There is a watertight case for the company at the top of the 2005 Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For list having the happiest — and being the luckiest — workforce in Britain. In retaining its title of Best Company to Work For, W L Gore & Associates has managed this year to do something never achieved before.

It has done so as competition has intensified. While it is hard to get to the top of our list, it is even harder to stay there. This year, 449 companies took part in our contest to find Britain’s best employer, 228 of them fighting for a place on our main list. The views of 80,212 employees (47,927 working in companies on the main list) were canvassed across a range of 66 questions, making it by far the most comprehensive study of the British workplace ever mounted.

Being one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For is a journey rather than a destination — and the year-on-year scores in our employee survey prove it. Across all questions, the overall positive response score nudged up 0.3% to 68.2%, three times the rise of the previous year and indicative of the fact that it is not possible to stand still and continue to thrive in our list.

Gore has long been noted in the business world for its employment practices, just as it is famed in the wider world for the breathable water-resistant fabric it manufactures for an extensive range of outdoors wear. In a flat company structure, all staff are associates, there are no managers, and pay and position are partly governed by colleagues, who rate individual contribution on a scale of one to six.

John Kennedy, head of the UK associates, says: “Sometimes it’s a tough environment if you don’t have any frames of reference. But if you do any basic fundamental research into management, you know if you can get people to also think (what you’re suggesting) is a good idea you’re going to get things to happen a lot better and stick a lot longer.”

Kennedy adds: “That’s not rocket science. It’s pretty simple stuff, but it’s amazing how many companies can’t get their heads round that.”

Gore’s triumph is remarkable. It has the highest scores in 37 of the 66 questions in our employee survey and finishes second or third in a further 11. It top scores in six of the eight “factors” — or groupings of questions around a similar theme.

The eight factors are:

Personal growth: to what extent people feel they are stretched and challenged by their job.

In response to a series of statement, employees are asked to score them on a seven-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Ratings for leadership, my manager, giving something back and personal growth have increased significantly this year. Those for wellbeing and my team have fallen, and while scores for fair dealing are up on last year, they are still well below the level recorded in 2003.

While the overall positive score for company leadership has risen from 69.3% to 70.1%, the factor score hides a wider range of responses on the quality of leadership in the 100 Best Companies.

A sharp rise in the positive score among employees for being inspired by the person leading their organisation (up from 65.5% in 2003, to 66.9% last year and 68.3% now) is balanced by an even sharper fall in the amount of faith they have in the leader (down from 75% in 2003, and 74.3% last year, to 71.2% now).

Responses to “senior managers do a lot of telling but not much listening” provide the closest correlation to the final standing of firms in our list. Bosses are listening more, our survey reveals: the positive score for this question up from 61.7% to 64.4%, but that still leaves a large body of often disaffected staff saying the boss talks more than he or she listens. The value of listening and its impact on leadership and efficiency is outlined in the next article.

In contrast to leadership scores, those in our wellbeing factor have fallen back from 65.4% positive last year to 64.7%. Employees are less happy with their work-life balance (down from a 65.3% positive score in 2003 to 64.7% now) and report greater levels of stress and exhaustion, which is the lowest scoring question in the survey this year.

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