This week I decided to look at Intuit, The Cheesecake Factory, and Southern Ohio Medical center from the Fortune 500 list of Best Places to Work for 2020.
Common themes I noticed between the three companies I looked at were people, workplace culture, and feeling valued as employees and as people. All 3 had high agreement rates on the survey question “when you join the company, you are made to feel welcome. 2 of the 3 featured high rates of agreement to the question “I am able to take time off work when I think it’s necessary” and all 3 had strong emphasis on interpersonal relations within the company.
This highlights the importance of creating a positive workplace culture where people feel cared for and have a sense of community. Things such as benefits, access to resources, time off, and job security play heavily into this sense of acceptance, and security that people seem to feel at these companies, and are HR strategies that appear to have a strong impact on employee approval ratings when it comes to their jobs.
The HR strategies used to give people this sense of belonging and security in their jobs appears slightly different between companies based on the function and type of jobs people were working. Intuit had a strong emphasis on benefits, while Cheesecake Factory and Southern Ohio Medical Group placed more emphasis on people and family. Southern Ohio Medical group had more about job security and access to resources to do their job, which makes sense because access to resources is more important in a medical setting, as well as it being more common for people to face resource scarcity in this type of position, when compared to Cheesecake Factory or Intuit.
Overall, it appears that people value a sense of belonging in their workplaces, and HR has an important hand in creating the types of workplace culture that allow for this by tailoring business strategies to the specific needs of the job description, and by making strategic decisions about who they hire.