While we couldn’t all be together this year, that didn’t stop WalterFedy and AEC from celebrating Employee Appreciation Week! To kickstart the celebrations, staff received boxes with a few symbolic gifts that aligned with our company’s new vision and direction. The boxes contained a notebook branded with our new Action Statement, a handwritten thank you card from their leader, a pair of bold custom branded socks, snacks to fuel their big ideas, and one intangible, big-picture item.

Every year around this time, we usually offer up a selection of branded company wearables for staff. This year, however, we decided to look beyond our four walls and choose a gift with greater impact. In line with our new aspiration to use our work to enhance the world around us, we purchased enough carbon offsets to counter our 2019 GHG emissions of 371 tonnes eCO2. This amount includes all our staff’s commuting and work travel, as well as keeping our lights on and building heated. Our contribution will fund two projects in the province focused on maintaining the function and diversity of ecosystems along the Niagara escarpment and re-establishing forest species.

But that wasn’t all we had in store. We couldn’t have an Employee Appreciation Week without prizes! We had a long list of prizes for our daily winners to choose from including fitness trackers, local brewery packages, cordless headphones, and so much more!

To close out the week, we hosted a big COVID-friendly event that got us all out of the or house to enjoy some time together. On October 8, the company organized a trip to Bingemans drive-in to see Yesterday. Complete with all the best movie snacks, employees watched the movie from the comfort of their cars and safely within their own bubbles.

It’s a challenging time to celebrate our teams, but we’ve adapted to make sure our people know we value their contributions and resilience in what has been a most unusual year. Thank you to all our employees for everything you do day in and day out.