The 153 Best Company Cultures in America (and What You Can Learn From Them) Entrepreneur and CultureIQ spent months searching for the best cultures in the U.S.
This story appears in the March 2017 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
For the second year, Entrepreneur partnered with CultureIQ to find the best office cultures in America. For more companies, tips and profiles, check out the rest of 2017's Top Company Cultures package.
Work should be gratifying. We should appreciate our colleagues. Our peers should inspire us. And our happy, efficient, productive workplaces should -- and will -- lead us all to greater success.
"A high-performance culture leads not only to employee engagement but also to measurable business results," says Greg Besner, founder and CEO of CultureIQ, which makes software that helps companies improve their culture.
But you don't need to be told that. Of course all that's true. Of course it's what we all want. So why is it so hard to pull off?
There are a lot of small answers to that question, but here's the big one: Company cultures fail when a company doesn't consciously focus on making it better. Good culture doesn't just happen -- or if it does, it's fleeting and fragile. A truly strong one is nourished and grown, like any relationship. And oftentimes, when trying to cultivate a healthy culture, it helps to look at what other companies do, understand what they get right and adopt some of their best ideas.
That's why Entrepreneur partnered with CultureIQ to find the best office cultures in America. We measured 10 areas that are predictive of high-performing cultures -- collaboration, innovation, agility, communication, support, wellness, work environment, responsibility, performance and mission alignment -- to quantify the success of the culture. We wanted to know: Who is worth learning from? And what makes them so good?
After surveying thousands of companies, we narrowed the list down to 50 rankings across three different company sizes -- small, medium and large -- to bring you our Top Company Cultures of 2017. (Each category did have a tie, making the list 153 companies.)
To see who made the cut, check out our lists below:
To read more about the company cultures featured on our list, check out these profiles:
The 15 Best Company Cultures in America Share Their Secrets
Thanks to These 3 Values, This Startup Has Shockingly Low Turnover
Fusion Doubles Down on Employee Wellness and Watches Productivity Soar
Learn the 4 Principles That Helped This Virtual Company Become One of the Best Cultures in America
The Generation Gap at This IT Firm Has Nearly Disappeared. Two Staffers Explain How.
To Change Your Company Culture, Change Your Conversations
How One Company Used Data To Improve Its Sales Staff
This Small Firm Reveals How They Keep Work Fun
These 6 Business Leaders Share Their Top Advice for Cultivating a Stellar Company Culture
Methodology
Our methodology was straightforward. We spent five months in the middle of 2016 inviting all companies to apply. Once they did, their U.S. employees completed a survey of multiple-choice questions. The answers were used to assess a company's strength across 10 core qualities of culture: collaboration, innovation, agility, communication, support, wellness, mission and value alignment, work environment, responsibility and performance focus. We combined scores with the employee Net Promoter Score to create a cumulative CultureIQ Score (CIQ), which is what determined the ranking. The companies with the highest scores made our lists. (To be considered for the ranking, a company must have at least 25 employees, have been founded before January 1, 2015, be headquartered in the U.S. and have enough employees respond to be considered a representative sample. For franchises, only the corporate employees were surveyed.)
