What makes a company worth working for? What makes an employee want to stay on? It’s been proven that having a great company culture can help reduce employee turnover rates, and increase employee retention, satisfaction, and productivity. Looking at Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, an exhaustive list of businesses with the highest rates of employee satisfaction, it is clear that there is no cure-all or single solution to creating a productive, happy environment for your employees.
To no one’s surprise, Google has the highest employee satisfaction rate, but following close behind it is a grocery chain, Wegmans Food Markets. What do these workplaces have in common? At first blush, not much. Google boasts onsite childcare, fitness centers, nap pods, and a delectable offerings of specialty snacks and artisan coffees. Wegmans, by comparison, has a much more traditionally structured setup. Despite lacking avant-garde office spaces and high-tech perks, however, it only ranks three places below the be all and end all of cool corporations (seriously, those offices and rec spaces are something else).
Consideration, as it turns out, is what really makes the difference. It may seem self-explanatory, but treating employees as more than cogs in a machine does wonders for their satisfaction and happiness. The top businesses on the Fortune 100 know how to make their employees feel valuable, offering flexible schedules, ample paid vacation time, and plenty of sick days. Wegmans “promotes employee wellness with immunizations, yoga sessions, cooking classes…” and Google has begun “offering virtual doctor visits, second-opinion services, and breast-cancer screenings at headquarters.” This care for employees also extends into the realm of non-discrimination and fostering diverse workplaces. Each of the 100 companies offers same-sex benefits; although some of them still have overwhelmingly male workforces, this is certainly a step in the right direction.
No matter how radical the decor and tasty the trimmings, simple regard for health and wellness can make a bigger difference in a company than fancy coffees.
That said, both sound pretty good to me. There is a reason, after all, Google has topped the list seven times.
