[COVER STORY]
RESEARCH INSIGHTS FROM
GREAT PLACE TO WORK®
A decade of building trust with employees
Prasenjit Bhattacharya
CEO
Great Place to Work® Institute
O
ver the last decade, there have been
numerous researches underlining not just
the correlation between creating great
employee experience and business results, but as
the recent research by Edman indicates a causal
effect — great workplaces lead to sustained
business results.
In this article, I would attempt to introduce
some of our research fi ndings on great workplaces
and some of our observations on what sets the best
workplaces apart in their ability to sustain their
culture.
What is a Great Place to Work?
Most of us can, without hesitation, answer the
question, “Is your company a good place to work?”.
We have an implicit idea about what is and what is
not a good workplace. Ask yourself this question
— what is it about a company that makes it a Great
Place to Work? Many different answers would come
to your mind. Let us say that your list looks some-
thing like — A Great Place to Work is one where
employees are treated well and looked after, where
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employees are paid well, where employees do mean-
ingful work or where people are friendly. No matter
how big your list might be, there would be some
characteristic peculiar to one company that you
might want to add to make it more comprehensive.
Since FedEx stands out in its training and
leadership development initiatives, we could
add employee development to our list. Similarly,
one could add fun as Southwest Airlines has
been extremely successful in creating a high-
energy workplace with a conscious commitment
to have fun at work. Therefore, no matter how
comprehensive your list might be, it could just as
well be the case that a great place to work displays
characteristics not in your list. In fact, trying to
make a great place to work by implementing a
laundry list of ‘best practices’ is precisely the kind
of piecemeal approach that misses the essence of
the great workplaces.
It then underlies the diffi culty we face in
defi ning a ‘Great Place to Work’ and in explaining
why one employer is better than another.
| Vol. 9 Issue 6 • Sep-Oct 2018, Noida / Pre-Event Edition