Recognized as one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers in 2025, for the third consecutive year
Why It Matters
We are proud to be a people-powered business. Our ability to serve customers and communities, to advance our business strategy and to deliver strong returns for investors all starts with the energy and focus of our teammates. Investing in people so they can perform their best, feel engaged and grow rewarding careers is more important than ever.
Our Approach
People Strategy
Being people-powered is one of our core values—and a critical enabler of our ability to deliver on our business strategy. Our multi-year People Strategy is advancing our ambition to be:
We aspire to improve teammate and manager experiences by making moments that matter really matter. Building on our purpose and values, we’re delivering differentiated experiences that make this a special place to work, offering teammates opportunities to grow their careers and enjoy work that fits their lives.
We continued to make progress and refine our approach to teammate development and experience in fiscal 2025 in response to external trends and challenges, including Canada’s evolving labour market and shifting teammate expectations.
Our approach in this area continues to align with our comprehensive commitments to DE&I, ensuring we are drawing on key experience and insights to create a more equitable teammate experience for all teammates, regardless of gender, ethnicity or cultural background.
Hearing From Our Teammates
In fiscal 2025, we conducted our fourth company-wide survey, hearing from corporate and franchise teammates. More than 59,000 teammates across the country shared their feedback, which is an overall participation rate of 81%. We also added a mid-year Employee Engagement survey for our corporate office teammates, which had a participation rate of 88%. We completed the fourth Store Satisfaction survey, using feedback to create action plans to improve overall store support. In addition to these three surveys, we heard from teammates through our DE&I listening series, where we focused on specific communities and developed targeted action plans. We also gather teammate feedback across key moments in the teammate experience. Insights from teammate feedback allow us to develop action plans to ensure that we are focusing on what is most important.
Supporting Teammate Development
We continue to invest in our people across several career pathways, offering individual support, mentorship, coaching and robust training, including programs tailored for store operations, merchandising, supply-chain management and leadership development. In fiscal 2025, we started to measure internal movements and internal hires to better understand teammate movements. Robust development plans support ongoing succession and talent planning for key roles.
We have been focused on providing and implementing:
Regular formal performance reviews aligned with career development for all permanent teammates
Initiatives for talent recruitment, development and retention—including developing strategies to adapt to meet teammate needs, providing greater assurance and predictability on shifts and wages, and offering more career pathways
Posting open roles as our guiding principle for open and transparent career development
Formal mechanisms to promote an open feedback culture, including teammate experience surveys and new onboarding and exit surveys
Leader training on how to deliver feedback and have tough conversations, combined with skills-based learning solutions for office-based teammates
Support for teammate inclusion networks and support for their development priorities
Improvements to our operational data to enable target-setting and build a stronger foundation for reporting, analysis and insights
Quantitative targets and reporting on human capital development and risk assessment
Ongoing workplace succession planning for key roles at all levels
Prioritizing team development initiatives to quickly advance new teams to be high performers by focusing on alignment, communication and accountability
Supporting teammate engagement activities to build collaboration and a strong cultural foundation
Looking ahead, we will continue to invest in the right combination of company-wide alignment around capabilities, skills development and performance expectations, while continuing to empower our banners to find the right solutions for regional and local team needs.
Highlights
Canada’s Top Employers
We were thrilled to be recognized as one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers for 2025, for the third consecutive year. This achievement reflects our values-based culture, unwavering commitment to diversity and focus on growth and development, embodying our purpose as a family nurturing families.
Nationwide Capabilities Building
In fiscal 2025, we provided leadership growth and development training for all office teammates, leveraging learning platforms to support development opportunities.
Investing in Teammate Growth and Development
This year we refreshed the My Journey platform for teammates, providing skills development resources to support their career growth. We also launched an updated Leadership Development Resource Guide to support growth and development, expanded our leadership programs to include all people leaders and added new courses for managers and directors. For our operations teams, several industry-leading programs are offered to support teammate growth and build rewarding careers. This includes development programs in supply chain, meat cutting, cake decorating, culinary skills, naturopathy, franchisee-in-training, department manager-in-training and store manager-in-training. Additional programs to support teammate growth include education assistance and scholarship programs.
Advancing Career
Development
We recently introduced an updated management program that better supports teammates in today’s labour market, improving cross-training, growth opportunities and succession planning. This program contributes to improved store conditions, stronger engagement and better collaboration.
Leadership Pipeline
Through a robust talent and succession strategy, we continue to build our leadership pipeline by nurturing the development of future leaders for critical roles at every level of the organization. By taking a systematic approach and orchestrating critical experiences, we can ensure that as promotion opportunities and the need for new leaders arise, we have several candidates with the skills and relevant experiences to advance. This fiscal year we’ve been particularly focused on Nova Scotia, with the intent to foster leaders and talent in our home province.
Recognizing Teammates
Our comprehensive teammate recognition programs include acknowledgement of high achievers, long-service programs and company values-based recognition programs. In fiscal 2025, we launched a refreshed and harmonized service award program across the organization that better reflects our values and our teammates. We also launched an Employee Share Ownership Program available to corporate, non-union teammates, helping them build financial wellbeing and share in the success of the company. We express our appreciation through in-store events for teammates including BBQs and celebrations of shared holidays.
National Recognition for Team Support and Culture
In 2024, Longo’s earned a spot in Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures Hall of Fame, thanks to the team’s dedication to creating a thriving workplace. Longo’s was also proud to receive the Canadian Grocer Impact Award for Supporting Employees for its Dayforce Wallet program. Introduced in 2021, Dayforce Wallet allows team members to access their earned wages instantly after a shift.
Champions
Working on our updated management program over the past few years has been one of the proudest and most fulfilling experiences of my career. Seeing this vision come to life—watching teammates break down silos that had been in place for so long, coming together as one united team, and building something better for our people and our customers—has been truly inspiring. The improvements in efficiency, the elevated shopping experience, and the new skills teammates have gained along the way have made this journey so worthwhile.”
Kelsey Cole, Business Coordinator, Sobeys Inc.
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Taking care of our teammates includes prioritizing their health, safety and wellness and empowering them through our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.
As a family nurturing families, we want to ensure Canadians are taken care of today, tomorrow and in the future. By doing OurPartTM for the environment, we hope to inspire our customers to do theirs. Every step we take together—big or small—can make a difference.
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