in the best people — and to retain them. We want people to be happy to come into the office.”
Teamwork is important at Rubicon, Teneycke says. While teams are aligned to the firm’s practice areas, there is a lot of collaboration. “This is very much a people business. We advise clients on a range of issues. If I can use a sports analogy, they are hiring a coach and a general manager to work with them to come up with a plan and a strategy,” Teneycke explains. “There has to be a high level of integration with the clients and the trust relationship that is built with clients over time is very important.”
Pascucci describes Rubicon’s office culture as “a family-like atmosphere. Everyone is working together to make sure that clients are being served with white kid gloves,” he says. “We’ve created a culture in the office to support one another all along the way. Rubicon works as a cohesive team. Everyone has everyone else’s back.”
Hired four years ago as an account director — “I was employee No. 14,” he says — Pascucci has seen the firm more than double in size. His professional career began as an Ontario political staffer in Queen’s Park and, later, in then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s office. He left political work in 2020 to work in government relations, joining Rubicon in January 2022. “Seeing the growth and being a part of the growth speaks volumes,” he says. “People want to work here.”
The teamwork spirit is reflected in the support offered to employees with new families, Pascucci says. “It allows you to leave and come back seamlessly. That’s what puts us ahead of the curve.”
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Advertising feature produced by Canada’s Top 100 Employers, a division of Mediacorp Canada Inc. The Globe and Mail’s editorial department was not involved.