There seems to be no end to the lists that rank companies that are supposedly “best” for nearly any category of employee: overall “Best Companies to Work For” (Fortune magazine); for working mothers (Working Mother magazine); for older workers (AARP); for Hispanic women (Latina Style magazine); and by industry (Reed Residential Group’s best companies to work for in the residential construction industry).
Companies like lists, when they get coveted top spots. Potential employees like lists, because they provide a “hit list” of companies with rich benefits and workplace amenities. Current employees like lists, because they get bragging rights about working for enlightened companies.
But do lists mean anything? Can smart companies manipulate the process so they always come out on top?
Sponsors maintain that their lists are no-spin zones because they carefully design the process and closely guard their research and analysis secrets. Companies that place high on lists say that it’s hard to outfox a well-thought-out methodology — but they also admit that they try hard to get the ear of sponsors by telling heartwarming tales of employee happiness and fulfilled ambition.
A high-profile list benefits its sponsors as much as the companies that appear on it. Sponsors get to wield their authority on a particular topic by the way they construct the list.
“They’re like the Dow Jones industrial average,” said Mark Weiner, CEO of Delahaye Medialink, a firm that measures corporate reputations. “People don’t know the components or weighting, but if it’s up, you’re happy. It goes to the credibility of the media, that people assume that the lists are credible.”
Bob Sobiech, director of human resources for the Midwest Cluster for Deloitte & Touche, says that the implied “stamp of approval” can’t be underrated. “When you have a third party that looks at what you do and says, `Yeah, this stands up to scrutiny,’ that’s so much more powerful than us saying, `We’re good,'” he said.
Deloitte has appeared on a number of “best companies” lists; in mid-May, it ranked7th on the Diversity Inc. list of the “Top 50 Companies for Diversity.”
There’s no consensus on methodology for creating these lists. Each sponsor chooses its own criteria for screening and ranking applicants. Most combine some sort of statistical analysis–for instance, the percentage of Hispanic women in management–with “softer” information, such as diversity outreach efforts, work/life benefits and information about the company culture.
The Great Place to Work Institute, based in San Francisco, creates several of the lists, including Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” compilation. Besides 75 statistical questions, the application requires companies to let the institute randomly survey at least 250 employees for their opinions about the quality of work life at their employers.
Starting with the Working Mother “Best Companies for Working Mothers” nearly 20 years ago, the institute’s methods set the standard for the cottage industry of list creators. Companies are told not to coach employees about how to answer the questions, says Milt Moskowitz, a co-founder of the institute, but some do anyway.
One Chicago-area company that regularly scores high in “best” rankings encourages its employees to remember situations in which the company’s policies or culture helped them through a rough spot, so that the anecdotes are easy to recall when it’s time to fill out “best of” forms.
Still, it’s hard to fudge the raw numbers. Most applications request the same kind of data that companies are required to report to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the percentage of men, women and minorities at various levels throughout the company. Most of that data from publicly held companies is easily verified through filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“A company that thinks it can misrepresent itself through the application process is misguided,” said Deborah Russell, manager of economic security and work for the Washington-based AARP, formerly know as the American Association of Retired Persons. “We have a very rigorous process that we go through after the applications are submitted. A group of outside judges looks at the companies. The writers for the magazine talk with employees as they write the articles.”
Independent research organizations such as the Great Place to Work Institute keep themselves at arm’s length from the sponsoring organization, which can protect the confidentiality of the applicant companies and encourage them to reveal more information. Most magazines hire professional fact-checkers to verify the information in all stories and pay special attention to data-rich projects like lists.
Companies that get savvy to the process can improve their chances by telling their stories more adeptly. The uninitiated tend to simply fill out the form and send it in. Seasoned list-climbers know that the more detail they provide about what good care the company takes of its workers, the more attention it’s likely to get.
Laura McLeod, work/life officer for LaSalle Bank, says personal anecdotes always tell more about a company than dry numbers.
“It puts some faces to the policies: Here’s how this policy made a difference in someone’s career, or this junior person just received a promotion,” she said. “Every spot that we could elaborate on the AARP form, we really jumped in to let them know what we are about as an organization.”
The effort paid off: LaSalle made the 2002 edition of the AARP list.
