Photo: Prima employees celebrate their Great Place to Work Certification™ amid the COVID-19 lockdown.
In recent months, we’ve talked a lot about how COVID-19 is affecting companies and teams around the world, and how the Best Workplaces™ are responding. We’ve touched on supporting employees’ mental health, how to keep remote teams engaged and how to create conversations around sensitive topics such as employee financial wellbeing, gender, race and more.
It would be easy to look at our COVID-19 resource hub and think that the only things a company can do during this time are about survival — minimising negative effects of the pandemic and living to fight another day. But while it’s true that some companies are still figuring out how to keep the lights on, the reality is that now is also a time to invest in the future of your organisation.
Certification™ by Great Place to Work®is a powerful way to give your people something to celebrate while helping you attract and retain the best talent.
Here’s how Certification benefits your organisation:
1) There has never been a more critical time to find out what your people are thinking.
In 2020, our understanding about what our company, people and customers want or need, and how they behave, has changed dramatically. The best way to find out what they’re thinking: our Trust Index© employee survey – the first step in earning Certification.
There are real costs to waiting until things get better to listen to your people:
By giving employees opportunities to express their experiences and ask questions in your survey, leaders provide a sense of ownership and influence during changes, which can greatly lower employee stress and fear. As one employee from certified company Brown-Forman UK shared:
In addition, surveys unlock a rich source of data and solutions for managing change. After all, your people are the key to revealing ideas that have the potential to transform your business and culture.
2) Great Place to Work® Certification signals that you are truly a people-first organisation.
Unfortunately, many companies say they put their people first, regardless of whether or not their actions actually back up these claims. So how do customers and jobseekers know which companies really care for their employees?
That’s where Certification comes in. It’s not something companies can fabricate. It’s not anecdotal. It’s a trusted stamp of approval, backed by quantitative and qualitative data from real employee survey responses.
Certification shows potential candidates and others that you consistently work on developing and improving your employee experience, and are committed to building and maintaining a high-trust company culture. Here, Hilton – a 2020 World’s Best Workplace™ – provides an extraordinary case study in being people-first during COVID-19:
CEO Chris Nasseta had stopped receiving his salary in late March and, together with other company leaders, made the difficult decision to cut about 22% of its total corporate workforce; extended previously announced furloughs, reduced work hours and decreased corporate pay. To support furloughed team members globally, Hilton created a partnership with leading companies with no job openings. The worldwide initiative connected displaced Hilton employees from hotels and corporate offices to more than a million short-term jobs created by the pandemic.
As of mid-September, Hilton had placed thousands of team members in temporary positions around the world. Some of the partner companies include Albertsons, Amazon, CVS, Lidl, Wegmans, and Walgreens.
“Our company’s spirit has always been grounded in a culture that supports our Team Members and delivers hospitality for our guests,” explains Nassetta. “We will keep that spirit alive, and when the world begins to travel again, we will be ready to welcome them back.”
As Hilton employees attest, their company never wavers from caring for them. And they’re ready to help it get back up.
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Start Your Journey to Certification!
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3) Certification builds trust, camaraderie and pride at a time when your employees need it most.
We are all searching for things to celebrate these days. Earning Certification is good news that your whole team can celebrate together – even if you are remote.
Here are some examples:
4) Certification tells employees that you care about them and their future.
To follow leaders, particularly through challenging times, people must believe they can rely on their leaders to deliver on promises and match actions to words. They fundamentally need to believe that their leaders care for them and their future.
Getting Certified sends a clear message to employees that you care about their experience and wellbeing. And when people feel like their company invests in them, they’ll put in their best for their company.
Now is the perfect time to show your commitment to being a people-first organisation – and to shout it from the rooftops!
Certification provides you and your employees an opportunity to smile
and celebrate one another when those moments are harder to come by.
4) Certification tells employees that you care about them and their future.
To follow leaders, particularly through challenging times, people must believe they can rely on their leaders to deliver on promises and match actions to words. They fundamentally need to believe that their leaders care for them and their future.
Getting Certified sends a clear message to employees that you care about their experience and wellbeing. And when people feel like their company invests in them, they’ll put in their best for their company.
Now is the perfect time to show your commitment to being a people-first organisation – and to shout it from the rooftops!
Certification provides you and your employees an opportunity to smile and celebrate one another when those moments are harder to come by.
© Great Place to Work® Institute. All Rights Reserved.
ABOUT OUR METHOLOGY
To be eligible for the World’s Best Workplaces list, a company must apply and be named to a minimum of 5 national Best Workplaces lists within our current 58 countries, have 5,000 employees or more worldwide, and at least 40% of the company’s workforce (or 5,000 employees) must be based outside of the home country. Extra points are given based on the number of countries where a company surveys employees with the Great Place to Work Trust Index©, and the percentage of a company’s workforce represented by all Great Place to Work surveys globally. Candidates for the 2017 Worlds Best Workplaces list will have appeared on national workplaces lists published in September 2016 through August 2017.
ABOUT OUR METHOLOGY
The Best Workplaces in Asia List
Great Place to Work® identifies the top organizations that create great workplaces in the Asian and Middle Eastern regions with the publication of the annual Best Workplaces in Asia list. The list recognizes companies in three size categories:
To be considered for inclusion, companies must appear on one or more of our national lists in the region, which includes Greater China (covering China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau), India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka and UAE. For the 2021 Asia List, companies ranked on the national list in the Philippines will also be included. Multinational organizations must meet the following requirements:
Multinationals also receive additional credit for their efforts to successfully create an excellent workplace culture in multiple countries in the region. The data used in the calculation of the regional list comes from national lists published in 2019 and early 2020.