Reading the employee comments for the 2025 Fortune Best Companies to Work For, the most surprising thing was how little people cared about pay and prestige and how much they cared about being treated well. Hilton, Cisco, and American Express are not remarkable for their overt \u201cperks\u201d but because they come through for their people, build trust, and make people feel genuinely appreciated.<\/p>\n
At Hilton, people say they enjoy working with many different cultures, languages, and backgrounds all coming together to serve people. The sense of connection does not happen by accident. It is just like Buckingham and Coffman say about great managers creating a space where people feel acknowledged for their strengths and contributions and encouraged to show up however they like (Buckingham & Coffman, 2016). The HR practices at Hilton seem to help create this culture by emphasizing inclusion and relationship-building instead of making sure everyone is following the rules.<\/p>\n
Cisco\u2019s employees talk a lot about leadership being focused on mental health, family, and being authentic. Immediately, this made me think of Google\u2019s Project Oxygen, which showed through extensive data that managers who care about their employees as people will always outperform those who do not (Garvin, 2013). The culture at Cisco suggests that HR is helping to encourage this through benefits, leadership, and psychological safety so that employees know prioritizing well-being is the bare minimum, not a perk.<\/p>\n
American Express promotes developmental opportunities, parental leave, and connections. This clearly falls into the \u201cnew HR\u201d territory, as described by Breitfelder and Dowling.\u00a0 Employees do not just feel supported; they see a future.<\/p>\n
In conclusion what I can draw from this is that I want to manage like these companies do: by trusting people, developing them, and understanding that performance and well-being are connected. The hardest part of this job will be holding people accountable while being empathetic. HR practices like coaching, feedback, and development planning should help me to ease some of that tension so that my team can be happy and high-performing.<\/p>\n
References<\/strong><\/p>\n Buckingham, M., & Coffman, C. (2016). First, break all the rules: What the world\u2019s greatest managers do differently<\/em>.<\/p>\n Breitfelder, M. D., & Dowling, D. W. (2008). Why did we ever go into HR? Harvard Business Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n Garvin, D. A. (2013). How Google sold its engineers on management. Harvard Business Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reading the employee comments for the 2025 Fortune Best Companies to Work For, the most surprising thing was how little people cared about pay and prestige and how much they cared about being treated well. Hilton, Cisco, and American Express are not remarkable for their overt \u201cperks\u201d but because they come through for their people, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15036,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15036"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/4"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/week1discusion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}