WORKPLACE SPECIAL ........................The 6 Secrets Of America's Happiest Workplaces

The 6 Secrets Of America's Happiest Workplaces

The employer ratings site Glassdoor just released their best places to work for 2014--and the results can make your office way better.

What makes a company a best place to work? Turns out it has little to do with ping pong tables, more with meaning.

Glassdoor, the employer ratings site, has released the results of their 2014 Employee Choice Awards survey. The survey, averaged employees' anonymous ratings of their companies. Rather than showing a focus on perks, compensation, and other incentives, the best-rated workplaces had a range of intrinsic motivators, like challenging work, impact upon society, and an opportunity to work with brilliant colleagues.

This year's overall winners were the consultancy Bain & Company, who was named best large company to work for. The investment website the Motley Fool won for best medium-sized company, while Twitter was named the best tech company to work for.

"We are in constant dialog with our people about what is going well and what could go better" -- Hernan Saenz, Managing partner, Bain Texas & Bain Mexico

Unsurprisingly, tech firms were overrepresented in the top 50--though the results have little to do with Silicon Valley perks.

"Rather than 'it's because they pay a lot' or because it's 'hey, we're Facebook, and we give everyone as much food as they possibly eat," says Glassdoor SVP of People Allyson Willoughby, "the reasons people like where they work were much deeper."

"It blows my mind that with the push of a button we push out products that affect hundreds of millions of people. I can't explain the fulfillment that gives me as an employee here." -- Sara Haider, Vine for Android Software Engineer, Twitter

Combing through the data, Willoughby and the Glassdoor team found a handful of themes emerged among the most beloved companies. They were:

• Mission: a sense of purpose in coming into work
• Collegiality: working with awesome people
• Challenging work: being stimulated by the work to be done
• Meaningful advancement: the promise of growth
• Confidence in senior leaders: a sense of trust--and transparency--with management
• Perks: good pay, free food, a beer cart or two.

To Willoughby, the results were instructive.

"These aren't just things you have to buy that make people speak highly of their company," she says, "If you're running the company and you acknowledge that people want to work around other talented people, people want to have opportunities, people want to have transparency from upper management. Those are all simple things to accomplish if you're mindful of them."

"When I talk about why I like to work at the Fool, I could ramble off a list of all the really cool benefits, like 'Oh, we have all this free food, we have a beer cart that goes around, we have unlimited vacation, we have a personal trainer,' but really it's the awesome people that make this a great place to work."--Alison Southwick, senior video producer, the Motley Fool

But why are these intangibles so resonant with employees? Organizational psychology supplies some answers:

• Importance of mission: People feel most satisfied with their work when they find it deeply meaningful--which is why the happiest people have the hardest jobs.
• Importance of collegiality: Friendship among colleagues makes everybody more engaged.
• Challenging work: People want to expand their skillsets on the way to mastery.
• Meaningful advancement: People need to feel a sense of progress.
• Confidence in senior leaders: Confidence and transparency reduce volatility, which encourages bold thinking.
• Perks: You gotta get paid to feel secure enough to do great work.

The takeaway for leaders? If you want to move from better to best, promote those intrinsic factors--and don't be afraid of promotions, either.

By Drake Baer

http://www.fastcompany.com/3023191/leadership-now/the-6-secrets-of-americas-happiest-workplaces?partner=newsletter