The Best Companies to Work for 2007
By Robert Levering and Milton Moskowit, Fortune Magazine,
What earned these firms a spot on this year's Best Companies to Work for list? Find out:
Ten years ago, when we began compiling this list, the idea that your employer would deliver your groceries (a new perk at Microsoft) or allow you to do your laundry at work (
Google) might have seemed crazy. (Of course, the idea that you'd be paying out-of pocket for health care would have sounded just as nuts.)
Indeed, much has changed in the American workplace over the past decade. Back then 18 companies on our list offered telecommuting; today 82 do. Only 28 companies on the list offered domestic-partner benefits; now that number is 70.
Competition to get on the list has intensified too: This year 446 public and private companies vied for a slot, up from 161 in 1998. And 100,000 workers evaluated their employers, making this by far the largest simultaneous employee survey in corporate America. That's one thing that hasn't -- and won't -- change about our list: Employees decide who gets a spot. Here are the companies they picked this year.
See what jobs are currently available at some of FORTUNE's Best Places to Work:
How we pick the 100 Best:
To choose the 100 Best Companies to Work for, we rely on two things: our evaluation of the policies and culture of each company and the opinions of the company's own employees.
We give the latter more weight: Two-thirds of the total score comes from employee responses to a 57-question survey created by the Great Place to Work Institute in San Francisco. The survey goes to a minimum of 400 randomly selected employees from each company and asks about things such as attitudes toward management, job satisfaction and camaraderie.
The remaining third of the score comes from our evaluation of each company's demographic makeup, pay and benefits programs, and the like. We score companies in four areas: credibility (communication to employees), respect (opportunities and benefits), fairness (compensation, diversity), and pride/camaraderie (philanthropy, celebrations).
Some companies rank higher in a particular area. See which firms top the list in categories like:
After evaluations are completed, if news about a company comes to light that may significantly damage employees' faith in management, we may exclude that company from the list.
About 1,500 companies contacted us or were recruited to participate; of them, 466 finished the exhaustive survey process. (Any company that is at least seven years old with more than 1,000 U.S. employees is eligible.)
