They’ve done it again. W L Gore & Associates have topped The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For survey for the fourth year running.

The good news for the chasing pack is that the gap between Gore and the rest has narrowed in the past 12 months, but not enough to topple it from its throne. It remains the company to beat, offering its 454 employees better personal growth, greater team spirit and a stronger sense of belonging than any other company in our contest.

Just making the lists — the 100 Best Companies to Work For, the 20 Best Big Companies to Work For (both contained in this supplement) and the 100 Best Small Companies to Work For — is prize enough for most companies.

But not for W L Gore. The Livingston-based company, whose unique range of fabrics and materials are worn by men on the moon as well as men (and women) on the moors, believes it has a unique workplace culture and sees this annual contest as both validation of that and a challenge to others.

Accepting Gore’s award 10 days ago, John Housego, manufacturing plant leader, said: “Workplace engagement, we strongly believe, is a competitive advantage. Competitive advantage when used correctly not only creates income and profit, which we are great at doing, but also comes with a responsibility to society as a whole.

“We are successful because of the ability of our associates to grow, explore and learn in an environment of freedom and trust.”

The company’s achievement in finishing top for four successive years should not be underestimated as the competition gets stiffer every year.

This year’s rankings were determined by the views of 148,645 employees, up from 86,500 last year, making this by far the most comprehensive survey of workplace satisfaction in the UK. In all, 894 companies registered to take part in this year’s contests, with 657 going through the entire process — 36 big companies, 273 mid-size companies, and 348 small companies.

There are not just more organisations fighting for places on the lists, but the quality of the workplaces submitted to our rigorous scrutiny is rising.

Using a methodology designed expressly for the British workplace, The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For believes that the happiest, most productive workplaces exhibit strength in eight key areas or “factors”. These are:

Leadership: how employees feel about the head of the company and senior managers.

Wellbeing: how staff feel about stress, pressure and the balance between their work and home duties.

My manager: people’s feelings towards their immediate boss and their day-to-day managers.

My team: people’s feelings about their immediate colleagues.

Fair deal: how happy the workforce is with their pay and benefits.

Giving something back: how much companies are thought by their staff to put back into society, and the local community in particular.

My company: feelings about the company people work for as opposed to the people they work with.

Personal Growth: whether staff feel challenged by their job, their skills are being used and if there is scope for advancement.

An employee survey containing 70 statements that each fall into one of these eight factors measures workplace opinion. Staff are asked to score each of the statements on a seven-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

This year, among the top 100 mid-size companies — those with between 250 and 4,999 employees — the average positive scores in seven of the eight factors has gone up. The only one to see a slight fall was Giving Something Back (down from 62.1% positive last year to 61.6% positive this).

The biggest gains this year over last are to be found in Leadership (up 2% from 73.5% positive to 75.5% positive), Personal Growth (up 1.3% from 71.6% to 72.9%), My Manager (up 1.2%, from 73.2% to 74.4%) and Fair Deal (up 1% from 62.1% to 63.1%).

Among the 20 Best Big Companies to Work For (those with more than 5,000 employees), a slightly different pattern emerges. Again, Giving Something Back registers a year-on-year fall (from 55.7% positive to 55.0%), but here, too, the wellbeing score registers a significant drop from 61.9% positive in 2006 to 61.3% this year. This is in part a reflection of the consistently poor scores recorded for workplace stress and feeling exhausted by the end of the day in the bigger companies in particular.

Not that employees in these companies are complaining. They feel they are exceptionally well rewarded for the most part, reflected in a jump in the fair deal scores this year of 4.9% from 53.9% positive to 58.8%, and that they are experiencing unparalleled opportunities for personal growth, up 2.3% this year from 67.5% positive to 69.8%.

Pete Bradon, head of research for Best Companies Ltd, says: “Strongly engaged employees will always go the ‘extra mile’. It is the responsibility of leaders not to take advantage of this engagement, not to ask them to go the extra two miles to the detriment of their wellbeing.”

With leadership scores significantly up, there is good reason to believe staff will not be exploited through their own diligence. In big companies the leadership factor sees an identical 2% rise this year from 66.1% to 68.1% positive.

Gore’s triumph in the mid-size company rankings is founded upon its employees’ overwhelming sense of belonging. You could not put a cigarette paper between the personal and corporate ethos of the staff and the company they work for. Compared with the rest of the top 10 mid-size companies alone, Gore’s My Company score of 89.1% positive is fully 6% ahead. Gore also tops the pile (4% above the average top 10 score) in the related area of My Team (85.6%), which gauges team spirit and staff identification with their immediate colleagues as distinct from corporate ethos (as measured in the My Company section of our survey).

Success in both these areas translates into a strong sense of personal growth (84.6%), a score which again is streets ahead of all other top 10 companies (7% above the top 10 average) and is the third area where Gore finishes top, see table right.

The company was founded almost 50 years ago by American scientist Bill Gore, and his wife Vieve. They believed a nonhierarchical environment would allow creative minds to flourish. Hence there are no job titles and no managers, just associates.

The company has two outposts in the UK, both in Scotland, in Livingston and Dundee. Carole-Anne Smith, the company’s European product specialist for snow sports, is a typical employee, having stayed with the company far longer than she ever imagined she would. “I hated it when I started,” she says. “Gore challenges you as an individual. I had come from a very structured organisation. Here you do not get a job specification, you get set the problem.”

The problem for the rest of the companies in our contest is how to catch W L Gore. A ray of hope for them all is that Gore’s scores in each of the eight factors are down this year over last by between 1% and 4% on average, with the sharpest fall in the Fair Deal factor. And whereas in 2006, Gore came top in 38 of the 70 questions in the employee survey, this year that is down to 18, although it is in the top 10 for 64 of the 70 questions, which remains the bench-mark against which all the rest must measure up.

However, while the competition to be top dog in our three lists is intense, its true aim is to create dynamic workplaces where talent flourishes under the guidance of inspiring leadership.

Jonathan Austin, chief executive of Best Companies Ltd, The Sunday Times’ partner in this project for the past seven years, said: “The real heroes of these lists are the companies which have taken the findings each year and used them to improve the working environment for their employees.

“The best companies to work for are those that want to nurture their staff and reward them with a thriving workplace culture, as well as pay and benefits commensurate with their achievements.

“The companies that deserve the greatest recognition are those that view their appearance there as a journey rather than a destination,” says Austin.

Using past surveys to track the progression of companies — 64 of whom have competed for each of the past four years or longer — it is possible to identify those that have acted upon the results to make positive changes to their workplaces, in turn driving up scores.

Taking the average positive score to all unchanged questions in our employee questionnaire in the years 2004 to 2007, Camelot Group, the national lottery operator, emerges as the organisation that has done most to improve life for its employees.

The full top 10 improvers are:

Camelot, up 11.3% to 75.5%
The Royal Bank of Scotland, up 7.8% to 67.6%
Admiral Group, up 7.0% to 74.7%
Faber Maunsell, up 6.5% to 70.2%
The Davis Group, ranked 32nd on the SME list, up 5.9% to 77.3%
Denplan, up 5.7% to 78.0%
King Sturge, up 5.2% to 74.9%
Pannone, up 4.4% to 79.1%
Data Connection, up 1.1% to 77.9%
Beaverbrooks, up 0.9% to 79.4%

Behind these figures — which identify Pannone and Beaverbrooks as the two companies most likely to challenge Gore for the Best Companies crown — lie big improvements in the responses to several key questions in the survey. The biggest strides have been made by leaders and middle managers, both of whom have upped their game considerably.

The biggest lift (5.9%) has been in the response to the statement: senior managers truly live the values of this organisation. Much of the large gain here has been made in the past year. Companies are also run by the leaders on sounder moral principles (up 4% between 2004 and 2007), they make a more positive difference to the world we live in (up 3.9%) and provide more stimulating places in which to work (up 2.4%) compared to results three years ago.

Managers have become better role models (up 1.9%), company bosses are more inspiring (up 1.8%), managers have become better at helping staff fulfil their potential (up 1.6%), companies are run on stronger values and principles (up 1.5%) and there is a stronger sense of family in workers’ teams (up 1.5%).

The net effect of all this is that more staff are responding positively to the statement: This is my dream job. Although still boasting only a 48.4% positive score on average (which means that more people still disagree than agree with the statement), this is up 1.3% over the past three years.

There is only one area which has shown a year-on-year decline between 2004 and now. The positive response to the statement: I am under so much pressure at work I can’t concentrate scored 72.1% in 2004, which has fallen now to 70.1%. The implication is that, even in the best companies to work for, workplace pressure is increasing. In financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, pressure comes with the job. But it has not prevented Goldmans finishing as the Best Big Company to Work For. It comes top in five of the eight factors in our survey and tops the poll in 34 out of the 70 questions in the employee survey — see page 10 for what makes Goldman Sachs tick.

Michael Sherwood, joint chief executive of Goldman Sachs, offers this view on pressure at work. “People talk a lot about stress in our industry but the reality is that stress is not knowing where your next meal is coming from.

“I think stress is something people here deal with because they’re very ambitious, very motivated. We don’t pretend that being a trader on a desk 10 hours a day is what everybody wants.”

His view is certainly borne out in the scores recorded by Goldman Sachs where for leadership, personal growth, my company and fair dealing, it enjoys at least a 8% lead over the average score of all other big companies in our list.

Another company to prove that stress need not be barrier to success in our lists is NATS, the national air traffic control service. It doesn’t get much more stressful than keeping thousands of air-liners safe in the skies above Britain, but NATS breaks into the 20 Best Big Companies to Work For list this year.

The biggest enemy of any workplace is worker disengagement. The impact of even slight disengagement is outlined on pages 44-45. Even in the top 10 mid-size and top two big companies, 9.2% of employees say they would quit tomorrow if offered another job. Although this rises to 25.2% among unlisted firms — those surveyed that failed to make the top 100s — it demonstrates the latent disaffection within even best companies.

And it appears age is the only barrier that prevents workers from voting with their feet. There is no difference in the ranks of the disaffected between men and women, married and single or those with children and those without. However, we have identified 10 key steps to keeping your workforce engaged by looking at the answers given in our survey by staff responding positively and negatively to the statement: I would leave tomorrow if I had another job.

Excite your employees about where your organisation is going and acknowledge their contribution. This, more than anything else, is likely to keep a workforce engaged and shield employers from the huge costs of retraining.

A morning or afternoon working from home is another tip for the top. The number of workers in top 10 companies working up to 10% of the time from home has increased from 14.1% in 2005 to 31.7% now (see also page 45).

Life in the best companies to work for in Britain is changing — and, with scores rising, it is changing for the better. Our three surveys are a barometer of that improvement. As an employee in one of the 220 companies we feature, you are already basking in the sun; if looking for warmer climes use our guides to chart your course; if you are an employer and you choose to ignore our findings, you may be facing stormy times ahead.

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