EMPLOYEE BENEFITS
Best perks in the top 100 companies
American business magazine Fortune has just published its annual survey identifying the 100 companies that are "great places to work" in the USA.
Dallas-based Container Store, a small retailer that sells just about anything for organising the home, was this year’s winner, with Southwest Airlines the runner-up.
Benefits play an influential part in the ranking, but what distinguishes the very best companies is the kind of relationship the management has with employees. Above all "trust and respect" are critical to great workplaces.
As Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz, the co-authors of the report, observe, in the war for scarce talent companies are under pressure to offer the best benefits and the most congenial work environment: "In an ultra-tight labour market, companies primp to woo and retain talent."
How? "They offer perks and amenities like concierge services, unheard of until recently. They listen to employee input, adjust schedules to suit family obligations, provide training, and cut workers into stock-purchase, stock-option and stock-award programmes formerly reserved for the management elite."
Obviously, these enlightened businesses do much to nurture the financial side of their relationships with employees. As many as 36 of the 58 publicly-held companies on the list offer stock options to all employees. More than 1,000 employee at top 10 company Charles Schwab have over $1 million in their accounts from generous stock options.
What’s more, the Best 100 also offer a bewildering array of perks (see box below). Stuck for time with Christmas looming? Ernst & Young will arrange for your Christmas cards to be hand-addressed. According to Fortune, software maker SAS Institute is "the closest thing to a workers’ utopia in America". You name it: onsite childcare, health centre with physicians and dentists, massage therapist, wooded campus and profit sharing.
"But financial perks aren’t the big story here", say Levering and Moskowitz. The best are also trying to help employee balance their home and work lives:
89 of the top 100 offer a compressed workweek
72 give the option of job sharing
45 operate reduced summer hours for employees.
But will companies still walk your dog after an economic downturn? No, say Levering and Moskowitz. "But it’s unlikely that a slowdown would lead the Best 100 to revert to draconian workplace practices. In an increasing tough global business world, what differentiates top companies from their competitors is often the quality of their highly-skilled workers." Having a special relationship with your employee, it seems, is the key to success.
Ten unusual perks . . .
| Company | Perk |
| American Century | Every employee gets a $650 ergonomic chair. |
| Capital One | Vacation days are available on half-hour notice |
| CDW | When CDW became the world’s no.1 reseller of computers, everyone got a free three-day trip for two to anywhere in continental US. |
| Eli Lilly | All Eli Lilly drugs (including Prozac) are free. |
| Pfizer | All Pfizer drugs (including Viagra) are free. |
| Intel | Eight-week sabbatical is available after seven years. |
| MBNA | Employees get a limo on their wedding day, plus $500 and a week of paid vacation. |
| Microstrategy | All employees go on a one-week Caribbean cruise in January. |
| Qualcomm | If your kid plays on a sports team, Qualcomm will kick in $250 of support. |
| Rodale | You can have your own gardening plot on company land. |
Source: Fortune, 10 January 2000.
Take any aspect of private life, and it’s being subsumed into the workplace:
46 of the Best 100 offer take-home meals "to liberate people from having to cook dinner
26 offer a personal concierge service, compared with just 15 two years ago.
Survey details
Title: "The 100 best companies to work for", by Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz, Fortune, 10 January 2000.
Price: £3
Methodology: A third of the scoring is based on a lengthy questionnaire filled out by participant companies and corporate documentation. But two-thirds of the scoring is based on a 57-question employee attitude survey — the "Great place to work index trust". This year, 33,500 employees completed the questionnaire.
Survey sample: 236 companies competed for a slot this year.
Business sectors: the 100 best companies to work for come from 20 different fields and 30 states: 42 are information technology or financial services businesses.
Availability: call Time-Life International in London on tel: 0171 322 1037.
Want to know more? Jump to Fortune’s web site . . .www.fortune.com
For more details of the 100 Best . . . www.pathfinder.com/fortune/bestcompanies/intro.html