For probably a dozen years, I’ve attended the annual Great Place to Work Conference. It’s the biggest event of the year for the Great Place to Work Institute (GPTW), the organization behind Fortune’s various “best places to work” lists. The conference brings together HR, communications, and other professionals from companies of all sizes that have […]
Fortune
Not On Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For List? There’s Always Next Year!
Fortune’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list came out today. You’ll recognize a lot of the organizations on the list—they’re the Googles and the Whole Foods and the REIs—companies in the news year-round for their off-the-charts benefits, HR policies and worksite amenities. They’ve been on the list many times before, and will be on […]
What Makes a 100 Best Company? It Depends…
Tomorrow I’m off to the Great Place to Work (GPTW) conference in San Diego. GPTW is the company that administers Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” and “50 Best Small and Medium-Size Company” lists. And although I try to make it to this conference most years, this time I’m particularly curious about it, because […]
Are We Dying to Go to Work?
Work can be sickening. Literally. In a riveting appearance at the recent Great Place to Work annual conference, Stanford business school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer presented a devastating case for the negative effects of U.S. workplaces on our health. Pointing out that human sustainability ought to be at least as important a goal as environmental sustainability, […]
Top 10 Things I Learned in New Orleans
I’m just back from yet another conference—this one, the annual Great Place to Work (GPTW) conference in New Orleans. And I want to start by making clear that after four or five days in the Big Easy, I am now able to pronounce its name correctly (“New OR-lins”) at least 50 percent of the time. […]
The Goldilocks Rule
Subtlety has its place in writing, of course. Specifically, it has its place in literature, where it’s often agreed that the more interpretation possible, the better the work. But subtlety has no place in employee communications. And it certainly has no place in “great place to work” applications. At least, not in the actual part […]