LiveWorkPlay Honoured Before Live Audience at Best Places to Work & DisruptHR Ottawa 2026

On a beautiful fall evening at Algonquin College on October 6, LiveWorkPlay was publicly celebrated before an audience of 400 Ottawa business and organizational leaders as the #2 Best Place to Work in Ottawa at Best Places to Work & DisruptHR Ottawa 2026. Congratulations to the Ottawa Business Journal for hosting a lively and fun event, and thanks to all of the partners and sponsors who helped make it possible. Click here or click the image below to see the video clip!

It was a particularly fitting setting: an evening that paired recognition of Ottawa’s top workplaces with rapid-fire DisruptHR presentations challenging conventional thinking about trust, belonging, performance, hiring, workplace rules, leadership, and what should remain fundamentally human at work. Those themes felt especially relevant after a decade of LiveWorkPlay questioning traditional approaches to supervision and performance management.

As a leading example, Sanita Alias issued a challenge to rethink workplace rules built around control rather than trust. This message connected strongly with the LiveWorkPlay team’s own experience of replacing traditional supervisory approaches with collaborative performance management and coaching. Alias reinforced that trust and accountability are not competing ideas: both depend on clear expectations, honest conversations, and shared responsibility.

We were thrilled to have a broad LiveWorkPlay delegation with us to receive the recognition, including Board members, co-leaders, directors, team leads, and staff from both our Employment Supports and Community Supports teams.

When the rankings were announced in August, we shared the extraordinary results of the independent employee survey administered by Workforce Research Group. In September, the Ottawa Business Journal explored the workplace practices behind those results, with LiveWorkPlay co-founders and co-leaders Julie Kingstone and Keenan Wellar helping to tell that story. You can read that feature by clicking here or on the photo collage below.

Last night gave us an opportunity to emphasize something equally important: a great workplace is an organizational accomplishment.

About a decade ago, the LiveWorkPlay Board of Directors began authorizing significant investments and changes focused on our people and workplace culture. Current and former Board members helped establish and sustain that direction; co-leaders translated those commitments into organizational systems and practices; and directors and team leads brought them to life in day-to-day operations. Some of those changes represented substantial departures from traditional workplace models.

LiveWorkPlay adopted a new collaborative approach to performance management and developed a coaching model designed to move away from conventional top-down supervision toward regular dialogue, shared responsibility, reflection, learning, and development.

Those approaches only work if people throughout the organization actively use them, question them, and help improve them. Staff at every level have played a role in shaping how these practices have evolved and in identifying where we still need to do better.

Best Places to Work is also much more than an awards-night designation. Workforce Research Group independently administers a two-part assessment that combines an extensive review of workplace policies and practices (more than 200 questions) with an anonymous employee engagement survey covering about 100 topics. LiveWorkPlay averaged 98% overall, with every category at 93% or higher. Staff also provided 30 written comments, and we responded directly to every one of them, including those identifying opportunities for improvement.

There is another aspect of this year’s recognition that means a great deal to us. LiveWorkPlay is the first charity providing direct services to people in the community to be recognized as one of Ottawa’s Best Places to Work. We think that matters beyond LiveWorkPlay.

The realities of community-based social services can make sustained investment in compensation, benefits, professional development, workplace culture, and new approaches to leadership particularly challenging. We hope our inclusion among Ottawa’s Best Places to Work demonstrates that innovation in how people are supported at work can and should be part of our sector too.

Being ranked #2 is wonderful recognition. What matters most is what sits underneath it: years of deliberate choices, sustained investment, new ways of working, shared leadership, honest feedback, and people throughout the organization taking responsibility for the kind of workplace we want LiveWorkPlay to be.

One of the strategic directions that helped launch this work was called Building A Leaderful Organization. Looking at the group representing LiveWorkPlay at the Algonquin Commons Theatre last night, that phrase felt particularly appropriate.

Congratulations as well to the other 19 organizations recognized as Best Places to Work in Ottawa. Together with the ideas shared at DisruptHR Ottawa, their recognition was an encouraging reminder that strong HR leadership and workplace innovation can emerge in any sector and in organizations of every size.

Thank you to the Ottawa Business Journal and Workforce Research Group for the recognition, and congratulations to the entire LiveWorkPlay team.

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