StarTech.com employees volunteer to clean up the local community on Earth Day.Supplied
Oriol Madrenas first joined London, Ont.- based StarTech.com Ltd. in 2007 for a summer working in the warehouse while he was attending Western University nearby. At that time, the IT connectivity company had just 50 employees. Madrenas would go on to work in customer service, marketing, market research, sales and client success, with postings in Canada, the United States and Spain. With StarTech’s support, he would obtain a global executive MBA degree.
“It’s definitely not been a straight-line path,” says Madrenas, chief revenue officer, of the now 400-employee organization. But that’s not unusual at StarTech, which just celebrated its 40th anniversary last fall. “There’s a lot of encouragement for that kind of curiosity and movement and a lot of opportunity to build a career that evolves alongside the business.”
In evaluating current and prospective employees, StarTech prizes values as much as proven performance and skills.
“We try to look for the potential and the ambition in our people and really try to align that to where they’ll be able to thrive,” Madrenas says. “For 40 years, a lot of doors have opened, and the company encourages its employees to walk through them.”
One of the company’s values is to think about customer, employee and community relationships alike as ecosystems. That’s why it has a long-standing partnership with the United Way at its London headquarters. Every employee donation to the charity gets matched by Paul Seed, StarTech’s founder and CEO, resulting in more than $5 million in donations over the organization’s history. In addition, employees get one paid day per year to volunteer for a charity of their choice.
Ecosystem thinking is also why StarTech has employee resource groups (ERGs) to organize events and advise management on matters of philanthropy, diversity and employee social interaction.
And that’s why it has made firm commitments to environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles, which over the past two years has earned the company gold status from EcoVadis. The award recognizes StarTech as ranking among the top five per cent of companies globally for sustainability.
Brooke Taylor, who was hired as a graphic designer last September, was impressed from the start by how transparent management was with employees at town hall meetings. She also notes the many opportunities she’s had to get to know her colleagues on a personal level, from a team challenge pulling a plane at London’s airport to a Halloween costume contest where her team chose the theme of “IT pain points.” (“I was a certain well-known suite of office software,” Taylor laughs.)
Using the Star Spotlights app, Taylor can recognize and award points to her co-workers for dedicated service and has already received enough points herself to redeem them for an Amazon gift card. The company makes a point of recognizing milestones such as five, 10, 20 and 25 years of service at town hall meetings as well.
“It honestly felt like I had known these people for years,” Taylor says of her integration into the StarTech team. This year, she decided to join the philanthropy ERG to help plan the company’s United Way campaign.
Living an hour’s drive from StarTech, Taylor works from home two days a week and makes it into the office the other three. Going the distance is well worth it, in her mind. “Never do I not want to make that commute,” she says.
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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.