Where are the best and worst places to work? Glassdoor, the site that surveys employees about workplace conditions in great detail, has issued lists of the best and worst 50 companies as rated by employees out of the 11,000 in its database (see below).
There aren’t any startups on these lists because Glassdoor does better with larger companies with more employees. Topping the list of best companies is General Mills, but tech companies make a decent showing as well, with Netflix, Adobe, Google, SAP, and NetApp making the top 10. Apple is No. 19. Amazon and Microsoft didn’t make the list. Neither did Yahoo, but it escaped the worst 50 list as well. The same cannot be said for eBay, IAC, and AT&T
Here are the top 20, with tech companies in bold:
1. General Mills
2. Bain & Company
3. Netflix
4. Adobe
5. Northwestern Mutual
6. Whole Foods
7. Google
8. SAP
9. Continental Airlines
10. NetApp
11. Intuit
12. McKinsey & Company
13. FactSet
14. Boston Consulting
15. Procter & Gamble
16. Caterpillar
17. Genentech
18. CareerBuilder
19. Apple
20. Juniper Networks
The five worst places to work, according Glassdoor, are:
1. DHL Express (USA)
2. United Airlines
3. Reynolds and Reynolds
4. Farmers Group
5. Gibson Guitar
Other notable companies that made the bottom 50 include:
6. RadioShack
14. Qimonda
15. NCR
27. EDS
29. AT&T Mobility
31. OfficeMax
33. Level 3 Communications
34. Motorola
37. Blockbuster
38. Alcatel-Lucent
43. IAC
44. Cadence Design
46. Circuit City
47. eBay
49. AT&T
The full lists are below, with teh best places to work listed first:
In this unpredictable economy and sudden recession – just be elated you have employment at any company…..
Can anyone imagine the talented people who are either out of work now, or forced to work as consultants to survive
should i complete my resume papers ? could i have a changes ?
I’m sure most people would agree with you, but it is hard to stay motivated or even care when your upper management got bonuses in 09 and you were advised you would not receive your low 2% raise about 3 weeks before you were expecting to receive it. This is the case with LexisNexis.
As a former employee of the world-famous Blockbuster, I am not surprised they hit the bottom 50. I guarantee you that if this survey had come out 10 years ago, they would have been in the top.
I am not surprised by these selections. The CEO’s of the bottom 50 are poor leaders and lack the vision to take their companies to the next level.
Its FATE! Me looking for a new job and Netflix being near the top! I love Netflix!
In a fortune 500 company, you hardly see your CEO ever, so basing this ranking just on what kind of a CEO you have is pretty inappropriate.
It’s a good time for us to be hiring at the Intuit Partner Platform. Great candidates out there and a great place to work! Come join us!
Where is MSFT?
I am not surprised by the low rankings of some of those companies, such as AT&T, eBay, and RadioShack, with the latter been going through re-positioning, and AT&T still faces stiff competition, and eBay, what can one say about eBay? Trying to put more emphasis on sellers than the buyers, etc., etc., et al.
This list is based on employee satisfaction not competition or repositioning. at@t has turned a fomer family realted company called Bellsouth into a miserable place to work. at@t not only treats craft poorly they treat their lower level management even worst! People forget that the new at@t is the old SBC Company who merely bought the at@t name because there really wasn’t much left of the old AT@T ecept for long distance and some business accounts. The good old boys from Texas where the old SBC and now the new AT@T is headquartered are trying to run a majot corporation like a small company. The result has been extremely low morale amonst craft and lower management.
Where is IBM?
stats can be manipulated, and definitely can be manipulative.
glassdoor doesn’t disclose how many people/users feedback were necessary for a company to appear on the list.
Also, we don’t know the size of the samples. The total and the one per company. So this list might have the ridiculous situation where one company’s rating is determined by the feedback of just 10 people.
You don’t need to be a mathematician (or a sociologist, or an economist) to see that these lists, as the ones with the “top searches of the year” released by Google and Yahoo! are nothing but a PR move — and that, in the case of Glassdoor’s ones, are less than relevant.
Sorry Glassdoor, but you’ll need to publish the size of the samples (total and per company), as well as other data about them (current vs. ex-employees, executive/employee in user’s average, and a long et cetera) to make your lists statistically significant and not as stochastic as they are now.
ValleyM
Did you forget to not that you work in recruiting for eBay?
@mdainc
I don’t work in recruiting, and even less for eBay in any way. And, for the record, I don’t work for any of the companies listed.
when I criticise Glassdoor’s lists, and the lack of reliable information about how they got those lists, I am in no way defending any of the companies included in them.
All I am saying is that these lists are not relevant, and they will not be more than the result of employee’s rants until we are not given more data — so we can see if they are statistically relevant.
Glassdoor publishes the methodology on their ‘top 50′ page at http://www.glas...-LST_KQ0,19.htm
From the Glassdoor site (thanks Coyote):
“To be eligible for the list, a company must have had at least all of the following as of December 15, 2008:
– 25 reviews from United States-based employees,
– “satisfied” ratings overall and across all categories, and
– a CEO with at least a 50% approval rating.
Read more. ”
25 reviews, for companies with thousands of employees, are not relevant from any statistical standpoint…
those list might be “cute”, and good from a PR perspective, but nothing else.
What makes some of the worst companies so bad to work at ?
I know some people that work at the Macy’s, OfficeMax, Rite Aid, Red Cross, Nationwide, Radio Shack and they have never complained or said anything bad at the companies so what exactly makes a place qualify as worst.
Is it job security, pay wages, work environment, employee perks etc.
It is definitely the benefits and perks given to employees. Google, Bain and some of the other consulting firms have amazing benefits. While the hours may be long and tiresome, the office environment and benefits more than offset the 100-hour workweek.
Just like stupid people don’t realize that their abilities are below average, why should people stuck at crap companies realize their predicament? A lot of them probably think office life as portrayed in “The Office” is all you can ever hope to get.
Wow, four Dayton-area companies on the worst list. DHL, Reynolds, LexisNexis, and NCR.
Not surprising that Reynolds is on there–once a GREAT place to work, the culture has changed significantly. Salaries and benefits are significantly less rewarding than in years past.
What’s happening to Dayton…?
Well, for Reynolds+Reynolds, Bob Brockman and his crew of losers came to town.
Congrats on taking a once strong company and driving it straight into the side of a mountain – and in only 2 short years. I’m impressed!
As long as UCS is in control – avoid this place like the plague!
Interesting that one would call Reynolds a strong company when an upstart like Bob could buy it so easily. Must have been really strong before…
Just because employees are getting everything they could ever dream of doesn’t mean the company’s doing well. Ever heard of job security?
And a significant portion of the companies at the bottom half of the list are struggling to make ends meet, are considering or have filed bankruptcy.
Nice info Mr. Erick Schonfeld, interesting, i wonder to see Accenture at 48th place, which list top in firing the employees. The recession affected these companies in such a way that their freedom of doing the work has been restricted and everyone is assigned with lot of burdens to acheive but still they need to meet their both ends.
regards
aartha
my hotdeals today
Canon Powershot SD770IS Digital Camera – Silver – $159.95
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Well convergys, TCS in India are good place to work.
Haaahaaaahaaahaaa…
(gulp)
Haaahaaahaaahahahaaaahaaa…
Adobe makes the list because it gives 25-30 days off per year (for any reason – sick or vacation); profit sharing; stock options and stock purchase plan that guarantees a return. The work atmosphere is not the reason it gets ranked well.
I love the work atmosphere at Adobe. Very collaborative. Lots of great, committed and smart people.
It’s really great at Adobe.
I worked for DHL a few years back managing employees at a warehouse and it was miserable. I am glad to see them close their U.S. operations. There was no way they could compete with extremely low employee morale.
test 2
Adobe has a good work culture with focus on creativity and innovation .
Stock options, Profit Sharing and Employee Bonus is also attractive
I thought this article may be appropriate.
http://www.theo..._figure_out_how
I doubt if this survey was either manipulated or wrong. I have heard from my friends that Microsoft was almost next to heaven. I ain’t go there just because I’m a Java Guy and MS is totally away from Java.
Ebay is really great to be in. Amazon has been rated next to Google, by people who worked there.
- Mani
http://ExcuseMeWorld.com
As a former Reynolds and Reynolds employee, I can completely agree with their position on the list. In fact, they should be worse.
I agree completely!
I noticed NCR near the bottom. With Craig Hurd at the weel, what does that say about the culture HP is heading toward?
In any case he has done a great job with the performance. Wonder if he has to ruin the culture to get those numbers?
I’m a little shocked to see Gibson guitar ranked so high on the worst list.
I wonder what numbers Fender has….
AT&T has bad work pratices, like 3 times your late 3 minutes from lunch and your fired.
We are not outsourced but we might as well be with the sweat shop practices and the high turn over rate.
What about Facebook?
i was expecting for someone to asked this lol
I too once worked for Reynolds & Reynolds for a while. It was a toxic environment with a lot of really dumb people in important roles. Morale was aweful and the parking lot was empty by 5:15 every afternoon.
Sadly the automotive bailout will help Reynolds, which surely would have gone out of business if a large number of Ford, Chrysler and GM dealers went out of business.
You are uninformed about Reynolds and the bailout. Reynolds is very diverse now and has some very prifitable extensions out there. I have been there for 20 yrs and, while I
put Bob B. in the same catagory as Al Davis. He is not stupid. He knows that there are 20 people who will do what we do for half the wages so He holds the cards. Remember the golden rule, The man with the gold makes the rules!
I spent 12 years at Reynolds and Reynolds, i also agree with Tony.
Hey James do you think Bob’s Company is worth 2.3 billion dollars now.
I would say if he is so smart why has he lost more Reynolds customers then UCS ever had?
Oh, James, one more thing,
Why have all of Reynolds Good employees jumped ship and why is Bob’s approval rating 8 percent.
From the Reynolds customers I have talked to, their approval rating is LESS then the employees.
Having worked for Reynolds and Reynolds for 10 years, and gone through several different changes, I would have to completely agree with everyone who is saying that it is a miserable place in which to work.
If you are female, you will be relegated to whatever menial job they can find for you, if you’re lucky. If you are a minority, you will be lucky to last more than a couple of months. If you are white, are a member of the NRA, and have no problems drinking kool-aid, then you will go very far within the company.
The problem is that the company is only going to go about as far as it takes to get everyone out of Dayton and into Houston. Once that’s done, it will return to its UCS roots and all the dealerships who relied on ERA will find themselves up a particular excrement-rich creek without a device for locomotion.
The recent trend where GM has encouraged all their dealerships to move away from R&R products is going to severely hurt the company, as well, as roughly 2/3 of their monthly cash flow is in danger of being pulled out from under them.
If you’re still at R&R Dayton, then I strongly urge you to keep your resume updated and keep your eyes and ears open.
Is this based just on “perks” or actual working environment? I could care less about perks, as long as my paycheck clears and i’m treated like a human being.
Most of this data can be gleaned by scanning business news headlines. Gee, I wonder why Angelo Mozilo has a 3% approval rating. Even that is probably a statistical anomaly (people mistakenly hitting Approve instead of Disapprove). Or DHL Express (USA)? C’mon, they pulled all their business out of the US. People got laid off! Yea, great chances at a great place to work?
Even AT&T, selling all those new iPhone subscriptions; stock is down 27% in the past 4 months.
What does one learn from this? Go work for Whole Foods (who is in the shitter but still high on the list)?
This list tells me that, statistically (that is, most of the time), in very bad times for a particular company (one in financial dire straits) often becomes a crap place to work. Move on, people. Nothing new here.
I am surpised Amazon didn’t make the worst list.
I have heard it is one of the worst places to work.
I do work there and I’m surprised it isn’t on the worst list either. I stumbled onto this page while searching for a new job. We do a great job of satisfying customers. That’s because we suck the life out of our employees. In the end, they make just as many people miserable as they do happy.
Where is the Walt Disney Company? I wonder where they would be on the list.
Having worked at eBay, I’m not surprised to see it low on the list. The sad thing is that I know eBay has a “great place to work” initiative internally and cares about this issue. It used to be a place where everyone was getting so rich on the stock that they didn’t have to worry about treating people right. It developed a famous reputation during that time as a place to get rich – and stomped on. Those days are *COUGH* over for better and worse and I know for a fact that employee satisfaction is something John Donahoe cares and worries about actively. I think the problem with eBay is that it’s such a giant bureaucracy now that its only means to make something happen like improving work conditions is to launch a “great place to work” initiative and form committees around it, hold a bunch of meetings to figure out what people want and measurable goals toward that, blah-blah, quack-quack, data-data, bullshit-bullshit. People are treated like numbers in the end, which they don’t care for. A leadership process is no substitute for leaders. And the company’s general malaise both in the stock market and with its seller base can’t be helping anyone’s morale. I don’t have the ideal solution to suggest, except to just somehow escape the whole business consultant mindset that pervades that place, which would be like stepping outside their own skin. Obviously impossible.
As a long time AT&T Mobility employee (8 years) I can definitely say it has gone way down hill. It used to be a great place to work with profit sharing, free perks, free phones, and other great accommodations. The employee cell rate plan is still incredible.
Other than that though, they have stripped away everything, and are hiring the lowest of dregs off the streets to work for them. 5 weeks of training where you learn nothing except common sense. They have become extremely concerned with a statistic called “Abandons” which is the percentage of people who hang up while waiting on hold. So to avoid that, AT&T hires a mass of people, and if it means getting terrible customer service or technical support, than so be it.
On top of that, “Quality” has gotten out of control where we must now say your name, repeat your issue, apologize, empathize, guarantee to fix it, and then recap once we are done. Which means repeating myself multiple times, and treating a customer like they are a five year old with a booboo on his knee. Some customers do need talked down to, yes, but most I think find if offensive, or at the very least it makes me sound stupid.
Yea, I could complain more, but honestly, my job is easy, I do enjoy it for the most part, and I have incredibly good job security.
If you’re willing to leave a good company where you have a stable job and join Netflix only to be laid off three months later because of their political games, then indeed Netflix is #3 for you. Netflix recruiters are salespeople and will try hard to sell you the company because they get 10% of your annual salary if you’re hired.
– Joe
Is this really true? Why would an (internal) recruiter get that much compensation for such a small company?
PayPal is a useless service. What the &%^%$ have they spent the past 10 yrs doing and hundreds of millions in salary if their service is still garbage. Can’t even edit your business name. Everyone there deserves to be unemployed. Lets have a total collapse of ebay and paypal. Force these people to start taking some pride in their work and lives. The employees there are 3 productive hours daily, long lunch taking, need to hit the gym before the All Hands, leaches.
There are really talking about it, please? Whether the data was accurate?
Of course working at ebay sucks. When you have to bid on everything, such as bathroom breaks, xmas vacay time, and how long your sick days will be, life can be pretty crappy.
Continental Airlines #9 best is surprising to me … I would think airlines along the lines of Jet BLue and Southwest would be higher. I’ve heard working for Google totally rocks … free food!!
I think it’s pretty dubious to ever look at any big company as a monolithic employer. There are huge differences by division as well as by type of job. Folks who live the monitored-minute-by-minute life that’s typical of customer service don’t have the same opinion of those in engineering.
Just using AT&T as an example, parts of the business are growing like crazy and are spectacular places to work (I’m a bit biased on this, since I’m part of one of those great places). Others aren’t quite so fun, but’s that’s the nature of a place with 300,000 employees!
Pretty dubious survey, 25 or more ratings? This is a bad joke.
So are the user comments so far- it’s pretty much “I love/hate my job so I agree with the survey because it ranks my company well/poorly”. Hardly mindblowing stuff folks.
The legit ones such as AT&T are no brainers. We know the larger the organisation the safer you are but the worse they treat you. Duh.
Why we can’t find tech big-names here?
As a former long-time employee of Reynolds and Reynolds in Dayton, Ohio…it is NOT surprising at all that they are #3 on the WORST places to work list. Since Bob Brockman hostility took over the company 2 years ago it has become a very communistic place to work and employee moral is lower than it has ever been…lower than most people can even imagine.
Not surprised to see LEVEL 3 on the worst list. EVERYDAY wondering if today will be your last and watching the top executives make decisions that make absolutely no sense. We all worry everyday that our jobs will be sent to India. Yes, at this point I am happy to have a job, but for how long?
DHL Express!!! It does not surprise me.
As a current Reynolds employee I can say this is definitely one of the worse places to work. I have been here since before the merger and back then it was a great place to work. People were involved with extra-ciricular activities, volunteering, company spirit, etc. Now it’s ’show up at 7:45 and leave at 5 on the dot’. Brockman successfully turned this once great company’s employees into folks just getting a paycheck. As a matter of fact, I lost an entire week of vaca this year b/c Bob thought the vaca policy provided too much time away from work. What a great way to build morale. But, in the end Bob has made us all feel quite assured that we are expendable commodities that can be replaced but someone less apt at a lower salary. Reynolds is an excellent place to work if you possess no self-value and no one else will hire you.
Every negative thing said about Reynolds is true. It was a great place prior to the takeover by BH Bob. Funny thing… right after the takeover, he immediately had each of us sign a 3 year non-compete also. He has our mouths swabbed on a random basis to detect tobacco use by employees. And just fired over 100 sales and training associates… some associates were even at dealerships installing systems or training when they got a call that they were fired. Pretty good for customer relations, eh???
Of course Level 3 is on the worst list. Complete idiots in upper management positions. Most middle managers too afraid to make a decision. Moral is terrible, most employees (employee owners….yeah right) no longer care…..and it shows. By far the worst company I have ever worked for in my 25 year Telecom career. Chapter 11 probably not far off.
I’ve been a outside tech for AT&T for 28 yrs and it has been a rewarding job. I’ve been well paid, I receive 6 weeks vacation and full med & dental. They have a program that pays for your education should you you choose to use it and the opportunity to transfer into any job you are interested and qualifed for. Upon reaching the 30 yr mark I will retire with a nice pension and retain my med and dental plan as will my wife until the day I die. How many of the top 50 can make that claim?
Yep! It’s all true! Reynolds & Reynolds is garbage! Thank God that I am no longer there!
I agree with everyone. Reynolds sux !!!
Agree with the Reynolds and Reynolds poor ratings 100%. It was the most horrible, degrading and dehumanizing job I have ever had. Dare I say “evil”?
I responded to a Reynolds and Reynolds job posting recently not knowing much about the company and received an e-mail requesting a phone interview. I think I’ll be turning them down after reading this.
Also, I’m kind of surprised not to see Wal-Mart on the list anywhere, be it good or bad.