The search floored him.
“When I looked at the list of winners and cross-checked to see if our firm (did work on) those winners, the answer was no,” he said.
“What they all seem to do really well is communicate exceptionally well with their employees, so that there is an atmosphere of collaboration. There is not a huge divide between senior management and your rank-and-file employees.”
For five years now, the Employees’ Choice Awards has honoured the best of Ottawa companies – from the mouths of the workers themselves.
Firms needed to meet four qualifications: be based in Ottawa, have at least 30 employees, have fewer than three ECA wins in past competitions and have no affiliation with ECA committee members.
Out of 49 companies that participated, 29 were named finalists and 10 won the award. Winners this year hail from industries ranging from technology to medicine to real estate.
“The first couple of years it was really almost exclusively technology companies, so what we’ve seen broadly is a widening acceptance in the marketplace from different industries,” said TalentMap’s Sean Fitzgerald.
“That area of understanding and engaging your workforce started in tech because tech people were hard to find, and hard to keep due to their transferable skills, and I think it's migrating across the whole workforce.”
This year’s ECA judging panel was comprised of Tom Bursey, Council of Canadian Academies; Brenda Clark, Canadian Health Services Research Foundation; Donna Hansen, HRPA Ottawa president; Carole Morris, Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions; and Michael Curran, Ottawa Business Journal.
The following pages profile the recipients of the 2010-11 Employees' Choice Awards:
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