5 Principles That Can Make Your Organization a “Great Place to Work”
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Creating a great place to work has always been a challenge. Now, with new work arrangements being put in place, from hybrid or remote models to the more traditional in-office approach, this challenge is even greater.
The good news is that substantial research, from us as well as leading academic and organizational researchers, clearly establishes that autonomy is a key driver of employee commitment, well-being, and performance. The implications of these findings for the “new workplace” and the higher expectations of employees prompted us to ask if a set of basic leadership principles—easily remembered and implemented—could be developed to help managers engage employees across all generational and work-related structures.
The idea of basic leadership principles for managers was introduced by development company Zenger Miller in the 1980s. (In fact, several members of the BE GREAT LLC team worked for Zenger Miller during the 1980s and ‘90s when the principles were adopted and enhanced.)
Over the years, managers from thousands of organizations all over the world embraced these basic principles to guide their approach to leadership. We had a hunch that today’s Great Place To Work® winners, selected from the Fortune ranking of Best Companies to Work For®, would give us clues as to what those basic principles are today.
The Fortune survey that is used to determine the Best Companies ranking has an established history and a reputation for methodological rigor and comprehensive sample groups. We concluded that this research would be our best source of knowledge and insight for determining the basic leadership principles needed today.
Our Director of Research, Asha Knudson, PhD, led our exploration into Fortune’s 2022 rankings of Best Companies to Work For® with a view to identifying the autonomy-related leadership principles that differentiate the five highest ranked companies and underlie their employee experience.
The 2022 survey is based on 870,000 employee survey responses representing 6.1 million employees. Topping the rankings for 2022 are Cisco, Hilton, Wegmans Food Markets, Salesforce, and NVIDIA. Ninety-four percent (94%) of employees at these top-ranked companies say their company is a great place to work, compared to 57% of employees at a typical U.S. company.
To deduce our new leadership basic principles, we began by looking at the quantitative employee experience survey data and identified common themes across the five companies, which included pride, support, self-determination, and ethical management. We followed up with additional secondary research into executives’ speeches, company web sites, and recent articles to identify the contributing factors that make these five companies great places to work. We specifically probed topics such as company culture, values, leadership practices, competencies, and the employee value proposition.
From insights we gained in analyzing these contributing factors, five autonomy-related basic leadership principles emerged for managing now. They are:
1. Recognize and value the ways that employees work best.
2. Respect employees and listen to what they say.
3. Promote the well-being and success of every person.
4. Provide opportunities for everyone to improve through effort, coaching, and practice.
5. Empower employees to make decisions and take risks that elevate their work.
These are the basic leadership principles practiced by managers in the top five Great Place to Work organizations. These managers, it seems, have learned to lead with autonomy.
Our own research reveals exactly what managers can do to lead with autonomy and build a great place to work. It explains how they can establish an environment that supports and values employees and their choices, regardless of the organization’s work model or requirements
Managers can overcome their own micromanagement triggers and learn to avoid less effective reactions rooted in well-intended but outdated or unexamined beliefs about control, efficiency, and accountability. In doing so, they will foster the employee motivation and engagement that drive productivity and that enable every company, including yours, to reach its potential and become a Great Place to Work.
To learn more about how to bring the advantages of autonomy to your workforce, visit our website or ask us about Leading with Autonomy® (LWA), a targeted program from BE GREAT LLC that offers tools and practices leaders can use to provide their teams greater flexibility while maintaining or growing productivity, accountability, and quality for both workers and customers.
John H. (Jack) Zenger, co-founder of Zenger Miller, and his partner, Dale Miller, reworked ideas developed in the 1970s by two Syracuse University professors of industrial and organizational psychology into Zenger Miller’s first three principles and then added two more in the 1980s to create these five.
1. Focus on the situation, issue, or behavior, not on the person.
2. Maintain the self-confidence and self-esteem of others.
3. Maintain constructive relationships.
4. Take initiative to make things better.
5. Lead by example.Best Companies to Work For and Great Place to Work are trademarks of Fortune and Fortune Media.
