When the heat is on, so the saying goes, you really find out what your
strengths are and who you want fighting by your side. For the 252 staff at
Heat, winner of this year’s Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For
contest, team spirit, inspiring leadership and great craic are the pillars
on which its success are founded.
The bond that exists between all the staff at this Belfast-based firm of
central heating engineers is self-evident. In the space of three years, Heat
has advanced from a ranking of 31st in 2006, to 10th last year, to this year
ousting W L Gore & Associates as the Best Company to Work For. No mean
feat this, as Gore had topped our survey for four years, from 2004 to 2007.
We predicted last year that the pack was closing on the standards of
excellence that it had set for so long. And so it proved.
Heat’s triumph in this survey over its predominantly white-collar rivals is
founded on one key quality, according to its founder and managing director
Bill McCandless. Communication.
“We work hard to make it simple,” he says. “People confuse simple with easy.
But simple is actually very hard. If you make it simple, everybody
understands and that makes it more likely to last.
“We have a big-company approach to many things and a small-company approach to
others and it makes for quite a strong blend,” he says. “We like to think we
have a degree of professionalism and the culture of a large company in terms
of training and investment, with the tight-knit element of a small company.”
This principle helps Heat to come out top in one of the new questions in the
66-point employee survey, which lies at the heart of our contest. Employees
give a 76.1% positive score for teams and departments working well together.
Teamwork is key when 90% of your staff work on-site, installing and
maintaining domestic central heating across Northern Ireland and the
Republic of Ireland as well as England.
In all, 311 companies entered this year’s 100 Best Companies to Work For
contest. A further 44 put themselves forward for the separate 20 Best Big
Companies to Work For survey, the results of which are detailed on pages 14
to 25 of this magazine. That competition was topped by KPMG, the accountancy
giant, repeating its success of 2006 and knocking Goldman Sachs off top spot
to third this year.
Last week saw Christians Against Poverty, a Bradford-based debt counselling
charity, crowned as the Sunday Times Best Small Company to Work For, beating
off competition from 512 other small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to
make it two wins in two years for organisations from the charity sector in
the SME list.
The three surveys captured the opinions of 180,000 employees, up from 148,645
in 2007. In the space of two years, the number of workers surveyed by Best
Companies Ltd, the organisation that conducts the research behind the three
lists, has more than doubled. It is the biggest survey of its kind in the UK
and a definitive guide to best employment practice and the most dynamic and
desirable places to work.
The methodology was devised exclusively for the British workplace and has been
refined over the past six years to produce this year’s lists. No amount of
window dressing by human resources departments can help companies triumph.
All the organisations listed have been placed here by their own employees.
They are asked to respond on a seven-point scale about life at their firms,
ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. The 66 statements
Sfall into eight clearly-defined areas, or factors, strength in each of
which is essential to be one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. The
eight factors 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 its pay and benefits.
- Giving Something Back: how much companies are thought by their staff to put
back into society in general, 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.
Taking the 100 Best (mid-sized) Companies, scores in six of the eight factors
have dropped year on year, four of them by statistically significant
amounts. The biggest fall was in leadership scores, down 1.8% from 75.5%
positive in 2007 to 73.7% this year. Scores for My Team also fell, this time
down 1.2% from a top-scoring 77.5% last year to 76.3% this. It is now
narrowly edged out by My Company (76.4%, and also slightly down) as the
highest scoring factor.
There were smaller falls for My Manager, down from 73.3% to 72.8%, and for
Personal Growth and Wellbeing, both down 0.1% to 72.9% and 66.7%
respectively.
While Fair Deal scores rise 0.3% this year to 63.4%, the only factor to make
significant gains is Giving Something Back, which rises 1.8% year on year
from 61.6% to 63.4%, recovering all the ground lost in 2007. Much of this
can be attributed to the attention being paid by business to its
environmental profile.
Geoff Armstrong, director-general of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development, sponsors of this year’s Best Companies survey, believes this
change is significant. “A lot of people, particularly those in their
twenties and thirties, want to work for someone socially and ethically
respectable.
“It’s important for them that their company fits into a bigger context than
just profits for shareholders, that it behaves as a good corporate citizen.”
A 3.2% rise (from 64.3% to 67.5%) in the positive score given by employees for
their organisation doing enough to protect the environment bears witness to
the impetus coming from employees to drive companies towards literally
cleaning up their act. Sharp rises of 4.6% (from 56.2% to 60.8%) for
organisations putting more back into their communities, and 1.9% (from 63.3%
to 65.2%) for companies not being driven only by budget and profit concerns,
contribute to the rise in the overall Giving Something Back (GSB) factor.
Of the four questions to see the highest increases in their positive score,
only one – which measures whether employees feel they are spending too much
time at work – lies outside the GSB factor. The 2% rise in the positive
score suggests fewer workers feel they are spending too much time at work.
However, the positive score recorded for happiness with work-life balance
records one of the largest falls (down 2.2% to 64.7%) since last year.
Dr Pete Bradon, director of research for Best Companies Ltd, believes the
changing economic climate could be behind these apparently contradictory
findings. “The figures suggest that while people might accept that they have
to spend more time at work, possibly securing their own or their company’s
position, they recognise that in doing so there is developing a greater
imbalance between working and domestic life.”
Further evidence that the slowdown might be affecting the Best Companies to
Work For lists is provided by analysis of the factor scores among the 20
Best Big Companies to Work For. In these companies, all eight factors have
recorded increases since 2007, continuing the trend previously seen with the
mid-sized companies of broad progression in scores from one year to the next.
Giving Something Back again records the biggest jump (up 3.9% to 58.9%),
followed by Wellbeing (up 2.6% to 62.7%), My Manager (up 2% to 71.1%), My
Company (up 1.3% to 73.6%), Leadership and Personal Growth (both up 1% to
69.1% and 71.1% respectively), My Team (up 0.4% to 73.7%) and Fair deal (up
0.2% to 59%).
Armstrong believes there are good reasons why bigger companies (with more than
5,000 employees) appear to be faring better in relative terms in our
surveys. “The very large firms are competing globally anyway. Their terms of
reference are ones of perpetual turbulence; regulations and customer choices
are always on the move.
“For some of the smaller companies, their concerns are more short-term and
more to do with the domestic market. If you can’t see job security or
maintenance of the training budgets, it’s demoralising for staff. In these
circumstances, you have to be open with people and tell them what is going
on,” says Armstrong, echoing the words of Bill McCandless at Heat.
In many ways, Heat embodies this year’s list. It is the top performing company
for Giving Something Back, triumphing also in the Wellbeing factor. No
company scores higher for work not interfering with home responsibilities,
with an 83.3% positive score.
The company, which operates solely in the social housing sector, has the top
score in six of the 66 employee survey statements, three of them relating to
the My Manager factor. No business has more workers who believe their
managers to be excellent role models (79.9%), great motivators (79.8%) and
brilliant leaders (85.0%).
Heat’s triumph is founded on top 10 rankings in 55 of the 66 statements, and
top three finishes in 29 of them.
Jonathan Austin, chief executive of Best Companies Ltd, is full of admiration
for Heat’s achievement, and acknowledges the part played by four-times
winners W L Gore & Associates in making Britain a better workplace. “For
years, W L Gore [now ranked 11, see table on page 6] provided the
bench-mark. It saw the light first and showed that a happy, engaged
workforce is also a productive and profitable one. Heat’s achievement in
only its third year on the list is outstanding. The challenge for Heat now
is to stay there, as it is now the company in everyone’s sights.”
Of businesses ranked just below the winner, Beaverbrooks the Jewellers looks
best placed to mount a serious assault on the summit. Its overall score has
risen each year for the past four years and now stands at 79.8%, ranking
third overall. Managing director Mark Adlestone wins our special award for
leadership for a remarkable fourth time in five years (see pages 8-9).
With an inspirational leader such as Adlestone at the helm, it is hard to
believe that he might not get a response from all of his staff, but our
feature on “floating voters” in the 100 Best Companies (see pages 44-45)
shows there are large numbers of employees at all levels of seniority who
have no strong views either way about their managers.
So even for the Best Companies to Work For, there are plenty of challenges. As
this year’s survey shows, not even the very best are immune from the more
uncertain economic climate. What cannot be questioned, however, is that far
from it being an expendable luxury, striving to be one of the Best Companies
to Work For provides a reassurance that is even more critical now for
employers and employees alike.
