What motivates Employees & What motivates Employers

Every year we get know the top places to work for. Somewhere in 2006 or 2007 I exactly don’t remember, Microsoft ranked 1 (A research on best companies to work for in India – Not Forbes) but never retained the place starting 2009. For 2013, it is ranking beyond the 30’s in Forbes list. While there is no correlation between an Indian and American workers context, this article/blog is not about the ranking or its accuracy on what place a company has been trending over the past decade across the globe but more into what motivates employees that in turn motivates employers to provide them with irresistible benefits. What do you think came in first. The chicken or egg. The situation is similar.

Here is the list: http://www.today.com/money/google-tops-fortunes-list-best-companies-work-2D11936133

 Now did they rank in top three because they were given free lunches, snacks, gym memberships, insurance, sick leaves etc.. OR that was a result of company growing in profits because of Product Innovation and a culture that foster the same. IMHO, it is the employees that trigger this whole benefits process or they tend to be loyal and work hard around innovation for the company while they grow. The company and its culture facilitates this foster the people concept. BTW, ‘foster the people’ is a music band.

Let’s take a moment to decipher the core of these companies. Google, as we all know dominates in search space and has now become ubiquitous. Other products are gaining popularity and recently Google maps captured an image of an unidentified flying object. This is like working for a sci-fi company and not to forget that the stock price is trading at a $1000 plus mark. That definitely makes it unique and also the policy of the company wherein they let any employee work on innovation projects for 20% of their weekly punched hours. Now that is definitely motivating. Given the fact that there is money for every employee, there is also tremendous opportunity to play your strengths around innovation. So it’s a hub for a knowledge worker and someone ambitious to make money. The result is a win-win situation.

The most interesting new entry is SaS which originally started as an Institute specializing in Statistics and Statistical software. Today the world of Analytics has made it more popular and it is actually the closed source or licensed software for analytics. Many open source competitors like R Analytics are offering analytic software free but SaS definitely is a leader from a market share perspective. What is it that made SaS get to number 2 rubbing shoulders with Google. Again it is a knowledge workers hub and specially when you are dealing with advanced statistics and analytical software that caters to business world and not forget the Clinical Trial Business. The employees are smart and motivated. The company offering all the freebies will actually turn them into loyal workers as they take a sense of ownership and literally become shareholders/partners of the company. The cocktail of both benefits and knowledge becomes a successful recipe for any company to get to the top 3 or for that matter top 25.

The most interesting 3^rd arrival is Boston Consulting Group that is not a product based company but has bagged the coveted third place. Note that my analysis on Google and SaS was an obvious one with my own views based on the industry information. However I am still figuring the forte of the third winner which is primarily into consulting. Wondering whatever happened to the Big 4.

 While the authenticity of the survey and sampling mechanism is debatable, the fact of the matter is that top three were very much in top 5 last year with Google and SaS being the repeat offenders.