‘The TTC is a world of surprises every day’

For Matt Hopkins, the countdown to FIFA World Cup 2026 was measured not in week or months but years.

As executive director of people at the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), he has been busy helping prepare the organization for the much-anticipated competition.

“I think we’re in… as good shape as you can be for such a big event… we’ll see what happens, obviously, but it’s like the biggest event that the city’s had in a couple of decades.

The scale of the undertaking is difficult to overstate. Internally, the TTC has compared FIFA preparations to the last time Toronto experienced a global event of similar magnitude: the visit of Pope John Paul II more than two decades ago.

“We’ve had the Pan Am Games and Taylor Swift was here last year, we had the Blue Jays making the World Seres, but nothing like the level [of FIFA] in terms of international attention.”

FIFA prep includes drone tech

Across the TTC, preparations have touched nearly every part of the organization. Infrastructure work has accelerated to improve system reliability ahead of the tournament. Slow zones across the network have been dramatically reduced. New digital wayfinding signs have been installed to help visitors navigate the system.

The TTC is working with technology partners to provide better real-time service information, while dedicated transit hubs and special services are being developed to connect visitors to key destinations.

One of the more innovative initiatives involves the use of drone technology, says Hopkins.

"We're trying to leverage drone technology so that we can have drones fly over the site and relay real time information back to us about where there's crowding on the platform and stuff like that."

Employee activity during FIFA

For Hopkins, however, some of the most important preparations are people-focused.

"We're having a number of our non-union employees, like our office employees, get out in special TTC FIFA jerseys" to provide customer service and help direct passengers.

"There’s a certain kind of festive excitement… for people who don't usually get involved in operations," he says. “That's probably the biggest HR part was that program of getting people signed up, giving them the training, helping them know what to do and to de-escalate in a frontline situation.”

The initiative reflects a leadership philosophy that has shaped Hopkins' career: organizational success ultimately comes down to people.

"The way I think about HR is like, yeah, we're bringing a specialty to the table, but at the end of the day, I'm still trying to help passengers get to be safely, reliably, you know, and on time. Right. So that's still my job."

Today, Hopkins oversees human resources for nearly 18,000 employees and helps lead an HR function that supports one of Canada's most complex public sector workforces. Since becoming executive director in 2022, he has helped modernize HR systems and processes, led collective bargaining for thousands of employees, established the TTC's first Employee Experience team and co-led development of the organization's people and culture strategy.

Career start at Loblaws

Yet his interest in people and workplaces started in a much different setting, he says: "I was a Loblaws cashier for a while, and I did a bunch of different jobs at Loblaws."

Working there for roughly a decade through high school and university exposed Hopkins to a unionized workplace and raised questions that would ultimately define his career around employee attraction and retention.

"There seemed to be quite a lot few people who stuck it out here. So what are the factors that drive that?" he says

“Obviously, I have a bit more insight on this as a seasoned professional now [but I wondered] ‘What is it that makes people want to keep working at a place… where you make $10 an hour?’”

At the time, Hopkins was studying psychology at the University of Ottawa, so he was thinking about that front-line experience “from a psychology, leadership, motivation kind of lens,” he says

HR leadership at TTC

A chance opportunity to become a union steward deepened his interest, and he went on to pursue a master’s in industrial relations at Queen’s University.

That perspective still informs how he approaches leadership at the TTC today.

A significant portion of the TTC workforce is on the front line, interacting directly with the public every day. Hopkins believes his own retail experience has helped him better understand the pressures employees face.

"Seeing how customers treated my colleagues when I worked at the grocery store, I have a better appreciation for some of the [challenges]," he says. “I’m very appreciative of all the work that they do."

"I think one of my strengths, both as like a labour person, but as an HR leader, generally, is I'm very good at seeing things from the other side's perspective."

Debut in collective bargaining

Hopkins went to join the Ontario Public Service through the internship program. There, a chance meeting with a senior labour leader helped launch his career in collective bargaining.

The experience exposed him to negotiations, budgeting, public policy and the broader forces that shape employment relationships.

"I was very fortunate to get that perspective early on in my career… I always say it fast forwarded my career maybe four or five years,” says Hopkins.

Labour relations quickly became his professional foundation: "I love labour relations. That's my background. That's my base."

He credits those early years with teaching him how organizations really function and how competing priorities can be balanced.

"I very quickly got to be exposed to how the budget works, what the political impacts are on on government workers, but also on collective bargaining."

Joining TTC in 2015

When he moved to the TTC in 2015, however, Hopkins recognized he needed broader experience and he was ready for change.

"There was this perception of me at that time of… ‘You've never actually done boots-on-the-ground labour relations, you've only done collective bargaining.’"

Ready to do something different, the TTC made sense.

 “It’s a prominent employer in the City of Toronto with no shortage of exciting work in terms of labour relations and HR to learn and get involved with,” he says.

"Obviously, I've been here for almost 12 years, so it was a good decision."

Over time, Hopkins deliberately broadened his experience into talent management, recruitment, compensation, employee engagement, strategy and operations.

"What I figured out kind of halfway through my time at the TTC was I love labour relations. That's my background. That's my base. But another thing I'm really passionate about is helping the organization get to where it wants to be and making a change and having a role in that."

Embracing employee experience

That philosophy is evident in one of his biggest current priorities: employee experience. After nearly a decade without a formal employee engagement survey, the TTC launched a new effort to better understand employees.

“There's a lot of pressure and a lot of need for us to prioritize showing action and developing out something tangible that shows people that we took their feedback seriously with a view to possibly following up again next year. So, that's a big priority,” he says.

"We just want to build the employee engagement, employee experience, work into the fabric of the organization a little bit more."

And leadership plays an important role, says Hopkins, so it’s about having them better understand the impact of their decisions on employees.

“People don't always quit their jobs over pay. It could be just because of leadership or because of development opportunities… there's a lot of different pieces where we want to ingrain active thinking about employee experience in the culture.”

Just as the TTC closely tracks service reliability, customer satisfaction and operational performance, he believes organizations need to better understand the needs and expectations of employees.

"I've kind of been trying to explain to people ‘You need to treat our employees like customers,’” says Hopkins.

Too often, he argues, organizations overlook the cumulative impact of small frustrations: "Maybe that won't drive them out as quickly, but it's death by 1,000 paper cuts too."

The philosophy extends to workplace policies and processes, he says.

"When we think about policy, my expectation is that we're looking at the policies both from a legislative compliance framework ... but also like ‘What are the policies or procedures that we have that stop people from doing their jobs right?’"

Focusing on data, AI

Another major focus is helping HR become more data-driven. It’s about looking at "How do we become more analytically focused so that we can explain intangible ways in terms of value, ROI, cost efficiencies, what the value of our work is?" he says.

There are costs to retention, hiring, turnover or absenteeism, says Hopkins, so it’s about quantifying those issues and upskilling to be analytically focused.

“Also, to communicate with our business partners within the organization, speaking in terms of their language of the business, bringing some metrics and dollars to those things,” he says, adding that a focus on performance management is a big part of that.

That thinking is driving some of the TTC's experimentation with artificial intelligence. One project Hopkins is particularly excited about focuses on absenteeism management. Historically, analyzing attendance patterns required significant manual effort, with staff reviewing reports and searching for trends by hand.

"What we're currently working on is like, first of all, just a simple prompts kind of system where you say, ‘Tell me about this person's absenteeism,’" he says. "We're hoping to evolve it eventually to be more helpful… so where you can say, ‘Hey, the May long weekend passed, how many people took the Friday off? And of those people, how many people have done it for three straight years?"

Sick leave is for when people are sick, says Hopkins, but it’s about honing in on those people who may be taking advantage of the system: “Absenteeism costs of millions of dollars a year, so it’s a worthy endeavour.”

Overall, there is never a shortage of opportunities and questions to be asked, according to Hopkins.

"I think the TTC is a world of surprises every day,” he says. “That’s part of what I love about it. Even though it can also be frustrating.”