15 Ways To Celebrate Your Certification and Strengthen Your Employer Brand

Key Takeaways:

You earned Great Place To Work Certification™. Your employees answered honestly about what it is like to work at your organisation, and the results held up. That deserves more than a line in a team meeting.

Recognition only does its job once people hear about it. Shared well, it lifts morale inside your walls and tells candidates, customers, and partners something they cannot pick up from a careers page. Here is how to make it count, and how to keep it working for you long after announcement day.

Why promoting your Certification is employer branding, not bragging

Employer branding is simply the story people tell about what it is like to work for you. Most organisations write that story themselves, which is exactly why so few candidates believe it. Certification hands the pen to your employees instead, and that is what gives it weight.

Promoting it works on two audiences at the same time. Internally, employees who see their workplace validated from the outside feel pride and a stronger sense of belonging. Recognition of this kind is one of the most cost-effective employee recognition ideas available to you, because the achievement has already been earned and paid for.

Externally, candidates comparing offers, customers deciding who to buy from, and partners assessing who to work with all read culture signals. Most of those signals are self-reported. Yours is not. That is a rare advantage in a competitive Canadian labour market, and it is why employer brand work belongs close to your recognition strategy rather than in a separate lane.

Great Place To Work research puts numbers behind it. High-trust workplaces run 27 per cent more agile than the average organisation, and nine in ten of their employees say they are willing to go above and beyond, which is 42 per cent higher than at typical workplaces. Promotion is how you convert that culture into recruitment and retention advantage rather than leaving it as an internal fact.

The organisations that get the most out of Certification treat it as a year-round asset for their workplace culture, not a single announcement.

15 ways to celebrate your Certification

These are ordered roughly by how much lift they tend to deliver, starting with the ones that shape how employees feel about the news.

1. Lead from the top. Film a short congratulatory message from your CEO, or gather quotes from leaders across a few levels. Employees read leadership attention as proof that culture is a real priority and not a marketing line. Share it internally first, then externally.

2. Make announcement day feel like an occasion. Decorate the office, put up signage, and have senior leaders greet and thank people at the door. For hybrid and distributed teams, run the same moment over video so nobody hears about it second-hand.

3. Hand the microphone to your employees. Executive quotes are useful, but employee voices carry further. Ask teams to record short clips about what the workplace means to them, or gather everyone for a group photo. This is the raw material for months of content, and it is more persuasive than anything a marketing team can write.

4. Share it on social with #GPTWCertified. Tag Great Place To Work® Canada so the announcement reaches an HR and job-seeker audience well beyond your own following. Lead with images and short video rather than a text-only post.

5. Put your celebration assets to work. Certified organisations receive celebration marketing assets, an action kit, and Canva templates built for exactly this moment. Using them saves your team the design work and keeps the recognition looking consistent wherever it appears.

6. Issue a press release. A release gives trade publications and local outlets a reason to cover you, and it puts the announcement on the record in a form journalists can quote. It also signals that you weigh culture as seriously as any other business result.

7. Feature it in your newsletters. Your internal newsletter reaches an audience that is already paying attention, and your customer newsletter reaches one that has opted in. Both cost less to reach than any paid channel. Add a call to action so readers can respond, share, or pass it on.

8. Publish a blog post on your own site. A post on your careers or company blog gives you room to tell the story behind the result, earns search visibility over time, and becomes a permanent link you can point to in job ads, proposals, and media enquiries.

9. Show your numbers. Your Trust Index™ survey produces a substantial amount of quantitative data. If you earned Certification, those figures are worth showing. Specific numbers land harder than adjectives, and they are difficult for competitors to imitate.

10. Add it to your job ads and careers page. Certification branding on a job posting is one of the highest-return placements available to you, because it appears at the precise moment a candidate is deciding whether to apply.

11. Update every profile and signature. LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, your company boilerplate, email signatures, and business cards. Individually these feel minor. Together they mean anyone who looks you up finds the same consistent signal.

12. Tell your customers. Buyers increasingly factor in how a company treats its people. Sending the news to your customer database shows them the care they receive is not an accident, and it is a rare piece of good news that does not ask them for anything.

13. Give people something tangible. If the budget allows, mark the moment with something real: an extra day of paid time off, an early close on announcement day, a bonus, or well-made branded items people will actually use. Thoughtful employee appreciation ideas work best when they cost the organisation something visible.

14. Celebrate in person. Recognition lands differently in a room full of people. The 2026 Regional Celebrations bring Certified™ organisations together in Montreal on 22 October and Vancouver on 27 October, with the live announcement of the 2026 Best Workplaces™ in Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec. Certified organisations with teams in those provinces are invited to attend.

15. Keep the story going, and plan the next one. Invite a different employee to open each all-hands meeting with a short reflection on why the workplace works for them. Then look ahead: review the upcoming Best Workplaces™ list publications and deadlines and decide which recognitions you will pursue next. Momentum is easier to keep than to rebuild.

Celebrate with us on Certification Nation Day

Certification Nation Day is the annual global celebration of every Great Place To Work Certified™ organisation, and this year it falls on 15 October 2026. Canadian organisations take part alongside Certified workplaces around the world.

It is a natural anchor for everything above. Pick a handful of the ideas on this list, schedule them around that date, and you have a celebration that reaches employees, candidates, and customers at once instead of a single post that disappears by lunchtime.

Turn recognition into something you can build on

Certification is a measurement first and a marketing asset second. The organisations that keep improving are the ones that treat the survey data as a starting point rather than a trophy.

To understand what your employees are actually telling you, start with the Trust Index™ employee survey. To see what high-trust culture does to business performance, read The Great Place To Work® Effect. And if your organisation has not been Certified yet, start here.

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This article is an adaptation of the original Great Place To Work®, written by Claire Hastwell, Content Program Manager.

 

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People Also Asked

How long does Great Place To Work Certification last?
Certification is valid for one year from the date it is awarded. Organisations that want to stay Certified survey their employees again each year, which also gives them a clean year-over-year read on how the employee experience is shifting.

Can a small organisation earn Certification?
Yes. Certification is based on what your employees report about their experience, not on headcount or revenue, so a 20-person organisation and a 20,000-person organisation are assessed on the same standard.

What is the difference between Certification and a Best Workplaces list?
Certification recognises that your workplace meets the standard on its own terms. Best Workplaces™ lists are ranked and competitive, and Certification is what makes an organisation eligible to be considered for them.

Where can employees see that our organisation is Certified?
Certified organisations appear in the public directory of Certified companies, which candidates and customers can search. That listing works alongside the badge you use on your own channels.

Does promoting Certification actually help with hiring?
It helps most where candidates are already comparing you against similar employers. A verified culture signal on a job posting or careers page gives someone a reason to choose your application over an identical one, which matters most in tight talent markets.

How soon after Certification should we announce it?
As soon as you are ready with the assets. Announcing while the survey is still fresh in employees' minds connects the recognition to the effort that produced it, and keeps the moment from feeling disconnected from their experience.

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