OpenRoad Auto Group – Top 50 Best Employers

Ranked 7th in the annual national study of best places to work

Vancouver, BC  – OpenRoad Auto Group announces it has been named in the Top 10 of Aon Hewitt’s 2012 Best Employers in Canada list. This is the third year that OpenRoad Auto Group has been awarded top placement, and is recognized among leading businesses including Cisco Canada, WestJet, McDonald’s, FedEx, and Delta Hotels & Resorts. Organizations were selected as Best Employers based on survey responses from more than one hundred thousand Canadian employees.

“I am very proud of the fact that OpenRoad has once again made the list of Canada’s 50 Best Employers, and thank our employees for their vote of confidence in our workplace,” said Christian Chia, CEO of OpenRoad Auto Group. “What we have accomplished together, is making our company a truly unique place to work and we are committed to build this community even stronger by keeping open dialogue with our employees to foster growth as a company and as a family.”

At the core of the award selection is employee engagement, which is driven by leadership, rewards, workplace culture and values, productivity and the support of performance and development. The average engagement score for the 50 Best Employer organizations was 78 percent. “Those organizations ranked highest on the list have employee engagement of close to 90 percent,” said Neil Crawford, Aon Hewitt’s leader of the Best Employers in Canada study. “That’s an impressive accomplishment, particularly now when many parts of the Canadian economy are showing signs of recovery and employee attraction and retention is becoming more challenging.”

For Christian Chia, CEO of OpenRoad Auto Group, which operates ten car dealerships selling 9 import brands – Lexus, Toyota, Scion, Audi, BMW, MINI, Honda, Mazda, and Hyundai – in the Vancouver metro area, focusing on people practices is critical to fostering an environment of innovation. Paving the road for innovation in the automotive industry, OpenRoad Auto Group has created a series of “climate” or cultural goals that contribute to their uniqueness.

Chia continues, “90 percent of the business model is the same from one dealership to the other. We have to work within that 10 percent where we can make a difference. We have to differentiate ourselves by offering the best service provision, and that means the quality of our people.”