Smash hit

Wellbeing: how staff feel about stress, pressure and the balance between their work and home duties.

My Manager: people’s feelings towards their immediate boss and their day-to-day managers.

My Team: people’s feelings about their immediate colleagues.

Fair Deal: how happy the workforce is with pay and benefits.

Giving Something Back: how much companies are thought by their staff to put back into society in general, and the local community in particular.

My Company: feelings about the company people work for as opposed to the people they work with.

Personal Growth: whether staff feel challenged by their job, their skills are being used and if there is scope for advancement.

GSB has always been the lowest-scoring factor in the survey but, for the first time this year, Fair Deal finishes beneath it, earning an average 63.1% positive score among all 100 mid-sized companies, compared with 64.1% for Giving Something Back.

Improved efforts to protect the environment (with a positive score up 1.2% to 68.1%) and making a positive difference to the world (up 1.3% to 66.2%) are the two individual questions across all eight factors showing the most significant increase in their scores among the top 100 — both of them prominent GSB questions.

Perhaps once viewed as the Cinderella factor, this is no longer the case, as Jonathan Austin, chief executive of Best Companies Ltd explains.

“A strong commitment to giving something back to the local and wider community really pays dividends for companies. It affects scores not just in Giving Something Back, but also in the My Company, My Manager and My Team factors. In the case of Beaverbrooks and the Best Big Companies’ winner, KPMG, it has really made the difference and lifted these companies to the top.”

With the winner of the Best Small Companies to Work For contest being a charity, Christians Against Poverty, the message seems clear.

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