What makes for a 'great place to work'?
ALSO: Do corporate values do more harm than good?
What makes for a great place to work? This week I got the chance to pick the brains of Daniel Zhao, Chief Economist of Glassdoor, as they published their new rankings of Best Places to Work report for 2026.
Gone is the era of tech firms being the best places to work, this year the chart was full of a wide range of organisations and sectors. The top three US firms included a car wash chain and a burger restaurant.
So what made for the firms who did well?
Culture explains a lot of it. We tend to join a job for salary, and quit because of the culture. Good culture makes us stick around and feel loyal. We’re 7 times more likely to quit a job for culture than for money.
But there's more than that. The best jobs give us career progression, they gift us a sense of autonomy, critically (listen up tech firms) flexibility is a big part of what we're looking for.
I was really impressed when reading the reviews of firms who performed well is that they weren’t perfect. There were plenty of relatable criticisms of organisations along the way.
Listen to the discussion below or on the website
Glassdoor: Top US places to work, Top UK places to work
Do corporate values do more harm than good?
On the subject of good companies, this week management icon Margaret Heffernan wrote a long and satisfying post railing against corporate purpose. She pulled apart the idea of purpose statements. Using the scandal ridden history of Johnson & Johnson as her jumping off point she reflects on the distraction of purpose/mission/values. It’s savage stuff:
Purpose has become a smokescreen, a disguise. Pretending to, or encouraging a belief in, a higher value system beyond profit is a feint. Deceptive and mind-numbing at worst, decorative and distracting at best, it is a displacement activity which looks like conscience but cannot induce it. We will get nowhere until business can forswear abstract nouns and learn to use language that is practical and tangible. We also have to call out the suspects that keep making repeat appearances at every crime scene: Scale, Competition, Speed and, yes, Purpose: the over-zealous belief in an organisation so devout that it blinds followers.
Last year Professor Benjamin Laker at Henley Business School and colleagues published research exploring the impact of values on culture. (Alternative archive version: these links don’t always work outside UK). They wanted to understand how leaders express and define culture, and how these communications were interpreted by their employees.
They found that culture was often seen as a communication strategy - expressed through an internal comms campaigns rolling out new values or articulating corporate purpose. But Laker and colleagues found that culture fails when it is treated like branding instead of behaviour.
If new values or training modules are rolled out employees look to see if these new symbollic gestures are matched by a shift in leadership behaviour. In fact 72% of formal culture change initiatives that they examined showed ‘no meaningful improvement in employee trust, engagement, or retention’, being perceived as cosmetic by employees. The opposite was also true, when senior leaders altered their behaviour - changing how they ran meetings, gave feedback, responded to challenges or made decisions trust scores increased by 26%, irrespective of whether there was a new culture campaign or not. They noted that one effective leader told them, “We didn’t announce a culture shift. We just started acting like it mattered.” Laker and colleagues observed that this meant that ‘before culture can be articulated, it needs to be embodied’.
This is especially true because employees are highly attuned to the actions that senior leaders are tolerating that contradict professed values. Their research found that 59% of employees felt that senior leadership actions were contradicted stated values at least weekly. When leadership are tolerating or conducting counter-cultural actions it undermines faith in the overtly communicated culture. Employees notice.
The research found that 69% of employees withheld concerns or feedback from senior leaders. Some said they’d spoken up in the past and it had done no good, others mirrored the concerns of Amy Edmondson, they were worried that speaking up would lead to them being considered disloyal or difficult.
Laker suggests that leaders need to demonstrate that leaders were fine with feeling questioned or challenged. He suggests that a company meeting should involve a frontline employee making an uncomfortable observation about culture, chosen in advance by their peers. He says leaders need to take it in without defending it. ‘Just listen, acknowledge, and take one visible step forward. The point isn’t the question - it’s what you prove by how you answer.’
How different would your ‘problem person’ be if you centred your attention on them?
Last year my biggest podcast was a conversation with Zach Mercurio, Ph.D. about Mattering, the feeling that we are significant to others.
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This clip from Teachers Talk Radio shows the impact of this mattering in schools.
Teachers were asked to take their most challenging child in their class and to give them 2 minutes’ attention every day for 10 days. For ten days the teacher was asked to engage with that child for 2 minutes. This was engagement aside from working in class (to avoid the child being anxious about their work).
2 minutes pure engagement.
By the end of ten days the children’s behaviour had already changed. The kids when asked observed that the teachers ‘seemed to give a s**t’ about them.
The research into this goes back to the 1980s but has seen a resurgence since 2014.
An education blogger, Angela Watson, styled it as the ‘2x10 Strategy’, a ‘miraculous solution’ saying it was a practical, low cost intervention for teachers. Watson said it was the first time she’d seen something she could call ‘miraculous’ in its impact.
Pure and simple this is what Zach was describing when he talked about mattering. Showing people that they are significant to us. In work it’s why teams think that leaders have favourites, because they seem to show a sense of mattering to some, but not all of us.
My challenge for you is, what would this look like with your problem person at work? Maybe the issue isn’t that they are bad, maybe the issue is they feel like they don’t matter to you. Read her original post
‘Assume positive intent’ - I worked in one culture where we were implored to assume good intentions behind the acts of other teams. It came from an interview with the one time CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, who said it was the sage advice of her father. ‘From my father, I learned to always assume positive intent,’ Nooyi said. ‘Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You’ll be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different.’
The adage urges us to avoid the curse of Attribution Error: where we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions (or worse, by their mistakes). If our colleague comes into a meeting late they’re a lazy loser, if we’re late it’s because the buses in this country are an actual disgrace. However, this article cautions us that assuming positive intent can give deniability to leaders who make others feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. (Star Tribune version) The broad truth is that extending the interpretation of positive intent to colleagues is helpful, but leaders should be held to a higher standard.
Leaders shouldn’t fall into the trap of reaching for the excuse ‘sorry you took it that way, I didn’t mean that’. Amy Edmondson suggested that psychological safety exists when team members can raise concerns without fear of consequence. But if junior staff know their concerns will be met with ‘I meant well,’ they quickly learn that raising issues is futile, the opposite of psychological safety. If positive intent is gifted to spiky management communication it can create bias-filled or passive aggressive cultures where junior employees are fearful of raising concern with management. For leaders they need to consider their impact over their intent. Sharing their intention can help contextualise the outcome, but shouldn’t give us a pass from considering the impact we have over others. Good read
Nice post by Professor Rob Briner about ‘growth mindset’ - if you’re a big fan of growth mindset and use it in coaching your team I won’t spoil this for you, run immediately to the link
Purpose functions as a shield because it is easier to draft a mission statement than it is to listen to an uncomfortable truth from a junior employee.
Margaret Heffernan’s piece on purpose was breathtaking. Sounds like this is her plan all year - I’m quite looking forward to her work. She’s so observant and fearless in her expression.