Page 333 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

320B RE-ENGAGE

another, as in high on senior leadership and low on employee well-
being, or high on job enrichment and growth, but low on valuing
and recognizing employees. Indeed, we have not been able to find
any such high-low pairings among any of the winning employers in
our database since 2004! What we did find (among second-tier non-
winning employers that scored in the sixtieth to eightieth percen-
tiles) were high scores on some drivers paired with average scores on
others.
Best Places to Work, where employees genuinely believe they are
lucky to be employed, can be likened to fine diamonds, which grade
high on all six qualities on which they are rated—shape, clar-
ity, cut, carat weight, color, and certification. Or for more musi-
cally inclined readers, the six drivers can also be compared to the
six strings on a well-tuned guitar that resonate and harmonize to
create the desired sound. A missing or out-of-tune string destroys
the effect. Still, depending on the tune being played, some strings
are more important than others, and, just so, some drivers are
more important depending on the employer’s business and talent
strategies.

: WHERE TO BEGIN

We know of no employer that has a perfect score on any of the six
engagement drivers. So there is always room for improvement. Here
are some questions that senior leaders and HR executives need to be
asking:

: Is our business strategy clear enough that we can easily iden-
tify which functional units or locations and which positions
are most critical to the achievement of that strategy, both
short term and long term?
: Are our business objectives clear enough—in all units and
locations and at all levels of the organization—that we are