Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MICHAEL BURCHELL, Ed.D., is a corporate vice president with the Great Place to Work^® Institute and a partner in the Institute’s UAE affiliate. A sought-after speaker at conferences around the world, he has worked with senior leaders in positioning the workplace as a competitive business advantage.

JENNIFER ROBIN, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Great Place to Work^® Institute. A former consultant with the Institute, she currently teaches in undergraduate, master’s, and professional programs at Bradley University.

The Great Place to Work^® Institute is a global research and consulting firm with forty affiliates around the world. The Institute produces the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For^® Annual List and the Best Small & Medium Companies to Work For in America lists, in addition to thirty-eight best companies lists internationally.

To learn more about the book, please visit www.thegreatworkplaceonline.com and www.greatplacetowork.com

Von der hinteren Coverseite

What Separates a GREAT COMPANY from a Merely Good One?

The Great Place to Work^® Institute produces the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For^® Annual List, which, year after year, features some of the most respected companies in the world―SAS, Starbucks, Cisco, Mattel, General Mills, American Express, and Four Seasons Hotel, to name a few.

In this highly-anticipated book, Institute insiders Jennifer Robin and Michael Burchell explore the concept of a great workplace and answer the fundamental question, “What is the business value of creating a great workplace?” The Great Workplace shows that, more than offering great pay and quirky perks, a great workplace is one where employees trust the people they work for, take pride in what they do, and enjoy the people they work with.

Drawing on decades of research, the authors explain how leaders and managers can create and reinforce the core values of trust, pride, and camaraderie with every communication, every decision, and every interaction. And they bring the definition of a great work-place alive with anecdotes, best practices, and quotes from employees working at some of the best workplaces, such as Google, Microsoft, Marriott International, FedEx, NetApp, Deloitte, and more.

If your company is struggling with the challenges of leveraging human capital, discover why some organizations have what it takes to be great―and what your company can learn from them.

Aus dem Klappentext

What Separates a Great Company from a Merely Good One?

The Great Place to Work Institute produces the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For Annual List, which, year after year, features some of the most respected companies in the world SAS, Starbucks, Cisco, Mattel, General Mills, American Express, and Four Seasons Hotel, to name a few.

In this highly-anticipated book, Institute insiders Jennifer Robin and Michael Burchell explore the concept of a great workplace and answer the fundamental question, "What is the business value of creating a great workplace?" The Great Workplace shows that, more than offering great pay and quirky perks, a great workplace is one where employees trust the people they work for, take pride in what they do, and enjoy the people they work with.

Drawing on decades of research, the authors explain how leaders and managers can create and reinforce the core values of trust, pride, and camaraderie with every communication, every decision, and every interaction. And they bring the definition of a great workplace alive with anecdotes, best practices, and quotes from employees working at some of the best workplaces, such as Google, Microsoft, Marriott International, FedEx, NetApp, Deloitte, and more.

If your company is struggling with the challenges of leveraging human capital, discover why some organizations have what it takes to be great and what your company can learn from them.

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The Great Workplace

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Ninety-five percent of my assets drive out the front gate every evening. It's my job to bring them back. —JIM GOODNIGHT, CEO AND FOUNDER OF SAS

What makes a great workplace? It's not what you do. It's how you do it.

If you are a leader, you must communicate, make decisions, and interact with people, just as leaders in all companies do. You may carry out your job description very well. But to be a leader in a great workplace, you need to not only execute your role but also instill certain beliefs in people as you are doing it. A great workplace is one where people trust the people they work for, take pride in what they do, and enjoy the people they work with. As a leader, you are the one to create and reinforce these beliefs with every communication, every decision, every interaction. To create a great workplace, you'll need to do your job differently. It requires a mindshift; it requires viewing your employees like Jim Goodnight suggests in the quote that opens this chapter. You'll need to do your job realizing that how you do what you do makes a world of difference to employees.

Consider the following quotes from employees in great workplaces: "We have the culture where people are willing to talk to each other, share what they know, and take the proactive step to get you in touch with the right person." "If you are a boss or a manager, you realize it's not about you. It's about empowering your people. And your voice doesn't carry any more weight than anyone else's. The only way this [management style] will work is by nurturing and nudging and helping set some vision." "Our company has growing pains like any company, but the people always come first. I truly know that I matter in this corporation, and that's what keeps me here."

What do people say about your company, division, or workgroup? Do they say it's a great place to work? If you don't yet have a great workplace, it can be. And if it is already a great workplace, you can hang on to it. This book will show you how. Not by handing over a list of initiatives or steps, but by orienting you to a different way of doing things. We won't tell you what to do, but we will tell you how to do it.

THE KNOWLEDGE BASE

The content of this book is based on years of research. Our company, the Great Place to Work Institute, has been studying great workplaces since its inception in 1991. But research began much earlier, in the early 1980s, when cofounder Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz were approached by Addison-Wesley Publishing to write a book on the best places to work in America. When Robert and Milton set out to interview people in companies around the country in 1980, business outcomes were not a key consideration. Rather, Robert and Milton believed that treating people well was the right thing to do, and so they focused exclusively on the employee experience. Still, they expected to see a connection between the companies with the happiest employees and the companies with the healthiest bottom lines. They also anticipated that they would see consistent practices among the best workplaces, those that Robert and Milton deemed the 100 best in America. From those consistencies, they hoped they could discern a recipe for creating a great workplace that could be followed by any leader in any organization.

In their 1984 book, The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, Levering and Moskowitz described the experience of employees at the 100 best workplaces among the hundreds they researched. The New York Times bestseller provided informative stories about all 100 companies, and highlighted several aspects they shared, including opportunities, pay and benefits, and openness. Themes began to emerge about the characteristics of great workplaces, but what made great workplaces that way weren't categories of practices or policies.

Turns out that the intuitively obvious prediction, that organizations with the most creative practices and the best bottom lines would be the ones employees raved about, was not universally true. Something was going on that transcended the policies and practices at the best companies to work for. It wasn't what they were doing, it was how their leaders were doing it. Specifically, the practices companies had and the money leaders spent on employees did not always lead to great workplaces; the relationships they built in the process did.

In Levering's 1988 book, A Great Place to Work: What Makes Some Employers So Good—And Most So Bad, he discussed great workplaces in terms of relationships and put forth the definition of a Great Place to Work that opened this chapter and that appears throughout this book. Specifically, he identified the relationships between employees and their leaders, between employees and their jobs, and between employees and each other as the indicators of a great place to work. Relationships at work matter, and in particular, the centrality of these three relationships influenced people's loyalty, commitment, and willingness to contribute to organizational goals and priorities. If leaders implemented practices and created programs and policies that contributed to these three relationships, employees had a great workplace experience. It mattered less what the programs, policies, and practices were, and more that they were done in a way that strengthened relationships. The Great Place to Work Model (see Figure 1.1) was developed during this time by the Institute's founders, Robert Levering and Amy Lyman. The Model was later formalized and today has five dimensions, which form the core chapters of this book: Credibility, Respect, Fairness (which, put together, comprise Trust); Pride; and Camaraderie.

In the late 1990s, FORTUNE magazine approached the Institute to develop an annual list of the best companies to work for in America. Now the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For® list is released every January in one of the magazine's best-selling issues. While the FORTUNE list tends to showcase the perks and benefits that employees in those companies enjoy, those perks are not the reason the companies made the list in the first place. They made the list because of their leaders' ability to create strong relationships. They made the list because of the five dimensions.

Not only have these five hallmarks stood the test of time, they are also applicable to companies regardless of size or geographic location. The idea of great workplaces and the practical Model quickly spread beyond the United States. Now, in over 40 countries around the world, the Great Place to Work Institute has shown that organizations and their employees thrive when these hallmarks are woven into actions on the part of their leaders.

All told, the Institute surveys 2 million people and gathers data on the cultures of nearly 6,000 companies worldwide every year. We evaluate companies for list membership using consistent methodology, whether the company is 60 people or 6,000, located in Brazil or India. In these evaluations, we assess two aspects of workplaces. The first aspect,...