Chapter 6
Better Business for a Better World
Great Places to Work For All help build a society defined by caring, fairness, shared prosperity, and individual opportunity.
As the U.S. space program was taking humanity to the moon last century, it was advancing our species on Earth as well. For one thing, NASA enabled African American women to play key roles in the “space race” against the Soviet Union.
The best-selling book (and hit movie) Hidden Figures captures the way African American women mathematicians, known as human “computers,” helped crunch the numbers behind NASA’s early rocket launches. One of the mathematicians, Katherine Johnson, calculated the complex trajectory for an orbital space flight. She got the assignment after asking for it boldly. “Tell me where you want the man to land,” she said, “and I’ll tell you where to send him up.”114
She backed up the boldness with a 1960 research paper, the first report published by a woman from the Aerospace Mechanics Division at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Johnson was so trusted that astronaut John Glenn asked for her to double-check the numbers from a mainframe computer before he lifted off on his historic flight to orbit the earth. Johnson also contributed to America’s signature space achievement: putting a man on the moon. Johnson determined the exact time the lunar landing vehicle needed to leave the moon’s surface to reconnect with the orbiting command service module.
NASA in those days was by no means a perfect place for women or African Americans. The 30 or so African American female “computers” depicted in the movie weren’t treated fairly or treated with full respect—most of them worked in a segregated unit, expected to use “colored” bathrooms. But NASA’s leaders wanted to achieve their mission. That meant they had to respect the mathematically powerful minds of those women to get the miraculous innovations required. And that respect, and the opportunities NASA provided, paid off for the women, the agency, and society. Although NASA’s African American women were largely “hidden figures” for many years, their contributions are now widely known and appreciated. So not only did NASA’s moonshots inspire people across the planet, Johnson and her peers gradually became important role models for both the African American community and for all girls and women interested in math and science.115
Despite its poor treatment of the African American “computers,” NASA and its leadership came to play a positive role in creating a fairer society, particularly in the U.S. south.116 Dr. Wernher von Braun, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, spoke out against discrimination in a 1964 speech to local business leaders. Von Braun, an émigré from Germany considered the father of rocket technology, used an analogy from the Cold War in Europe to make the point that poll taxes and other voting restrictions were wrong. “All these regulatory barriers form a ‘Berlin Wall’ around the ballot box,” he said. “I am not going to sit quietly on a major issue like segregation.”117
More than 50 years after von Braun’s comment, humanity still has not achieved full racial equality and inclusion. And globally, many other problems remain. Hundreds of millions of people spend the bulk of their time at workplaces that deaden their spirit, increase their stress, and erode their health. Thanks partly to frustrations with work, a lack of good jobs, and a tumultuous global economic system, the social fabric in the United States and around the globe is fraying. Political divides have widened as faith in each other has faltered.
In short, it’s an urgent time for business leaders to decide what kind of workplace they want to lead and what kind of world they want to live in. Just as in von Braun’s time, leaders have a choice about how to use their power and influence. Will they sit quietly in the face of challenges that seep into the business world? Or will they speak up and act—within and beyond their organizations—to solve problems plaguing society?
Today, leaders choosing the latter option are working to build Great Places to Work For All. These organizations are what the world needs now—desperately. By enabling people and businesses to reach their full potential, Great Places to Work For All help build a society defined by caring, fairness, shared prosperity, and individual opportunity.
Put another way, Great Places to Work For All free human beings everywhere to reach for the stars, as Katherine Johnson did, and to do so in harmony with one another.
In a World of Hurt
Harmony and mutual goodwill could use a boost today.
Suspicion and distrust are on the rise around the world. In 2017, the annual Trust Barometer published by communications firm Edelman showed that people’s trust declined globally in the four key institutions of business, government, nonprofits, and the media. Edelman found a majority of respondents worldwide lack full faith that the “system” works for them. “In this climate, people’s societal and economic concerns, including globalization, the pace of innovation and eroding social values, turn into fears, spurring the rise of populist actions now playing out in several Western-style democracies,” Edelman concluded.118
A relatively free global economy has lifted millions out of poverty in the developing world over the past few decades.119 But it has left behind many people in the developed world as jobs have moved overseas or been replaced by automation. The result has been heightened levels of financial insecurity, workplace stress, and increasing inequality within many developed nations.
Layoffs became a standard operating procedure in the 1990s and 2000s, and a whopping 8.7 million U.S. jobs were cut during the Great Recession roughly a decade ago.120 Instability has continued during the subsequent recovery. Recent research by the Pew Charitable Trusts found nearly half of Americans regularly experienced substantial fluctuations in income, earnings increased just 2 percent over the past decade for the typical American family, and only half of Americans feel financially secure.121
Job insecurity is a key part of the job stress facing Americans. Also contributing to work-related anxiety are a faster pace of business, an always-on workplace culture, and growing challenges in meeting professional and personal commitments, including childcare and eldercare. The stress adds up to a little-discussed crisis, where work is literally killing us slowly.122 As we mentioned in the previous chapter, work-related stress and the illnesses it causes lead to 120,000 deaths each year in America. That makes workplace anxiety more deadly than diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or influenza.123
At the same time, the problem hits society in the pocketbook in the form of unnecessary health care costs. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford University management professor and one of the authors of the research on the effects of workplace stress, estimates it costs the United States up to $190 billion annually—increasing the nation’s health care costs by 5 to 8 percent.124
Rising Inequality Brings the World Down
Globally, income disparities have been declining amid the economic success of countries such as China and Brazil. But the global trade system has also led to growing levels of inequality within most developed nations.125 That widening inequality represents a problem for individual countries and the world as a whole. Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson has documented the corrosive effects on society when wealth disparities are large. Among them are physical and mental illness, violence, low math and literacy scores among young people, lower levels of trust, and weaker community life.126
These problems, he notes, stem from the way great inequity in status leads human beings to see themselves as adversaries rather than allies. “Whether society has great inequality and a strong status hierarchy, whether there is a strong sense of superiority and inferiority, tells us whether we are in the same boat together and depend on cooperation and reciprocity, or whether we have to fend for ourselves in a dog-eat-dog society,” Wilkinson writes.
It also turns out that our overall global prosperity suffers from high levels of inequality. A 2014 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that countries where income inequality is decreasing grow faster than those with rising inequality.127
Not only is our world facing challenges of inequality, job stress, economic insecurity, and distrust, but the human race is pining for a good job. That’s what polling firm Gallup found in its surveys of global sentiment. Over the last century, the “will of the world” changed from wanting things such as peace, freedom, and family to wanting a good job.128 This shift is driven in part by young people who forge close friendships through work and want meaning and development from their jobs, says Gallup CEO Jim Clifton. And yet, as we mentioned in the previous chapter, Gallup also has discovered that just 30 percent of Americans are engaged at work, a number that drops to a paltry 15 percent worldwide.
“What the whole world wants is a good job, and we are failing to deliver it—particularly to millennials,” Clifton says. “This means human development is failing, too. Most millennials are coming to work with great enthusiasm, but the old management practices—forms, [focusing on skill] gaps, and annual reviews—grinds the life out of them.”129
The Role of Great Places to Work For All
We agree with Clifton overall. We waste human potential at workplaces worldwide on a scale that is scarcely imaginable. But not all companies are failing to deliver a good job or promote human development. The best workplaces, the ones we’ve honored on our lists and that are striving to become Great Places to Work For All, are delivering these goods and more. They are quietly counteracting global trends of mistrust, economic anxiety, and inequality.
They provide not only good jobs but great ones. Not just full-time work with a steady paycheck but a workplace where people trust their leaders, enjoy their colleagues, and take pride in their jobs. What’s more, these workplaces have been getting better over time. We have noted that even the best workplaces have gaps—pockets of people not having as positive an experience as others. Still, the overall levels of trust, pride, and camaraderie that we measure in our employee surveys have climbed 14 percent over the 20 years we’ve been ranking the 100 Best Companies to Work For in America. In 2017, a striking 91 percent of employees at the 100 Best said that taking everything into account, they would call their organization a great place to work.
And those great experiences ripple outward.
Companies that Care
In the first place, Great Places to Work For All contribute to a world that’s more caring. This starts with the ways these organizations foster positive, human relationships at work, where leaders and coworkers care about each other. People aren’t cogs in a machine, mere numbers, or warm bodies. As we discussed in the previous chapter, coworkers facing crises like a serious illness or the death of a loved one can expect support, concern, consoling.
But the care employees experience at a great workplace comes from more than just the empathy of bosses and colleagues. Among the factors that Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer cites for a healthy environment that minimizes stress-related illnesses are a measure of control over one’s work, the ability to resolve conflicts between work and family commitments, perceived justice at work, and job security. All these are generally present at Great Places to Work For All. For example, even as many Americans have ridden an economic roller coaster that’s left them more anxious than thrilled, the Best Workplaces have preserved—or increased—a measure of job stability. The share of employees at the 100 Best who say “I believe management would lay people off only as a last resort” has ticked upward, from 81 percent in 1998 to 85 percent in 2017.
It adds up to a holistically healthier environment. At the 2017 100 Best Companies, 84 percent said they work at a “psychologically and emotionally healthy place to work.” In other words, people generally don’t experience the lingering feelings of anger and humiliation from being ridiculed by the boss. They don’t worry about leaving work early to see a child’s soccer game. In fact, many have some level of control over their hours and where they work. And they don’t feel powerless about how to do their job well or worry that their position will be wiped out on a whim. On the contrary, they feel respected. For the most part, they feel great at work.
And they bring that positivity home, where they can be better at caring for the people in their lives beyond work: their spouses or partners, their kids, their friends and neighbors.
As one employee at a Great Place to Work–Certified company shared:
What REALLY works for me is my full-time work from home status. I LOVE this benefit more than anything else. I’m able to have three hours back in my day that I would otherwise spend on getting ready and commuting. Instead, I use this time to exercise and get dinner on the table for my kids at a reasonable time! I am a better employee, a better wife, and a better mom because of this benefit and for that I am extremely grateful.
Many great workplaces take care a step further, with generous policies that enable and help employees to care for family members in need. In 2016, for example, professional services firm Deloitte announced it would give employees 16 weeks of fully paid family leave time for caregiving. The benefit is very generous by U.S. standards, where companies are not required by federal law to give employees paid time off.130
Health insurance coverage is another way great workplaces care for a wider circle of people. As a rule, the 100 Best offer coverage for employees and their family members. And amidst turmoil about the fate of federal policy on health care, employer-provided health insurance is the most desired employment benefit.131
Apart from directly providing support to employees and their loved ones, great workplaces typically show significant care for the communities around them.132 Much of the community service by great workplaces takes place locally, but many organizations extend their care across the globe. Belgian shoe store chain Torfs is a good example. The 600-employee company, a Best Workplace in Europe, has supported disadvantaged children in poorer countries, including a group of students in Nepal. Torfs employees effectively adopted these 31 children, with some staffers traveling to the Nepalese village of Sekha to work directly with community leaders.
When Nepal suffered a massive earthquake in April 2015, it shook Torfs employees half a world away. They organized a fundraising campaign at stores. Isabel Van Goethem, a marketing employee at Torfs, wrote a blog on the company website about how her own children were anxious to hear about whether one of the Torfs’s “godchildren” in Nepal, Nikesh, was okay in the wake of the earthquake. “The devastation is enormous, we see the images on the news but also the pictures that we see from our Nepalese friends,” Van Goethem wrote. “My heart sinks into my shoes.”
Hearts lightened some as Torfs employees learned that the Nepalese children they have bonded with in Sekha survived the big quake and aftershocks. The incident captures the way the Great Places to Work For All build a more caring world in concentric circles. Employees, family members, and people in communities near and far connect, look after each other, treat each other better.
Fairness on the March
Great Places to Work For All have a similar impact regarding fairness—the second major way they contribute to a better world.
This fairness effect begins with a devotion on the part of leaders at Great Places to Work For All to treat people equitably. Fairness is a simple concept, but it is not easy for leaders to achieve—especially in large, complex organizations. Fair treatment in pay, promotions, and other matters isn’t necessarily equal treatment, given different job levels and responsibilities.
Nonetheless, the Best Workplaces have made significant progress over the past 20 years when it comes to evenhandedness. Employee ratings of fairness have improved 22 percent at the 100 Best from 1998 to 2017, outpacing the other four workplace dimensions we measure—respect, credibility, pride, and camaraderie.
Best Workplaces have been at the forefront of pushing to close gender pay gaps. These efforts are part of a larger picture showing great workplaces to be countering the income disparities that can be so corrosive in society. To be sure, the CEOs of Best Workplaces earn pay packages that can reach into the millions. But these organizations demonstrate a measure of restraint in their executive pay often lacking at other big companies. In a 2016 study with research firm Equilar, we found the median CEO pay at publicly traded 100 Best Companies was about 19 percent less than at the S&P 500 ($8.3 million vs. $10.3 million).133 In other words, CEOs at great workplaces are paid plenty, but they are more concerned than their peers elsewhere about sharing the gains with their entire team.
Indeed, employee perceptions that they are paid fairly has risen over the past 20 years at the 100 Best. The figure has climbed 22 percent, such that in 2017, nearly four out of five employees believed pay was fair.
Beyond greater economic fairness, great workplaces are promoting a society that treats all its members equitably. Yes, within the walls of great workplaces, there are groups not having as positive an experience as others. But the Best Workplaces have been making progress. For example, the share of employees who say people are treated fairly regardless of race has climbed 10 percentage points to 95 percent, while belief in equitable treatment regardless of gender has jumped 12 percentage points to 93 percent. We didn’t track bias against employees identifying as LGBTQ in 1998, but in 2017, fully 96 percent of employees at the 100 Best said people were treated fairly regardless of their sexual orientation. And as we’ve discussed earlier, leaders of Best Workplaces, such as EY’s Beth Brooke-Marciniak and PwC’s Tim Ryan, are raising their voices in the public sphere, calling explicitly for a more inclusive, kinder, fairer society.
Great Places to Work For All, though, aren’t just fostering greater fairness in the United States. The impact is global. Marriott’s expansion into India in 2001 is a good example. Most Indian hotels at the time expected employees to work six days a week. Marriott bucked that trend with a workweek expectation closer to what its employees in the developed world experienced. The company established a five-and-a-half-day workweek, meaning that staffers would take two days off every second week.
Rajeev Menon, Marriott’s chief operating officer for the Asia Pacific region (excluding Greater China), recalls that the decision caused an “uproar” in the hospitality field, with some industry leaders calling it an unsustainably generous policy toward employees. But Marriott stuck to its “People First” philosophy—that by taking great care of their employees, the employees will take great care of customers. That enlightened ethos has only fueled the company’s progress in South Asia—defined as India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Nepal. Over the past 11 years, Marriott opened 8 hotels in the region with another 17 planned in the next few years.134 And rivals have reversed course on the shorter workweek. “Now a number of our competitors have followed our lead,” Menon says.
Not only did Marriott lift labor standards in India, but it took aim at a privilege of the business elite. The company refused to go along with a tradition in the India hospitality industry whereby rank-and-file staff members ate in one cafeteria while hotel executives enjoyed a separate, exclusive dining room. “We said we’re going to have one associate dining room, for everyone from general managers to frontline associates,” Menon recalls.
This is what a fairer world looks like. Where working-class Indian housekeepers are breaking bread with business leaders. Where people who’ve long felt excluded based on their racial or gender or sexual orientation are invited to the table. Where people are compensated in an equitable way.
While much of the world sees a playing field tilted in favor of the powerful, great workplaces are working to level it—for the benefit of all.
A Bigger, Shared Pie
A fairer world relates to the third major way Great Places to Work For All are making the world better: through shared prosperity.
We just discussed equitable pay practices. But we’re not only talking about how the pie is sliced and distributed. We’re talking about making the pie bigger—much bigger. As we’ve seen, high-trust workplaces grow fast, and For All cultures accelerate that growth. If you recall from Chapter 1, companies in the top quartile on our For All Score enjoy more than three times the revenue growth of companies in the bottom quartile.
You might argue that fast-growing companies do not signal more prosperity for a country or the world as a whole. After all, the success of one business can spell the demise of another and the loss of jobs. But the key ingredient of great workplaces—trust—has been shown to be a kind of economic tonic on a grand scale. Great workplaces depend on leaders and rank-and-file employees developing trusting relationships. As we saw with caring for people, developing a mindset of trusting others tends to spill out beyond the workplace. People at these organizations begin to have more faith in others in their broader communities. And it is precisely when societies have “high-radius trust”—when even strangers tend to give each other the benefit of the doubt—that economic performance improves on a national level.135 Nobel Prize–winning economist Kenneth Arrow put it this way: “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time. It can be plausibly argued that much of the economic backwardness in the world can be explained by the lack of mutual confidence.”136
Companies alone cannot ensure that all people in a nation or worldwide share in economic progress, especially during turbulent times. But we see the Best Workplaces doing something critical that helps their people at least prepare for downturns and changes: training employees. As noted earlier, the average company on the 1998 Best 100 list offered employees approximately 35 hours per year of training and development. That number has grown to more than 58 hours for hourly employees and 65 hours for salaried workers.
AT&T’s massive effort to retrain its workforce is a sign of the way the Best Workplaces are helping their people remain valuable contributors. CEO Randall Stephenson portrays the training offer as a broader economic pact. “It’s a new contract, a societal contract,” Stephenson says. “The world is changing and it’s changing fast. If you are interested in keeping up, we’re going to give you the tools and everything you need to equip yourself for the future.”
Great Places to Work encourage a sense of shared prosperity beyond money alone. They help growing numbers of people feel they are sharing in the good life. To illustrate this point, look at Liderman, a Peruvian company that provides security services. Most Liderman employees are security guards, earning salaries of about $400 per month, often living in poor neighborhoods in Lima. Liderman leaders took note of the fact that many of its employees live in homes without decent bathrooms, where they and their families have what amount to outhouses or crude, unpleasant toilets. The company made it a policy to give employees interest-free loans to renovate their homes, often in the form of better bathrooms. Liderman employees take such pride in their company-assisted upgrades that many post “before” and “after” photos of the projects online.
A nice bathroom is an important sign of sharing in modern comforts. In effect, Liderman is helping people of modest means, in jobs—security guard roles—that historically haven’t come with much prestige, to share in the dignity that economic progress and prosperity have provided the human race.
Today’s global economy often leaves some to sink. But Great Places to Work For All are lifting all boats.
Empowering Individuals
Just as they promote shared prosperity, Great Places to Work For All also advance economic opportunity and empowerment around the globe. This is the fourth way these workplaces make the world a better place. People generally want the ability to improve their economic lot in life, and parents have long hoped that their children could do better than the prior generation. But amid growing wealth disparities, many people are skeptical about economic mobility; nearly two-thirds of people in advanced economies think that children will be worse off than their parents.137 Barriers to individual progress and decreased faith in the economic system help widen the social fissures within countries and globally, but the Best Workplaces are countering the trend. They are freeing people to move forward, empowering them economically.
This happens in part through the extensive training commitments we’ve discussed. Another example along these lines is Elektro Eletricidade e Serviços, a Brazilian electric utility company. When Marcio Fernandes became president of Elektro in 2011, he juiced up professional development investments in the form of new career paths and training options.
Tiago and Josiane Souza, a married couple who are both electricians at Elektro, jumped at the chance to elevate their careers. Both enrolled in an electrical engineering program at a local university. Josiane made the leap into college after noticing that Elektro colleagues were progressing from the position of electrician to electrical engineer—with the company’s support. “Elektro inspired me to go after a college degree,” she says. “I never thought I would get one. I saw that if a person studies, they have the opportunity to grow in the company.” Earning an engineering degree will mark a milestone not just for Josiane and Tiago but for their families—none of their parents attended college.
Another form of economic empowerment is the ability to control your destiny at work. To have a measure of autonomy over how you do your job and a say in workplace decisions. In the last chapter, we noted that the 100 Best have reduced micromanagement over the past two decades. It’s also true that workplace democracy has improved at these companies. In 1998, just 64 percent of employees said management involved people in decisions that affect their jobs. That figure had jumped to 77 percent in 2017. The rise in the share of employees at the 100 Best who say leaders genuinely seek and respond to employee suggestions is nearly as impressive. It’s a 19 percent increase, to the point where 82 percent of employees at the 100 Best now feel their ideas matter.
One of the companies that most empowers employees at work is manufacturer W. L. Gore & Associates. One of Gore’s guiding principles is freedom: “We encourage each other to grow in knowledge, skill, scope of responsibility and range of activities. We believe that Associates will exceed expectations when given the freedom to do so.” Another is commitment: “We are not assigned tasks; rather, we each make our own commitments and keep them.” In keeping with these values, Gore allows employees to form their teams based on the ability of individual employees to recruit peers to a compelling project. Gore also lets employees rank colleagues on their contributions to the company—a ranking that helps determine salary raises.
Among the Gore employees who have benefited from freedom at work is Monika Fattorello, a human resources professional for Gore in Italy. Fattorello has been able to pursue her passions in communication and training. So besides handling HR tasks for Gore’s associates in Italy, Fattorello also has taught courses in communication skills—such as how leaders can give effective feedback—to Gore colleagues in Italy, Spain, and other countries in Europe.
Her experience at Gore has been a radical departure from what she’d experienced at her three previous workplaces. At former employers, managers tended to view her as requiring close scrutiny and as fundamentally flawed. “Before the end of the day, I’d have to tell someone what I’d done, and they’d tell me what I’d done wrong,” she says. “My leaders at Gore trust me.”
Working on a Solution
We’ve seen how Great Places to Work For All are combating global problems like mistrust, economic anxiety, and a lack of opportunity. In effect, they are strengthening the social fabric. Against a backdrop of widening differences, the Best Workplaces have been fostering greater social cohesion. Consider how these measures of collegiality, caring, and solidarity have increased at the 100 Best over the past 20 years (see Figure 18). In each of the categories related to workplace harmony, the 100 Best as a whole have seen employee scores improve at least 10 percent.
The 100 Best represent a fraction of the U.S. workforce. But not a tiny one: the 2017 FORTUNE 100 Best employed a total of 2.3 million people. What’s more, we’re not talking about small, local businesses where everyone can get to know one another easily. We’re talking about large organizations, such as Cisco, Genentech, PwC, and Salesforce, that are national and even global in scope. Whole Foods Market, Marriott, and Edward Jones have operations in 40 or more U.S. states. The Best Companies have managed to foster friendships and caring connections across blue and red states, with employees of different races, nationalities, and religions, among employees in both the C-suite and the boiler room.
Figure 18
Best Workplaces Strengthen Society
And in just the past couple of years, leaders of Best Workplaces have been stepping up to play larger public roles, speaking out in favor of a more unified, inclusive society. They are answering a call issued in the Edelman report on rising suspicions globally: “To rebuild trust and restore faith in the system, institutions must step outside of their traditional roles and work toward a new, more integrated operating model that puts people—and the addressing of their fears—at the center of everything they do.”138
Elevating Everyone
Might the Best Workplaces be doing more than healing a world that’s hurting? Could Great Places to Work For All have the potential to elevate the human race? Raise our consciousness?
Author Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations makes the case that a new level of human consciousness is emerging, as is a corresponding new, “more soulful” nonhierarchical approach to organizations. Laloux, a former management consultant, argues that traditional, top-down companies have killed our spirits and threatened our viability as a species with their focus on unbridled growth. But he sees a different breed of organization taking shape, one that parallels a stage in human development labeled “Teal.” It is in keeping with psychologist Abraham Maslow’s highest stage of “self-actualization” and involves letting go of ego and fear—in favor of trust. “All wisdom traditions posit the profound truth that there are two fundamental ways to live life: from fear and scarcity or from trust and abundance,” Laloux writes.139
Laloux’s suggestion that organizations are moving in a healthy, humanistic direction dovetails with other social theorists who see the course of human history heading toward greater cooperation.140 If so, Great Places to Work For All are on the right side of history. With many decentralized, purposeful, community “Teal” features, these organizations are serving as engines to elevate the human spirit.
A Lever to Move the World
It would be going too far to call NASA in the 1960s a Great Place to Work For All. But the agency played a role in expanding opportunities on Earth even as its missions into space fired up imaginations and united much of the planet. People worldwide were pulling for the Apollo astronauts and thrilled when Neil Armstrong took humankind’s first step onto the moon in 1969. Katherine Johnson, whose calculations helped make that small-yet-giant step possible, was among those enthralled by the moment. The level of respect she experienced at NASA, combined with the challenges of her work and the epic purpose of pushing beyond Earth’s boundaries, made her job a joy.
“I loved every single day of it,” Johnson said of her 33-year career. “There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work.”141
Unfortunately, most people today do not feel the same way about their jobs. Work is a place where people generally feel stuck, stressed, and deadened, where seeds of division are sown. But when you think about it, what better lever is there to lift us up as a species? Work is where people spend the lion’s share of their waking hours. What if every day, everyone had the kind of caring, fair, purposeful, stimulating experience that people at great workplaces have? The kind of human beings shaped by those organizations could potentially solve our seemingly intractable problems: sectarian struggles, armed conflicts, continuing poverty, challenging diseases. We could reach our potential as a human race.
In essence, this is our mission at Great Place to Work. We are working to build a better world by helping organizations become Great Places to Work For All. To do so, we need leaders to join us. Leaders willing and able to create a great experience for everyone, no matter who they are or what they do for the company.
We call this kind of a leader a For All Leader, and in the next chapter we lay out our new research into how to become one.