Eyereturn Marketing, which has been operating out of the Toronto area for 10 years, has just reached a milestone: the company was honoured by Great Place to Work Canada as a top workplace environment.

“It's an independent test,” Eyereturn President and Co-CEO Renee Hill told Toronto Business Daily, talking about how the company achieved its worker-friendly status.

Hill said although the Great Place to Work Canada survey uncovered many existing positives, it also helped the company to improve even more.

“It really actually helped us to see what issues were,” Hill said, calling Great Place to Work Canada’s involvement “good feedback.”

For example, she said analysis found that a policy of allowing dogs in the office has become extremely popular, as a stress reliever and a social component of what people do at Eyereturn. She said care was taken to make sure that everyone was comfortable and that people who are afraid of dogs don't get unwanted interaction with them at work.

Other factors contributing to great workplace assessments involve fitness, she said. The company offers discounts to a gym in the building and brings in healthy snacks, such as fruits and nuts and other whole foods for workers to munch on.

In fact, Hill has gone a step further in accommodating shared snacks in the office, hiring cleaning staff to take care of some of the dishes and allowing individual employees to expense purchases from a nearby grocery store, as long as they buy enough for the whole office.

“It's just stuff to make everyone's life a little easier,” Hill said.

Hill also believes that employees thrive on self-management, which is why Eyereturn doesn't have a micromanaging culture. However, the company was responsive when it found that some employees wanted a little more training at the very beginning of their jobs, she said.

“They wanted a little more kind of instruction when they first started. We really tightened up our hiring and training processes,” Hill said.

As for the company’s services to clients, Hill said a lot of it involves tracking online advertising for companies across all platforms.

“We look at measurability, we look at fraud,” Hill said. “We look at conversion rates and KPIs.”

She said Eyereturn services as “auditing the Internet” on behalf of clients.

Although the company has offices in Montreal and New York, its main office is in Toronto, which Hill said helps the company to get top-quality talent from nearby universities.

“We get the best and brightest,” Hill said. “You can really get great talent and pay them well.”