Facebook has risen to the top spot among tech companies on the annual Glassdoor Best Places to Work U.S. rankings.
That seems fitting for the company in a year when it is taking on Slack, Microsoft-owned Yammer, and other workplace collaboration platforms with its own Facebook Workplace.
Facebook’s Head of People, Lori Matloff Goler, told TechCrunch that the social media giant focuses on being a “strengths-based organization” and wants to be known as an employer that “takes good care of its people overall.”
She said, “Most employees speak favorably about their ability to have a real impact here. Many talk about the flexibility in the way we work.
Your manager is there to care for you, set context and help you play to your strengths, give you feedback and goals, but let you do whatever you need to get there. It’s not about how much time you spend in the office.
This is great for families but was inspired by engineers who, as you know, like to or need to work at different hours and are not seated at their desks all the time.”
Facebook also offers a very attractive parental leave package, she noted.
Glassdoor compiles compensation data, reviews and ratings by employees about the companies where they work. It makes money through paid job listings, recruiting and employer branding services. Its data sample comes from employees who self-select to offer information there.
Last year’s top-ranked tech venture, Airbnb, plummeted 34 spots in Glassdoor Best Places to Work 2017.
According to Glassdoor Community Expert, Scott Dobroski, that was largely due to written reviews from employees who said there has been an increasing amount of bureaucracy and decreasing amount of transparency from senior leaders in the company as it has grown.
The sharing economy’s top lodgings business still attained an overall 4.2 rating, out of 5 possible, from employees and did make the list of Best Places to Work U.S.
He also said Facebook made the list for the seventh time and topped the tech category because employees raved about their employer, overall, especially around compensation and benefits and perks that make day to day life easier like free meals or transportation.
When it comes to Facebook’s areas for improvement, Glassdoor data suggests the company could afford its people greater work-life balance. On a scale from one to five, Facebook employees rated work-life balance at their company around 3.8 compared to Google’s 4.1 rating in the category.
Google got slightly lower marks than Facebook on compensation and benefits with a rating of 4.4.
Other areas where employees were asked to score their companies included: career opportunities, culture and values, senior leadership, how strongly they’d recommend their employer to a friend, and the business outlook for their employer.
Whether Facebook can stay atop the list, or perhaps even top it overall and not just among tech employers remains to be seen.
The future of human resources at Facebook will be about “personalization,” Goler said.
“Students in middle and high school right now have grown up on shared platforms where they can customize their feeds, whether that’s on Instagram, or Facebook…They’ll enter the work world thinking it should feel similar to those consumer products.”
In total, 20 tech companies made the Glassdoor Best Places to Work 2017 list for the U.S.
Here they are, with their rankings and overall company score, as provided by Dobroski:
- Facebook (#2, 4.5)
- Google (#4, 4.4)
- World Wide Technology (#5, 4.4)
- Fast Enterprises (#6, 4.4)
- LinkedIn (#8, 4.4)
- Adobe (#9, 4.3)
- Paylocity (#14, 4.3)
- SAP (#15, 4.3)
- MathWorks (#16, 4.3)
- Salesforce (#17, 4.3)
- Intuit (#20, 4.3)
- Docusign (#23, 4.3)
- Concur (#24, 4.3)
- Akamai (#25, 4.3)
- Zillow (#29, 4.2)
- NVIDIA (#30, 4.2)
- Airbnb (#35, 4.2)
- Apple (#36, 4.2)
- Microsoft (#37, 4.2)
- Texas Instruments (#42, 4.2)
Featured Image: Glassdoor.com