Hits & Misses: Glassdoor’s 100 Best Places To Work 2023
The surprising takeaways from this year’s list.
Glassdoor, an online platform that provides information about job opportunities, company culture, salary, benefits, and interview questions for various companies around the world — has just released its annual “100 Best Places To Work.”
It’s a tally of employees’ ratings of their own companies — often sharing the different Pros and Cons of working inside the organization. This method is far from perfect and Glassdoor has no dogmatic claim for its results, but it does give a decent picture of what it’s like to work in a company.
Gainsight, a California software company, tops this year’s winners with a high review of 4.7 (out of a possible 5). Box, Bain & Company, McKinsey & Company, and NVIDIA round up the top five spots.
The roll of 100 is a mishmash of companies of different sizes and from different industries. We have organizations like Netflix, In-N-Out Burger, Lego, LinkedIn, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This takes us to the first of our takeaways from this list:
#1 There’s no such thing as an inherently “bad” industry.
The mixed group of industries we have in the list shows that practically anywhere you work has the possibility of becoming a great place to be.
No industry is inherently bad. It’s not the industry itself that’s the problem, it’s how it’s being run and controlled.
We have airlines (Delta and SouthWest), hospitals (St. Jude Children’s), real estate (Coldwell Banker) car wash (Crew Carwash) companies on the list.
(Of course, depending on your role and rank in the company you might have a very different insight from those who wrote in their reviews.)
#2 Even a tech company can be human.
We will notice that there are many tech or software companies that made this list.
It can only mean one thing. Even a tech company knows that its best assets are the humans working on its different projects.
For example, Gainsight, this year’s top winner, has a “Human-First” philosophy — ensuring that its people are cared for and prioritized.
If you want to stand out as a tech company, or any company for that matter, you have to treat people as human beings — with needs, and families to go home to, and Saturday nights planned.
#3 Even a big company can feel warm and intimate.
With these companies, their people don’t even really say that the organization is professional or efficient, with a long, unbroken, history of excellence.
They say that when they get to the office, they know that they belong. They know that they can trust management. The whole place feels intimate, regardless of the number of employees or the billions on its balance sheets.
Colleagues know each other as persons, with their own strengths, weaknesses, ambitions, and goals — not as lifeless cogs in a well-oiled machine.
#4 The Smiles Have Stories.
As instructive as the companies included in the list, we can’t also help but notice those that didn’t make it.
And it’s the restaurants, hotels, resorts, and many in the hospitality industries.
It’s easy to assume that with the wide smiles and quality of service, we get as customers, employees would also love working there. Well, this is not necessarily the case.
Difficult companies can churn out high-quality products, and provide world-class service, to the applause of their clients. But their employees might have a less than world-class experience.
Just something to remember, as you sip your welcome drink…
Congratulations to this year’s winners. This is by no means a perfect list. And it will always have biases baked into the methodology. The hope is that it spurs other companies and organizations to become great places to work by prioritizing the well-being of their employees, offering fair compensation and benefits, and promoting work-life balance.
So that in the long run, all of us win.
