Dear Best Small & Medium Companies,
November, 2015
First of all, congratulations again on your recent recognition! You are the most important focus of our business in the future, and we're very glad to help promote your success.
Some of you have been on our list for years and years. Some of you are just joining this year! We appreciate all of you tremendously. Each of you has an admirable business worthy of public recognition in the nation's largest business publication.
Producing the Best SMB list in Fortune® magazine in order to recognize and honor your achievements is a staple of our business.
This high recognition will not go away. Our ability to support you will improve.
With that being said – we have spent the year analyzing our client's feedback, developing our strategy, and re-thinking, re-designing, and newly integrating our online experience. In order to improve our service to you and exponentially expand the reach of our social mission to change the world by creating great workplaces, we are excited to introduce our new program:
The newly integrated Recognition Program:
We are Giving Time Back to You With No More Culture Audit©
We mentioned this change to some of our SMB conference attendees in Seattle last month and we got a Hallelujah in response! We are doing away with the Culture Audit for all small and medium sized companies. Instead, you will need only submit a Culture Brief (a substantially shorter submission – only a few hours time when you have all the information accessible).
The Best Workplace for Small and Medium Companies list methodology will now be based solely upon employee feedback. We will use your creative best practices to highlight your company's practices in your Review. While we are sad to lose some of the wonderful insights that you've provided us each year, we are happy that the process will become much more streamlined for everyone involved.
Many of the things you are familiar with will remain the same. Your last year's Culture Audit© data will be available to you mapped to the new Culture Brief™ format once you log in to the website. Your login information will remain the same as last year. And as always, we protect the integrity of your employee's responses and company information with the utmost care.
Certification vs. Best Workplace – what's the difference?
Put simply:
- Certification is a passive badge that we will now award – companies will use their own publicity efforts to promote their status, and our media partners do not promote them
- Best Workplaces are actively promoted in national media by Great Place To Work's marketing team, our media partner Fortune, our conference, and all the other publicity you are accustomed to receiving upon release of the list
Introducing Great Place To Work® Certification:
For years, we have seen companies apply to our lists who have great workplaces – they're just not one of the Best. We now have a way to give those companies some small piece of what the best companies receive. We've made this change after analyzing macro-trends for investors1, employees2 and consumers3 indicating the need for more data points on companies with great workplace cultures. Our social mission to create great workplaces for all has been our guiding light.
Best Workplaces – still the Best!
Only the Best Workplaces take advantage of our media partnership with Fortune® online. And only the Fortune 100 Best are published in a dedicated issue each year. The free positive publicity, the ability to use the Great Place To Work Best Workplaces logo, as well as the Fortune 100 Best logo – as well as just the employer brand benefits in attracting and recruiting talent to one of America's best workplaces… these are exclusive rewards for being one of the best. You earned it!
Comparison to Inc. 500 / 5000:
Think of Inc. magazine – with the introduction of electronic media rapidly surpassing print media, in 2007 they expanded their list by 10x. The Inc. 500 is an elite group – featured in the print edition, publicized, and awarded at their conference. The online edition features 5,000 companies.
Additionally, they've segmented their list by region, industry and other characteristics.
Some of you are featured on their lists! As you know, the elite status of being one of the top 10, or top 50 has not been diminished – in fact, it is strengthened by the broader pool of applicants.
We understand that this Certification may not be as impactful to you – being a Best Company already. But as a Best Workplace we also know you care about the entire movement – like we do – of celebrating workplaces that treat their people with respect.
And being at the elite top of a large field is highly significant, and something to be extremely proud of!
$995 registration fee gives more value for all applicants
We know that the #1 and #2 reasons that companies apply to the 100 Best are #1 Attracting & Retaining Talent, #2 Benchmarks to the Best Workplaces.
For all applicants, with a base fee of $995 we are bringing some new value to support your workplace culture efforts:
- simpler survey set-up and culture submission process
- certification with a Great Place To Work® badge and review for one year
- our NEW Feedback report with Benchmarks to the 100 Best
- all the new opportunities for participation in all our lists
See our new packages for Small (below 100) or Medium (above 100) sized companies
For those who purchase reports, we still offer the expanded reporting packages that many of you rely upon, and have upgraded the data and insights you will receive.
More Best Workplace lists = more benchmarks compared to your peers!
We now publish over a dozen lists of the Best Workplaces on Fortune.com!
These include industry lists:
- Finance
- Healthcare
- Technology
- Manufacturing
As well as Best Workplaces for:
- Women
- Diversity
- Millennials
- ...
...the list of lists goes on and is growing even more in 2016!
The great news is that all of these lists mean more rich data about the Best Workplaces for you to obtain benchmarks through our new reporting packages. By making your one single application you now become eligible for all of these lists, without any additional submission required.
See all of our Best Workplaces Lists, and their submission deadlines here
Size Categories Have Changed
Now: Small = 10–99 employees, and Medium = 100-999
This change reflects market categories better. As you can see from the orange area in the graph below, nearly 25% of the American workforce are in companies with 10-99 employees. Whereas 20% of the American workforce are in our newly defined ‘Medium' category.
Also, in the teal area you can see the volume of companies who are in the Small category. It is our goal to help create a great workplace for all.
More Winners!
We will have twice the amount of winners – our plan is to recognize 50 Small & 50 Medium (up from 25). Applications have been growing. We're really committed to supporting the growth of Small & Medium businesses because of how impactful you are on the US workforce. We see the survey results and submissions of companies that haven't been able to make the list in years past, and they are amazing and deserve recognition too.
Join our Webinar on December 10th to learn from our clients and our CEO on the topic:
Become a Workplace Hero with our newly integrated Recognition Program
You can click our red logo in the top corner of your screen to begin browsing the site, or select your size of company from the top menu. Those with more questions, please download our new Guide to the Recognition Program.
[links to PDF ‘Guide to Recognition Program' that SLK is providing]
If you have any questions, please contact us. You may either get in touch with your primary contact, or send an email to Kim Peters (This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), our VP of Recognition who can either answer your question or put you right in touch with someone who can.
Sincerely,
The Great Place To Work® Recognition Team
Hebrew (IL) 
English (US) 
