At organizations that span all advertising disciplines, many employees may often feel like workers on an assembly line, contributing bits and pieces to large-scale projects that bounce from department to department.
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“You don’t get to see the impact of your work,” said Christiana Marouchos, senior director of digital marketing at StackAdapt. But at the Toronto-based programmatic advertising company, “getting to work on something with a tight-knit team and getting to see the results of your work” is standard practice, she said.
Top-of-mind for many at StackAdapt are the people—the individuals who make up those teams within the company. And according to many, including VP of People and Culture Natalia Vassilieva, StackAdapt’s employees are the best thing about it. “And I bet you 90% of our team would have the same answer,” Vassilieva said.
The Canadian company with employees all over the world is “still quite picky” about who it hires, said Vassilieva. But despite a tight labor market, the organization has continued to grow steadily over the past several years, wooing prospective hires with everything from up to 25 paid days off each year to its visible promote-from-within mentality that encourages hard but rewarding work.
With its growing employee body, which has begun to branch out globally, what the company has planned for its physical workplace is still up in the air.
“When COVID first happened, we were already in an office that was way too small for the size of our team,” said Vassilieva. And amid new lockdown restrictions in Ontario due to another wave of infections, it’s currently “a bit of a gray area with what we’re doing with our Toronto office,” she said. StackAdapt is not without ideas, though, including moving forward remote-first with a WeWork-style communal office or converting its current headquarters into a collaboration space.