Media Profile is a special place to work. When Patrick Gossage founded it in 1985, he had a clear idea of what a firm should be: professionally excellent and a place where people actually wanted to come to work every day.
If you visit us after all this is over, you’ll be able to hear how that vision is still alive today: the walls of our open-concept space often resound with laughter and the chatter from “drive-bys” (spur-of-the-moment brainstorms or gut checks). There’s magic in this, and it deepens how committed everyone is to our clients’ success. We often talk about our entrepreneurial spirit. But it’s truly remarkable when you see our teams (and sometimes the whole office) rally around one another to do amazing work. In life, you sometimes need a bit of that magic glue to bring everything together and make 2+2=5. We seem to have a lot of it.
Everyone profits when the company does well. We’re Canada’s largest independent PR firm, and Patrick made profit-sharing part of the business from the start. While that might explain some of our level of accountability and commitment, it’s certainly not the only reason.
We thrive because we really do enjoy coming to work every day. The affection and respect we share is apparent to anyone who experiences it. That laughter I mentioned is just icing on the cake.
Of course, going virtual four months ago was a shock. Change is hard, especially when so many of us thrive on the energy of our colleagues. But we adapt.
So how did we keep our culture strong when “open concept” suddenly stretched across the GTA (and beyond)? The way PR pros know best: connecting.
Emails became less common as we moved to Microsoft Teams, and impromptu video calls have replaced the drive-bys. Group conversations on client projects are as vibrant as ever in our chat feeds, and no one hesitates to click that call button. We increased the frequency of our all-hands meetings from monthly to weekly address questions around these changes, before we fell into a good rhythm and they moved to bi-weekly. Our social committee became a socially distant committee, organizing events from streaming movie nights to virtual cocktail hours and pizza-making competitions.
The passion I felt in the office every day has extended into our current, somewhat more domestic, reality. Even one of our newest people, who was only in the office for a little over a month before we headed home, has clicked into the culture without missing a beat.
I look forward to the day when screens don’t separate us. Unlike people who carved out careers working from home, I work at an office like MP because I love it.
See you all soon.
