The Waterloo regions newspaper or record, aptly named, The Record, were in our Cambridge head office all last week, interviewing company president John Stix who was talking about how Fibernetics, Worldline’s parent company, is focusing on employee happiness to drive company success. (Pssst… it’s working)

The Record: Fibernetics focuses on fun to restore workplace passion

John Stix and Jody Schnarr walk through the offices of the telecommunications company they founded 10 years ago, handing out cold glasses of Guinness after leading a rumba line during a barbecue lunch.

Every Friday, there is a celebration in the Fibernetics head office in Cambridge. A few times each week, Stix picks up baked goods on his way to the office and hands out the treats.

About four months ago, the growing provider of telephone and internet services embraced new core values that stress happiness, empathy, wellness, closer connections among employees, innovation, and the support and nurturing of its employees’ passions.

“A job gets you in the car in the morning, but passion gets you bouncing out of bed,” says Stix, president of the 250-employee firm.

Read the whole thing on the Record Website

According to the Huffington Post, Canadians aren’t using scissors to cut their cable TV subscriptions, they’re using weed whackers.

The news portal reports that between Shaw and Rogers, they’ve lost nearly 200,000 cable subscribers in the past year.

Rogers’ latest quarterly report, released this week, showed the company lost 111,000 TV subscriptions over the past year, or about 5 per cent of their TV customers.

Shaw lost 82,000 over nearly the same period, or 4 per cent of their total. Its satellite TV service, Shaw Direct, lost 6,600 customers. If Rogers’ and Shaw’s experience is typical, this would suggest nearly one in 20 Canadian households ditched cable TV over the past year.

Both companies managed to offset some of the loss with gains in internet subscribers. Rogers gained 51,000 new internet subscribers, while Shaw saw 71,000 more “standalone” internet customers, meaning internet but no cable.

The new earnings reports illustrate the impact of the cord-cutting phenomenon. The CRTC, Canada’s telecom watchdog, said earlier this year that 2013 marked the first time total cable subscriptions in Canada declined.

Broadband Internet is the inevitable choice for Canadians, as they are getting their video entertainment elsewhere, instead of from traditional television providers. As these kind of “over the top” services become more and more available, Canadians are going to be spending more on their Internet, as artificial bandwidth caps have been introduced by all the major telecom players as compensation for lost business.

Worldline is benefiting from this trend as more and more Canadians are discovering that they can have unlimited high speed Internet at a lower cost than even the base plans from the big three.

For more, please call Worldline at 1-855-299-0025 or visit our website.

Who wouldn’t want to work for this woman?

If you know anything about Worldline, you know that we are heavily in to our culture. We know that having a happy, engaged workforce, and having a fun place to work leads to more productivity and more importantly, better customer service.

A company mandate, we work on improving our culture the same way we work on improving our operations, our solidifying our finances, or strengthen our network; it’s a key to our ongoing success.

Our president, John Stix, is the chief advocate for our internal I’m in! “cultural revolution” but his partner in crime is Amanda Little, who was our Head of Human Resources and is now our Head of Human Culture.

Amanda is perfect as she brings a ton of enthusiasm and a sense of fun to the role, along with her years of HR experience. Now she’s looking to add to her team:

ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT
Human Culture

Your invitation

At Fibernetics, our purpose is to deliver happiness and connections every day by being awesome.  This is the company’s calling and if you believe this could be your calling too, we want to hear from you!

We are inviting an awesome administrative assistant to join our human culture team to contribute to delivering happiness and connections every day.  The unique tasks that you will take pride in accomplishing are listed below.

 Ways you Contribute

• You will learn what it is like to work inside of a growing company and the best ways to support the people who work at Fibernetics
• You assist the human culture department by handling all administrative tasks
• You will learn the various systems and programs in place at Fibernetics
• You like to plan events and engage staff to participate and attend
• You will be responsible for tracking time and attendance for employees at Fibernetics into the HRIS system
• You will sit on the Health and Safety committee and participate in monthly meetings and inspections
• You will create and maintain the new hire documents for Fibernetics employees
• You will help keep personnel files organized and complete
• You will sort and organize incoming resumes, and complete prescreening interviews before booking face to face interviews for hiring managers
• You will also be willing to help with many other areas within human culture as assigned

What Makes You Awesome

• You have excellent communication skills and enjoy working with people
• You either have or are working to earning your Bachelors Degree in a related field
• Your goal is to gain work experience towards obtaining your CHRP
• You have a great attention to detail and high accuracy with data entry
• You like to organize, anything
• You believe in Fibernetics’ purpose and values

Write to careers@fibernetics.ca to let us know how you can contribute, what makes you awesome and why you want to be “in”.  We look forward to hearing from you!

With last week’s announcement from both HBO and CBS that they are going to offer their content online for a monthly subscription, the Television and cable industry are about to change in the U.S. And, according to this report, Canada will not be far behind.

HBO is Coming

(From the AP) Canadians who want to view specialty channels and watch their favourite shows must go through their cable providers, like Bell and Rogers.

But some industry experts say that may change. They suggest that Canadians will inevitably have access to American content streamed online when online streaming becomes the norm and more and more people abandon their cable providers.

It’s already happening south of the border. Last week, HBO announced that it will allow Americans to stream its programming online next year without having to subscribe to the cable channel.

While HBO won’t be streaming its service into Canada, at least not yet, the experts say the pressure from the public and from some content providers to allow more streamed foreign content is bound to grow. And that could mean that Bell and Rogers may eventually be relegated to essentially providing the “pipe” —  or the actual cables, connecting to households that facilitate internet or wireless service.

“[Rogers] controls the pipe as does Bell. They will come to the realization, that’s their model, forget about content, and all this other nonsense, they don’t really have anything of propriety there to offer,” said Fred Lazar, an economics professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business. “Focus on the pipe, control that, and essentially increase the rates charged there as people start migrating.”

“What [Bell and Rogers are] going to do is try and slow the migration as much as possible and try and better position themselves through different types of pricing to take advantage of the inevitable migration [from cable to online],” he said.

In a sense, cable companies were the Netflix of their time, Lazar said, mostly providing cable subscribers programming (much of it American) that had been created by others, while also supplying a healthy dose of Canadian content.

But then the internet came along, providing a more direct distribution forum for content that allowed customers to pick and choose what they wished to view. Companies like Netflix, which provided quick online streaming access to films and TV shows and catered to binge viewers, roared to success, putting the future of cable in jeopardy.

Read the Full article here