2017 Workforce 100: Ranking the World’s Top Companies for HR

Excelling in each area of human resources is no small feat. Workforce pinpointed seven core areas: workplace culture; employee benefits; diversity and inclusion; employee development/talent management; HR innovation; leadership development; and talent acquisition. To realize the importance of these categories and take action to improve them pushes a company from good to great.

Now in its fourth year, the Workforce 100 recognizes companies that excel in HR over the course of a year. To determine which companies make the list, Workforce editors work with researchers from the Human Capital Media Advisory Group, the publication’s research arm.

The research team created a statistical formula to sift through publicly available data on HR performance to separate the best from the rest. To give employees more of a “say,” we asked recruiting and job review website Glassdoor Inc. to provide data on what workers are saying about the companies that made our short list. From there, we combined that information with the public data available to create our 2017 Workforce 100 list.

Besides being No. 1 in 2017, Google also is one of the 28 companies to make the Workforce 100 all four years.

[Please read: The Workforce 100 2014]

This year’s list heralded 25 previously unranked companies. That’s why we touched base with several first-timers that made an impression with some aspect of their HR strategy. Associate Editor Andie Burjek interviewed executives at companies including Ultimate Software (No. 19), West Monroe Partners (No. 31), LaSalle Network (No. 38) and Grant Thornton (No. 92) to get the scoop on their best workplace practices.

[Click here to read this feature listing the 25 first-time companies and exploring what some of them have done to stay excellent in HR.]

Welcome to the Workforce 100 list, first-timers; that’s some high-class HR company you’re keeping these days.

WORKFORCE 100 METHODOLOGY

The Workforce 100 is the rank order and scores of the 100 companies that performed best in seven core areas: workplace culture, employee benefits, diversity and inclusion, employee development and talent management, human resources innovation, leadership development, and talent acquisition. The working assumption behind the list is that high performance in these core categories provides a reasonable proxy for overall HR excellence.

To create the ranking, researchers at the Human Capital Media Advisory Group, the research arm of Workforce magazine, collected available public data from a representative list of established benchmarking and ranking programs in the identified categories and partnered with Glassdoor to include data on employee satisfaction in key areas. This allowed researchers to generate a score based equally on depth and breadth of outside recognition and internal recognition.

The reason for this change in methodology was to create a ranked list that made comprehensive HR participation and employee feedback on their respective employers the primary focus rather than excellence in one core area. Using this method, organizations that are recognized on multiple lists but do not perform perfectly will be ranked higher than organizations that are ranked in one area but perform better in a single discipline. In addition, organizations that are not as heavily represented in external recognition programs are still acknowledged for their HR efforts through the posted opinions of their employees.

To generate the score, researchers first looked at how many lists with HR relevance a particular company appeared on, which makes up half of the total score (maximum of 5 points). The other half of the score (also with a maximum of 5 points) was derived from an average of the company’s Glassdoor performance in areas pertaining to HR. These scores are then added together to create the final score.

Component Lists:

Note: Some of the component lists are compiled by active participation from the companies listed and therefore do not recognize companies that decline to participate.