2011
Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Awards
Glassdoor has just released their Employees’ Choice Awards for the 2012 Best Places to Work.
The list contains 50 companies, of which the top 4 each have an average ranking of “Very Satisfied” from their employees:
- Bain & Company
- McKinsey & Company
- MITRE
Underscoring the importance of leadership, each of those companies also has a CEO with at least an 89% approval rating from employees. (McKinsey’s CEO earned a 100% approval ranking.)
Both companies that earned A or A- rankings on our Good Company Index (Disney and FedEx) also appear in Glassdoor’s Top 50.
2011
Yahoo! CEO leaves with 33% approval among employees
Once again, data on Glassdoor.com foretold a CEO’s unceremonious firing. Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz had only a 33% employee approval rating (even lower than many politicians!) when she was fired yesterday.
As its name suggests, Glassdoor lets you take a look inside, providing job hunters and investors some of the inside scoop on what it’s like to work at over 100,000 firms.
2011
Finding good (and not-so-good) employers
As we described previously, arriving at how to rate companies on the Good Company Index™ was, at times, a long slog. Often, we found ourselves confronting disappointing data quality – or even no data at all – in areas that we wanted to be able to including in the rankings.
Fortunately, however, these issues were not problems when constructing the good employer component of the ratings.
If you turn back the clock to ten (or even five) years ago, if we wanted to know who was a good (or not-so-good) employer, we would have turned first to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work for – which would have given us insight only on that small subset of companies that had chosen to devote the resources to providing all the information necessary to Fortune. And there were rankings of companies with the best training (a great, but narrow, measure) and no doubt an occasional article or two here and there that talked about a specific company, but that was about it – nothing comprehensive.
(We had some additional information on certain organizations from data requests we sent out related to our investment portfolios at Bassi Investments – but that wasn’t information that was useful publicly.)
Bottom line: until recently, there was no comprehensive data source for information on what it was like to work for most companies. Vault.com and a couple of others tried to create clearinghouses for that sort of information, but those efforts didn’t take off as broadly as we had hoped.
Fortunately, Glassdoor.com, founded in 2007, got it right. The company has data on tens of thousands of organizations – ratings and reviews directly from employees within those firms.
Transparency in this area had finally arrived – great news for job seekers, for the handful of investors who want to take such information into account, and for the growing number of consumers who want to spend their money with companies they respect.
And, of course, great news for us too. We tapped the Glassdoor rankings as the primary source of information on what companies are good employers (we supplemented it with information from the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work for).
At the time we compiled the numbers for the book, the companies in our rankings (publicly-traded companies in the 100 largest companies in the US) with the highest Glassdoor ratings were Procter & Gamble, Chevron, Goldman Sachs, and Apple. The lowest? RiteAid, Supervalu, and Hewlett-Packard.
Some of those are certainly not surprising while others are big surprises, especially based on long-standing reputation (Hewlett-Packard!)
The very existence of the Glassdoor employer rankings helps to illustrate the recent rise of what we call “technology-fueled people power,” which is changing the world by improving what we know about the companies in our lives.
2011
The Good Company Index: how we got there
One of the central elements of Good Company is our Good Company Index™, in which we rate companies on their behavior as employer, seller, and steward of the community and environment.
Thinking back, it’s possible we co-authors spent more time debating and constructing this rating system than we did on any other part of the book. (And believe me, we devoted a long time to some other parts too, so that’s really saying something!)
Most fundamentally, the Index rating reflects our views about what constitutes a good employer, a good seller, and a good steward. (After defining those characteristics, we were delighted to find that they also proved to be associated with stronger stock performance – a finding we’ll explore in more detail in future blog entries.)
Once we settled on those characteristics, we set out to find data that would tell us how good (or not-so-good) was the behavior of companies in each of those areas. We sought data that ideally had all of the following attributes:
- Closely reflected the characteristics we had defined
- Reliable and of high quality
- Available for a large number of companies
- Timely
- Publicly available
There were certainly some areas where we were delighted by the data options available. We’re big fans of the information available on Glassdoor.com, which publishes employee ratings of their employers.
That’s a core component of our “good employer” rankings. And the Newsweek Green Rankings, a key element in our “good steward” scores, are very impressive in their comprehensive ranking of the environmental footprint (and management of that footprint) among the 500 largest publicly-traded companies in the United States.
Reflecting the early stage of much of this work, however, it turns out there were significant obstacles in capturing information in many of the areas we wanted to rank.
In some areas, no data existed at all and we had to decide whether it was possible to create our own database, or whether it would simply be impossible to measure a given area. (After telling ourselves for months that surely a consolidated list of major government-imposed fines and penalties must exist, we finally yielded and ended up creating our own database, largely through manual company-by-company searches across multiple government websites.)
And not surprisingly, even many of the good data sources focus on large companies only. (In fact, this was such a significant factor in so many categories that we made the decision to limit our 2011 rankings to only the publicly-traded companies listed in the Fortune 100 – the largest 100 companies in the United States.)
In one area (customer rankings of companies that could be compared across industries), we became convinced that the best source of data was from a company called wRatings, which – unfortunately for our purposes – did not make its data publicly-available. Fortunately, however, their CEO Gary Williams kindly agreed to work with us to use their data to construct a “Good Seller” index, and allowed us to publish the results for the Fortune 100.
In the end, we’re pleased with the index we created. At the same time, however, we recognize it’s still just a first step. We fully expect it to become more robust (and available for a larger number of companies), in the years ahead.
Stay tuned – over the next few weeks, we’ll explore in more detail how we actually assigned scores to companies on their behaviors as employer, seller, and steward.