A leading platform for monitoring workplace culture and corporate brand reputation has revealed that Microsoft’s employees rate the company’s culture higher than any other company’s workers.
Hubspot and RingCentral were also among the top 10 companies ranked by their own employees’ feedback, praised for their “vision” and for “never lead(ing) with results” respectively.
The mass shift to hybrid, flexible and remote working arrangements over the last two years has ushered in a new era of company-cultural norms, and tech companies are evidently among the most willing to embrace that change and accommodate employees’ needs.
Microsoft: The Best Place to Work
The report, carried out by Comparably, derived company ratings from the anonymous feedback of current employees at over 70,000 businesses, over the past year.
Comparably claim that nearly “20 different workplace culture categories” were measured, including but not limited to “compensation, leadership, and work-life balance to professional development opportunities, and perks and benefits.”
“Satya Nadella is really inspiring. He has a good vision and the global strategy is excellent. In these complicated times, it’s reassuring to be in such a strong company with a strong leadership team” – Microsoft employee, quoted by Comparably.
Overall, employees at Microsoft rated their company’s culture higher than any other company with more than 500 employees. Google, often touted as a trendsetter for contemporary corporate culture, finished in third place.
Other notable companies that made it into the top 10 include fellow computer-manufacturers IBM (2), software company Hubspot (4), ed-tech business Chegg, (6), and cloud-based comms platform RingCentral (8). CNBC reports that this is in part due to their willingness to offer flexible working options.
What Makes a Company a Joy to Work for?
Leading global authority on workplace culture Great Place to Work identifies 6 key elements that combine to make a good company culture: community, fairness, trustworthy management, innovation, and trust.
Community is important, Great Place to Work says, because it’s vital for team and company cohesion. Feeling like you’re coming together with everyone else and contributing to something greater than the sum of all your parts can have a powerful, unifying impact that forms the foundation of positive company culture.
Community, fairness, trustworthy management, innovation, and trust are needed to build a great company culture.
Unsurprisingly, fairness and trust are both crucial – employees feeling like they’re on unequal footing, or getting fewer opportunities than they deserve, will breed widespread dissatisfaction.
Trust is equally as important – and nothing says you trust your employees like taking their mental health into consideration, giving them the freedom to book time off work when they like, and not clock-watching.
How Can You Improve Your Company’s Culture?
There are loads of ways to improve your company’s culture – but before you commit to any actionable changes, it’s important to define your company’s values, why they’re important and how they’ll make employees feel.
RingCentral doesn’t have a better company culture than, say, other telephone system providers just by chance – they’ve worked hard, over many years, at developing a value-laden belief system that dictates how their businesses run. Hubspot is the same in its industry.
A positive environment for employees can be fostered via lots of different means, even if you’re managing remote employees. Showing you trust your workers by giving them responsibility, for instance, can improve trust. Ensuring employees have the proper equipment shows you value what they do for your business.
The most important thing to remember is that, in almost all cases, granting workers responsibilities, autonomy, and freedom, as well as treating the workforce as a whole with dignity and respect, will pay dividends in the long run.
