Scores for our 2011 Good Company Retail Index were calculated for 52 large US retailers in November 2011. The scores are based on each company’s combined performance on three separate measures that reflect the three elements of being a Good Company (good employer, good seller, good steward):
- Glassdoor.com rankings (employees’ assessments of their companies as employers)
- wRatings scores (customers’ opinions of companies on quality, fair price, and trust)
- 2011 Newsweek Green Rankings (assess companies’ environmental footprint, management of that footprint, and transparency)
These three measures represent an important subset of the more complete range of metrics used to calculate overall Good Company Index grades for the publicly-traded Fortune 100 companies, as reported in the book.
Methodology: For each of the three metrics listed above, the 52 companies were ranked and then broken into “octiles” (each octile represents one-eighth of the full group). For each measure, companies in the top octile were awarded 8 points, second from the top 7 points, etc., down to 1 point for companies in the lowest octile.
We then summed the octile points and calculated the percentage each company earned of the maximum 24 possible points (8 points for each of 3 metrics), adjusted to a scale from 0 to 100 (where, for example, scoring in the bottom octile in all 3 metrics would yield a percentage score of 0, and scoring in the highest octile in all 3 would yield a score of 100).