Top 100 Places to Work

Fortune's annual ranking of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" was released this week. I have a strong, often anti-corporate, belief that profitable companies excel in the area of human resources. They hire the right people, treat them well, and organize them to common and worthy objectives. Yes, they do so to earn a profit for their owners (as they should), but they feel people management is a large part of their success.

This year's list supported my hypothesis ...

"The List", which by definition is a Main-Street view of life, was tilted toward companies that are also Wall Street successes. Many companies which have languished in profits recently and possess an old-school mentality toward employees were not to be seen on this list. Perhaps these companies are not so much "tough and decisive" as they believe, but simply poor managers. They need to revisit the old maxim that "management is getting things done through others"; it's not about the productivity in the executive suite, but how well they leverage and motivate others.

The correlation between Main Street success and Wall Street success is borne out by some of the brands on this list: SAS (#1), Edward Jones (#2), Google (#4), Dreamworks (#6), Boston Consulting Group (#8), Qualcomm (#8), Zappos (#15), Cisco (#16), Genentech (#19), ScottTrade (#27), Chesapeake Energy (#34), Aflac (#37), Quiktrip (#41), Ernst and Young (#44), and so on. These are not companies conducting touchy-feely social experiments. They are smart, successful, and leverage the human asset with great skill.

What sets these companies apart?

They invest in perks such as on-site (and free) health clinics (SAS, #1), family-oriented services such as child care (offered by several companies), they rarely lay off, they offer freedom (Google allows employees 20% of their time to work on their own projects, SAS doesn't monitor hours), they hire the best people in the first place (receiving 100s of applicants for every opening), executives relate to employees well (Whole Foods, #18, caps executive pay at 19X the average hourly rate), pay and benefits are top-notch, they offer free lunches (Google), and they promote from within.