Page 16 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

Employee Engagement C3

in these events has been collected annually since 2004 by Quantum
Workplace of Omaha, Nebraska.
As surveys began to flow into the servers at Quantum Workplace in
2004, we immediately began noticing results and trends we found inter-
esting. We were occasionally inspired by reading the positive employee
comments at winning companies and often horrified at comments from
companies where employee engagement scores were low. (After reading
remarks from employees at a hospital in one small town, we resolved
that if we ever find ourselves driving through that community and hap-
pen to take ill, we’ll just pop a couple of aspirin and keep driving!)

: THE BEST-PLACES-TO-WORK DATABASE

With millions of surveys collected from over 10,000 employers, we
believe our analysis of Quantum Workplace’s ongoing research to be,
in some respects, the most comprehensive analysis of employee en-
1
gagement in the United States. According to Greg Harris, president
of Quantum Workplace: “Other researchers may have collected as many or
more individual surveys, but the Best-Places-to-Work project has allowed
us to view a larger and more diverse sample of employers, especially with
regard to company size.” The breadth of the Quantum Workplace da-
tabase has had a significant impact on the insights we present in this
book. Simply stated, with this wider perspective of employee engage-
ment from so many employers—small, medium-size, and large—we
were able to glean insights that other researchers may not have been
able to uncover because of the more limited scope of their data.

: CAN A BEST-PLACE-TO-WORK BE ANYPLACE?

Conventional thinking might suggest that Best-Places-to-Work winners
must come from trendy, high-profile industries, such as fast-growth,