Great Place to Work® Methodology
What is a Great Place to Work®?
A Great Place to Work® is a place that inspires you to reach for the stars. It's a place where employees of all generations can develop personally and professionally, where people trust and support each other, where they take pride in their work, and where working with their colleagues is fun. A Great Place to Work® is a place where you can realize your potential.
For more than 30 years, Great Place to Work® has been collecting and analyzing data to measure the workplace culture of organizations. Trust has always been the foundation of a great workplace culture. But as the world of work has evolved and countless organizations have been evaluated, the methodology has evolved as well - because only the employers that create a Great Place to Work for all employees, are truly great.
The Great Place to Work® For All model
The For All model focuses on maximizing the potential of all employees. This is the key to stronger innovative strength and higher value creation. In the case of a football team, for example, mutual trust is the basis for good teamwork. Team spirit, however, is shaped by values such as discipline. And if the coach and captain demonstrate leadership qualities, the team has the potential to become a top team. But if they really want to score goals (value creation) and outsmart the tactics of the opponent (innovative strength), the potential of each individual player must be fully maximized.
Maximizing Human Potential
Organizations need to be agile, innovative and authentic to their stakeholders in order to create added value and successfully address the challenges of the modern working world. They can only do so with a workplace culture in which all employees give their best and are able to maximize their potential.
Benjamin Franklin once said: „Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.“ It‘s the same with maximizing the potential of all employees; if it is not fully maximized, opportunities are simply allowed to pass by - and one day they sink. The biggest leaks are where positive work experiences and mutual trust are lost.
In his pyramid of needs, Maslow showed that people must first satisfy physiological, security, social and individual needs before they can realize their full potential. The basic needs at the workplace are similar; 30 years of research has shown that it takes trust-based relationships, pride and team spirit before the potential of all employees can be realized.
In today‘s world of work, developing the potential of all employees is at the heart of a great workplace culture - and at the same time the basis for sustainable competitiveness.
Trust
The key to maximizing the potential of all employees is trust. Trust - particularly the relationship of trust between employees and leadership - remains the most important asset in today‘s working world. Because even though the business world is changing, people remain people, and trust remains the universal prerequisite for positive interactions. The foundation of a trust-based workplace culture requires credibility, respect, camaraderie, pride and fairness.
When leadership and employees act fairly, treat everyone with respect and show that they are capable of managing the business with competence and integrity - then trust is created. A trust-based workplace culture enables decisions to be made more quickly, all employees to be involved and promotes cooperation. For this very reason, trust is also a much-needed breeding ground for agility. So if the Great Place to Work® For All model is the engine, then trust is the fuel.
Values
If you think of slogans or the career website when you think of lived values, you are on the wrong track. Lived values are the principles that show how employees work together in an organization on a daily basis.
Research on the workplace culture of more than 700 companies has shown that lived values lead to greater integrity among employees and thus to higher productivity, greater profitability, better corporate relations and greater attractiveness as an employer for potential talent. It therefore pays off to base corporate strategy on the values that are lived.
Leadership effectiveness
In order to tap into the full potential of all employees, leadership effectiveness is needed. Leadership effectiveness is characterized by the creation of purpose, respect, care and fairness towards employees - by leaders appreciating the employees and actively living the organizational values. Equally important is mutual trust between leaders, since in modern working environments leadership is not only achieved horizontally, but also vertically and in a shared effort.
Only in this way can a trust-based workplace culture be supported by all those involved and affected. Furthermore, each management level should communicate a coherent strategy. Each business unit, each department must understand what part they contribute to the common corporate vision. Finally, it is important that leadership teams represent the diversity of the personnel. The better diversity is reflected in leadership teams, the greater the credibility with employees - because people are more likely to trust people who are alike.
Innovation
The commitment and motivation of employees to contribute productively to an organization increases when the potential of all employees is fully unfolded by means of leadership effectiveness, lived values and trust. The changes in the world of work brought about by digitalization and globalization, as well as the trend towards new forms of work, mean that organizations must constantly remain innovative in order to meet the high competitive pressure. Innovation concerns products and services, internal processes and cooperation. Higher efficiency and profitability are the consequences of an organization‘s permanent innovation work.
To achieve an higher strength of innovation, however, organizations need the collective intelligence and commitment of all employees. If the ideas of employees are not heard, not taken seriously or not implemented in the workplace culture, motivation and commitment will disappear - and with it the employees. They will implement their ideas in another company or in their own start-up. But if employees work in an encouraging and inspiring climate, the impetus for ideas will also increase, and so will their innovative strength, provided that the potential of all employees is developed.
Value creation
To build stability, a company needs a long-term strategy and sustainable value creation. This goal is often attempted by reducing costs or increasing prices. However, the most important driver of value creation is ignored: the employees. When provided a trust-based workplace culture and positive experiences, employees deliver the greatest power for value creation.
Through their motivation and commitment, they go the extra mile; not because they have to, but because they want to - and have a smile on their face. This creates more value not only in customer interaction, but in all stakeholder relationships. Ultimately, this is also reflected in the financial figures. So anyone who invests in their workplace culture, and therefore in their employees, is investing in higher value creation.
