Yesterday I wrote something on how Glassdoor data isn’t that valuable (it’s not), and a few people hit me up. Somewhat oddly, 2-3 of them said “Write something about ‘Best Places To Work’ lists.” So, here goes nothing.
I actually used to be somewhat fascinated by the methodology of these lists, even writing this post in 2014 breaking it down. Over time, I got more work within the HR/marketing worlds and I saw how these lists tend to get formulated, and I lost virtually all respect for them. Along the way, I became Internet friends with a guy named Anil Saxena, who worked with “Great Places To Work” for a minute, and we even did a podcast together. He exposed how some of it is all a joke.
This CBS News article also does a good job illustrating some of the problems with “Best Places To Work” lists, including this paragraph:
First, most magazine lists are “opt-in.” To be eligible for a list, you have to fill out whatever paperwork the tabulators require (Fortune’s list, produced in conjunction with the Great Places to Work Institute, involves employee surveys and some open ended questions). This means that not only do you have to be a great place to work, you have to be a company where management cares about being listed in magazines as a great place to work. Only 311 organizations bothered this year, out of thousands of employers in the US. So if you went through the whole process, your odds were pretty good. But that doesn’t means that the 311 employers that did try are better than the thousands that didn’t.
Yep.
If I had to list out some of the biggest problems with “Best/Great Places To Work” lists, here’s where I’d net out, probably:
- They are usually pay-to-play.
- They are opt-in, meaning thousands of companies without executives who care about this stuff aren’t applying.
- The efforts are coordinated by the marketing department, as opposed to departments that deal more with people, or the execs themselves. Now, I realize HR submitting it would be kind of a joke, and the execs would laugh at the assertion they do any award-submitting work, but … an award submitted by a marketing or PR team is probably not a true reflection of the culture.
- Speaking of “culture,” most of these surveys/lists are based on benchmarks around pay and benefits, which are important as hell, but they don’t speak at all to the “culture” of a place. If the pay sucks, the culture tends to suck; that is true. But “culture” is about if teammates have your back, more than most things. That won’t be captured here.
- Some of the lists, like Fortune, say you have to be a company for 7+ years and have 1,000+ employees. There are some great companies — many! — that won’t meet those baselines.
- A lot of this whole deal is the host (i.e. a magazine) trying to collect data on companies to use in other resources and articles, more than anything else.
Honestly, if the only thing a company has on their website / careers page about “culture” is a bunch of these awards, I would run screaming for the hills. We’ve been talking about “employer branding” for a decade or more now, and still companies don’t seem to get it right. They treat it as gaming a campaign or winning some cheesy pay-to-play awards, instead of training managers, paying people fairly, and removing obstacles to doing good work. Those three things would make a place actually good to work at.
Oh, and as for the factors that truly make a good workplace, try this.
