This is the story of a journalist who was fed up with bad places to work, turned his frustration into a mission – and went from worst to best.
Robert Levering was was sick with the way some companies treat their employees. So he came up with an idea: write a book about the “100 worst companies to work for”. Understandably, getting someone to finance it proved difficult, until someone asked him why he didn’t turn it around.
100 worst became 100 best
Much had already been written about what makes companies great (by Jim Collins for example), but never from an employee’s point of view. So, together with Milton Moskowitz, Robert toured the U.S. in search of the magic ingredients. Up till then, secondary perks such as health insurance, free lunch, etc. were considered the mainstay of employee satisfaction. But their travels taught them otherwise.
Trust, pride and camaraderie
Levering and Moskowitz discovered three essential elements in the making of a great workplace.
- Trust: a set of values that actually live in the company; the desire to trust managers and leaders; to be treated respectfully and fairly; to be involved and listened to.
- Pride: in your own work, in that of your team, and of your company as a whole.
- Vamaraderie: social cohesion through mutual support and celebrating successes (and failures) together.
Perks played their part of course, but only as a consequense of these three elements.
The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America
Their book was first published in 1984 and quickly turned into a nationwide bestseller. In the early ’90s, Levering and Fortune Magazine started publishing a yearly review. This marked the start of the Great Place to Work Institute (GPtW), which today works in 46 countries.
On a mission
Great Place to Work wants to help companies become, ehm, a Great Place to Work. Why? Because every company can be one. It doesn’t really see itself as a consulting firm and only works with companies with a clear desire to measure and improve their performance as employers.
GPtW uses a standard survey method to measure employee satisfaction. It also asks management to elaborate on its workplace policy. Best practice examples, together with survey results, are the tools for companies to then maintain or improve the situation - themselves.
GPtW lists have a clear set of criteria. Companies only make the cut if they score a minimum of 7.5-8 out of 10. And company policy should clearly demonstrate its continuous renewal and power to inspire. Some companies choose to keep results confidential; others, like Microsoft the Netherlands, go as far as to devote a publicly accessible website to the issue.
So what’s work at GPtW like?
I asked Jos Plompen, former director of Great Place to Work Netherlands, how GPtW manages to keep camaraderie alive in a globally scattered team. He told me all people are bound by one ideology, and they come together regularly to share their own best practices. And with 500 people, GPtW isn’t too big to know your fellow team members.
And of course, you can check out their own workplace here.
Pictures: Grafiti Artist by Howard.Hall - under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, and Christiana Care celebrating Great Place to Work week by ChristianaCare – under a Creative Commons Attibution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.