PR agency headed by ex-resident wins award

Perseverance pays—and so does being a great employer.
Mia (Pearson) Wedgbury could attest to both. The former Fort Frances native, the daughter of Mary Jane and Ross Pearson, is president and co-founder of “High Road Communications”—Canada’s largest technology-specific public relations agency.
And last week, her Toronto-based firm garnered second place as the best small- and medium-sized company to work for in Canada, according to a 2005 survey conducted by the Queen’s University School of Business and Queen’s Centre for Business Venturing.
First place was garnered by “SportsDirect,” an online sports media company based in Halifax.
The Queen’s survey is part of the university’s annual “Best Employers in Canada” ranking, compiled in association with Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm, and media partner the Globe and Mail.
Based on employee opinions, work environment, and human resources/management practices, the survey was open to participation from companies with Canadian-based permanent employees.
High Road Communications, which boasts an employee turnover of only four percent, placed in top spot for career opportunities, motivated employees, and senior management leadership.
“As a company, we put together a vision for ourselves each year and [in 2005] it was to make High Road ‘The Best Place to Work,’” Wedgbury said during a brief telephone interview from Toronto yesterday.
“We made that our mission and then applied to [be a part of the survey],” she noted. “We were notified three weeks ago that we were going to be in the top 20, but it wasn’t until we saw the Globe and Mail last week that we knew [we had placed second overall].
“We had many [‘Best Place to Work’] initiatives but the one that I was perhaps most passionate about was that every month, each employee was encouraged to submit an idea about a new technology that could make the company run better [and] every month we’d have five, six sometimes 10 submissions,” Wedgbury remarked.
“We put the ideas into practice and by the end of the year, we had 12 new [innovations] in place and the best part is that it was an employee-driven, bottom-up [approach].
“But that [concept] is so entrenched in our company culture here,” she stressed. “From the beginning, I wanted to create a very different type of firm where people wanted to work and wanted to stay.”
Wedgbury co-founded High Road Communications in Toronto and Ottawa in 1996. The company, which employs 70 people, has since expanded to include offices in Montreal and Vancouver.
The public relations firm, and other winners of the Queen’s University survey, will be showcased in the “Report on Business” section of the Globe and Mail on April 27.