The Last Word: For Greatness’ Sakes

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What makes a great or best or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious company?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer, and if I had one, I’d channel my inner Dr. Evil and sell it to you for $1 million dollars.

Sorry, $100 billion.

OK, maybe I wouldn’t. Pinkie promise.

The one constant seems to be that great companies take care of their workers, and while many employers don’t offer the paternalistic approach of yesteryear, there are companies that go above and beyond to make things great for today’s workers.

In some areas, employers are much more progressive now. When my kids were born in the aughts, I asked for time off for paternity leave. My small employer at the time didn’t have a written policy on paternity leave, but it did grant me two days off. I wasn’t floored by that generosity, but it seemed like some time off was better than nothing.

Today, companies like Netflix are offering unlimited paternity and maternity leave during the year after a child is born or adopted. In the 1950s, when employer paternalism was at its zenith, men were rarely even allowed to be in the delivery room when their children were born, let alone take time off to help raise their ragamuffins.

Beyond benefits, good companies tend to listen to and develop their talent. As Sarah Sipek reports in our Workforce 100 feature, Cisco started a program called the Our People Deal to promote communication and develop benchmarks to help people at different stages of their careers. And AT&T says it looks to promote from within, even if candidates only have 50 or 60 percent of the required skill sets for a particular job posting.

Getting good people to stay should be every company’s goal, especially because it’s so costly to hire and train new people. But sometimes things don’t go as planned.

In 2002, after finally finding a new job six months after having been laid off when a dot-com went dot-bomb, I was hired to join a company that would soon become a historical footnote.

While interviewing at accounting firm Arthur Andersen, I knew of the Enron scandal rumblings, but I didn’t think the problems would destroy a legendary 90-year-old accounting firm.

Um, yeah.

Things went south shortly after I started. Soon I was out of a job, again. I remember the Friday afternoon I asked the division head if I were at risk of losing my job because I was the new guy. After spending 20 minutes assuring me there was nothing to worry about, he quickly changed his tune and told me I would be laid off on Monday.

Layoffs occur at strong and weak companies for various reasons. We had an internal debate, for instance, whether an employer like oil-company Schlumberger should make the Workforce 100 list despite laying off 20 percent of its staff last year. In January, the company announced North American revenue had declined 39 percent from the previous year, but the company also posted pretax operating income of $6.5 billion overall. Ultimately, we decided the numbers our research team used to create the list should stick regardless of how things pan out for the company.

Today, with an improving economy, mass layoffs have become more of an anomaly. Although, there are some notable exceptions, including one from our list. Intel recently said it would reduce its workforce by a reported 11 percent.

Ten years ago in June 2006, there were 1,097 mass layoffs involving more than 50 workers that affected almost 120,000 people, even though the unemployment rate was at a modest 4.6 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Mind you, this was still a year and a half before the start of the Great Recession. In June 2008, there were 1,643 mass layoffs involving almost 166,000 people.

As part of budget cuts, the BLS no longer keeps mass-layoff statistics, but the unemployment rate at deadline was 5 percent, roughly the same as it has been since August 2015, which is half as much as the 30-year high of 10 percent from October 2009.

In other words: advantage employees.

The Execu Search Group put it this way when it released its “2016 Hiring Outlook” white paper: “Where employers once held most of the advantage, and offers were few and far between for candidates, job seekers now have opportunities to be more selective about the offers they take and the organizations they work for.”

To get workers to select your company will take the creation of employee-focused programs, innovation and observation. And I know at least 100 companies you should look at for some inspiration.

Written By: James Tehrani

Credit: Workforce.com