Best Places to Work

We participated in a contest sponsored by Colorado Biz magazine this year. It was about being "The Best Place in Colorado to Work". Basically they have a questionaire that a company's employees fill out anonymously on the internet. They then take the results of that poll and subject it to some proprietary formulas, with the resulting company rankings announced.

We did fairly well, coming in #13 (lucky number) in the rankings. I have to admit that I felt proud of that ranking. We also get a statistical analysis of the responses, again with total anonymity for the employees.

They have a nice awards ceremony where they announce the rankings, a bit like the Academy Awards. Acceptance speeches strictly kept short. I even wore a jacket, no tie however. It seemed that a key element in companies that ranked higher than ForeRunner centered on allowing dogs to come to work. A "dog friendly" policy seemed to be what it took to be a "Best Place in Colorado to Work".

Being a good place to work is something that I do take very seriously and it is one of the four main elements in our business plan. I don't want to give it just lip service, but be serious about it. But what does that mean? What is a good place to work? How do you become one?

In my earlier life I was a controls engineer, so of course, all my instincts tell me that you need a feedback loop to achieve any goal. You must measure the variable you wish to control. You then compare that measurement against where you want to be and take a corrective action. Then you measure that variable again, repeating the process. So what measures a good company to work for? (Sorry about the dangling participle.)

While I applaud Colorado Biz for sponsoring this contest, I don't think that a "dog friendly" policy weighs heavily in most peoples thoughts. But I could be wrong. How do you know? We had about 70% of our employees take the poll, which was a high percentage among those companies participating. But what about the 30% who didn't participate? It is their workplace also. Would their participation have skewed the results?

Of those who did participate, 100% of them agreed that they were proud to work for ForeRunner. I admit this made me very proud of this company. It says that 90 out of 90 people are proud to work here. Before this, I wasn't sure that you can get 90 out of 90 people to agree that the sun comes up in the east.

In any case, we are serious about this being a good place to work. Like almost all the important things in life, you can't define it or come up with a checklist that determines it. But you know it when you see it.