Cheques & (in-office) benefits

Barb Gamey took a seat Thursday inside the Blue Bomber room.

Other meeting spaces — the United Way room, the MTYP room — were nearby. She could’ve chosen the King Edward boardroom, which seats 20 people, or the Willson Place boardroom, which is bigger.

She could’ve picked from 20 different breakout rooms, bookable by tablets stationed at each location.

Or she could’ve accepted an interview in an unconventional spot: perhaps the gym or the sport court, where basketball, pickleball and tennis are on tap.

Gamey had just given a speech to staff in the biggest of four lunchrooms, complete with restaurant-style booths and an advanced coffee machine offering long espressos and mokaccinos.

Thursday was a notable day for Payworks: leadership and employees celebrated the grand opening of the Winnipeg company’s new South Pointe office.

“I feel like the building has come to life the way we envisioned that it would,” Gamey had told her staff.

Payworks spent roughly $60 million on eight acres of land and its development in south Winnipeg. Just off Payworks Way, employees drive into a two-storey parkade before entering the five-storey, 94,000-square-foot complex.

And there’s room to grow. A 30,000-sq.-ft. expansion has been plotted, in case it’s needed.

“I think we’re good for the foreseeable future,” Gamey said inside the meeting room named after the Winnipeg Blue Bombers CFL team.

Twenty-four years ago, Gamey started the company with a handful of employees. Now, Payworks has 600 staff nationwide. It manages cloud-based services like payroll and human resources for clients.

This fall marks the company’s third growth-related move. Gamey started in a Johnston Group office on King Edward Street with some 300 sq. ft. of space. Then, she was out selling her services to local ventures like Rae & Jerry’s Steak House and Assiniboine Credit Union.

As business picked up, Payworks started a British Columbia office and headed to Pembina Highway. By 2008, the company had approximately 55 employees.

The next four years saw the establishment of offices in Toronto and Calgary. In 2013, Payworks and its roughly 75 employees moved to a structure on Willson Place. Payworks staff frequented the orange-and-black building until the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Word of mouth and a good product has kept business growing, according to Gamey. The pandemic brought a new level of expansion.

At the time, government had rolled out financial programs to support businesses’ payrolls. Payworks automated access to the funding, making it easier for clients to apply, Gamey said.

Also, companies who’d previously had in-house payroll and human resources services no longer had access to their offices. Many businesses who were shut out contacted Payworks, Gamey relayed. “We set up a lot of business during that time.”

Payworks had begun searching for acreage in 2018, due to a need for space. It kept hiring throughout the pandemic; when employees returned to Willson Place, meeting rooms had to be converted to offices.

The last two years alone have seen 200 net new hires, though not all in Winnipeg, said Michael Penman, Payworks chief operating officer.

Winnipeg counted more than 200 Payworks employees in 2018; it now has more than 350.

Offices dot Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Pitt Meadows, B.C.

Employees work, sometimes remotely, from coast to coast.

Technology and service departments continue to grow at a “fairly brisk pace,” Gamey said. Payworks has more than 40,000 customers, she added.

As the pandemic progressed, the new Payworks office design plans changed.

“There was a sense that flexibility would be key,” she said.

Hence the 20-plus meeting spaces, all bearing Winnipeg-related names. There are designated quiet rooms and standing desk meeting spots.

“The other piece … being talked about was a variety of ways to interact, and reasons to get up from your desk,” Gamey said.

So Payworks’ golf simulator was expanded. The second-floor lunchroom has table tennis; the first-floor lunchroom has a “micro market,” where employees can buy snacks and fresh sandwiches.

As of Sept. 1, Winnipeg staff must be in the office three days per week. Previously, the hybrid model differed between employees.

Response to the policy shift has been mixed, but it’s been timed with the opening of the new building, Gamey noted. “I think that we’ve given people lots of reasons to want to spend some time here.”

Amanda Soloway, Payworks senior manager of marketing, called the building “enormous” and “beautiful.”

“We all felt very spoiled when we first came on our … office tours,” she said.

Payworks chose the site because of its closeness to the old location. Also, leadership plotted employees’ postal codes and checked where the highest concentration of staff lived, to ensure the office was on the same side of the city.

Coun. Janice Lukes (Waverley West) said she’s “over the moon ecstatic” about the new build.

It may encourage workers to move to South Pointe, a growing neighbourhood, and to spend money at the roughly 70 new businesses that have planted themselves in the Bridgwater area, Lukes said.

“It’s a locally owned business, and they’ve located their headquarters here,” she said. “That’s really significant. We want to keep headquarters of companies here.”

One of the new meeting rooms is named Windsor Park, after Gamey’s childhood community.

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Gabrielle Piché
Reporter

Gabrielle Piché reports on business for the Free Press. She interned at the Free Press and worked for its sister outlet, Canstar Community News, before entering the business beat in 2021. Read more about Gabrielle.

Every piece of reporting Gabrielle produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.