The Culture Audit© Submission Advice

What key qualities make your organisation a great place to work? How do you create this unique environment and why do you do it? (4,000 word maximum)

TIP: Help us understand what is unique about your workplace through sharing specific examples:

• Share your most impactful programs for creating this environment
• Explain how this culture or programmes benefit and impact your business, using specific examples and metrics wherever possible.
• Show how you act on employee feedback and turn it into tangible actions, such as action planning based on data received from surveys, including the Trust Index Survey ™

We want to understand from the company’s point of view what they have done to create the environment that employees are describing in the Trust Index survey. So, we ask you to tell us (in less than 4,000 words): 

What key qualities make your organisation a great place to work? How do you create this unique environment and why do you do it? 

What is Great Place to Work® looking for in a response?  

In response, companies may be tempted to provide a comprehensive list of their benefits and perks, or fear that we have an undisclosed list of specific programs we’re looking for and that they can make a mistake by focusing on professional development, rather than community service. Neither is helpful or true.  

Through our research, we know that there is nothing magical about the specific benefits you offer – it’s the culture you create through them and through your people that has the impact. In 80% of the cases, your competitors will describe substantively the same programs,  but they can never have the same culture.

Set your answer apart by sharing the big picture of the core attributes that define your culture - and the context, strategy and effectiveness of the programmes that drive this culture. Bring your culture to life by showing it to us in action, illustrating your answer with the programmes that show you at your best.  

For example, is your culture one of ambitious world travellers driven by excellence? Maybe you want to highlight the exceptional professional development programmes that push your employees to excel, the recognition programmes that reward them, and the work-life balance programs that sustain them?  

Or maybe your culture centres around caring – for your own people, your customers and your community. Then tell us about the exceptional benefits that meet the needs of your people in crises, how you reward people for going above and beyond with customers, and how integrated community service is in every aspect of your employee life cycle, from onboarding through retirement. 

Here are some other ways you can make your answer stand out from others: 

Communicate your company’s unique culture. This bears repeating. Think about how your competitors are going to describe their cultures – what is different about people’s day-to-day experiences at your company that could never be mistaken for working for your competitor across town? 

Draw attention to the ways you’ve intentionally included everyone.  Maybe you’ve made sure that a particular program that would typically only be offered to the day shift is offered to the night shift too. Or, maybe the same programmes don’t work for everyone, so you’ve developed unique programmes for a subset of your workforce so regardless of role or background everyone has a way their needs are met. Be explicit about how you include everyone in your programmes, benefits, and the best of your culture. 

Call out ways you make your programmes personal and human, instead of transactional and commoditised. For example, maybe your anniversary programme spends fewer euros per employee, but each person receives a personalised note from their manager and a token that relates to a personal hobby or interest.  

Make the connection clear when your values and philosophy drive key programs. You stand out when you are clear about who your company is, what your strengths are, and how your programmes build these strengths and strategically support the business itself.

For example, your pro bono program takes on more meaning when you share that your people value development and community impact, so in addition to using it to do well in the community and inspiring your people, you also intentionally take on projects that build the skills and resumes of junior professionals in areas they are passionate about – and that ultimately has increased retention of key talent and expanded your business by 20%. 

Show us the data.  Answers that share hard numbers (or at least specific examples) describing the utilisation and impact of  your programmes really stand out from others. For example, how many of your new managers use that professional development programme and then go on to be promoted from within?  What kind of positive impacts are your programmes having on your people – and your business? 

This question is meant to give us the big picture story about who your company is  in action and how you’ve intentionally created the culture you have. We look forward to getting to know you better through it – and sharing who you are with the world. 

How do you ensure everyone - regardless of who they are or what job they do - is a full member of your organisation and can reach their highest potential? (4,000 word maximum)

TIP: Help us understand how you systemically ensure equity, build belonging, and value and leverage your people's uniqueness through sharing specific examples:

• Share how your benefits/programmes address any unique needs specific to employees’ tenure, position, work shift, educational background, pay status, gender, age, ability, nationality, race/ethnicity, etc.
• Describe how your culture impacts hiring, onboarding, and training.
• Explain how this culture or programmes benefit and impact your business, using specific examples and metrics wherever possible.

We want to understand  your  company’s point of view  on  what you  have done  systematically  to  ensure a  consistently  great work  experience  for all  your  people. We focus the question to understand  your company’s  approach to common critical barriers to employees’ full engagement in  your  workplace.  So, we ask  you to tell us (in less than 4,000 words): 

How do you ensure everyone - regardless of who they are or what job they do - is a full member of your organisation and can reach their highest potential? 

What is Great Place to Work® looking for in a response?  

We recommend you  focus on the areas we’ve found set the best companies apart. Share specific examples of ways your organisation  has  created  an experience of full inclusion  by  systemically ensuring  equity, building  belonging, and valuing  and leveraging  your people's uniqueness. 

Great answers will typically tell us: 

As a baseline, what you do to make  sure people  can count on being  treated equitably by the organisation.  For example, what strategies do you have in place to create organisational  accountability  and  measurable  success  in areas like equitable  hiring, pay, promotions, and allocation of development & coaching resources? 

How  you  systemically  ensure  different  people feel they  fully belong in your organisation. In what  ways  do  you  proactively help different people feel central to and full participants in  your business and  culture?  For example,  some companies have  a  regular  interpreter in staff meetings so hearing-impaired or non-native  speakers can fully participate.  

How you systemically show that you value – and leverage – individuals’ uniqueness. What strategies do you have to identify the talents, needs and perspectives that make your people unique?  What ways have you found to meet  these  unique needs  and  leverage  different  experiences and talents for the betterment of the business? For example, some companies have a structured way to take people’s talents, backgrounds and experiences into account when designing project teams or getting feedback on business decisions. 

Describe how you engage with leaders to ensure they are inclusive in their approaches to creating a great place to work for all.  For example, does your organisation have a clear stance on what an inclusive  leader looks like in your company? Is there an intentional system to hire, develop and hold  a  range of great leaders  accountable to this standard? 

Share  highlights of  how your benefits/programmes address any unique needs  specific to  things like  employees’ tenure, position, work shift, educational background, pay status, gender, age, ability, race/ethnicity, national origin, etc. Plus, programmes related to hiring, onboarding, and training. 

As with all the questions in the Culture Audit, evidence and specific examples will make your answers stand out.  Don’t avoid telling us if you are not where you want to be yet in your results. Tell us about your progress, what you’ve learned along the way, what you’re doing next, and how it’s impacting your business.  

What are your organisation’s values or guiding principles? Please share three (3) specific examples of how you have put them into practice. (2,000 word maximum)

TIP: Help us understand what is unique about your values and how they fit your specific culture by sharing specific examples:

• Share how your values are put into practice day-to-day.
• Describe how your values are integrated in the design of programmes/policies.
• Explain how your values influence decision-making, especially strategic or difficult decisions.

We want to understand how your organisational values are brought to life, we ask  the  company to tell us  (in less than 2,000 words)  how their  stated values  shape their programmes, practices, and key decisions  through  this Culture Audit  question: 

What are your organisation’s values or guiding principles?  Please share  three specific  examples of how you have put them into practice. 

What is Great Place to Work® looking for in a response?  

Avoid simply reporting a list of your values  and  instead  bring to life  how your  values  capture  what’s  unique about your  company.  How are they specific to your  organisation’s particular business, market,  and culture?  How do your employees connect to these values? 

Help us see why  your values aren’t just  words on a wall, but something  your people  actively  engage with.  For example, you could share how you selected them.  Perhaps  you developed your  values collaboratively,  conducting  focus groups and employee surveys,  tapping  into the insights of groups like high potential employees,  employee resource groups (ERGs), senior leaders and  front-line  employees,  so that  everyone  had direct input into  defining  what the company stands for.  Regardless of how you determined them, understanding why and how you picked them  can illustrate  how  to connect to  your specific business. 

Great responses to this question stand out because you: 

Explain  how  your  values play  out day-to-day  in the workplace.  For example, how  do  they factor into things like  hiring and onboarding, employee recognition,  decision-making,  leadership development, setting priorities or strategy, how employees are promoted,  or other key programmes and decisions? 

The examples  you share might  demonstrate how  you live your  values in big ways and small,  such as special recognition given to employees for demonstrating  your  values,  or how managers are accountable for leading with values.  Answers will stand out when they share specific examples that help us see how your  values  are relevant  in everyday work situations and are actually utilised. 

Share specific examples  about how  your  values were used  to make  difficult decisions.  We want to see what happens when values are really put to the test — when push comes to shove, will an organisation rely on its values to shape how they handle a situation?  For example, how  do your  values  influence what happens when mistakes  occur by an individual, team or the organisation? 

Have you ever  taken  a  risk to live by  your  values? Perhaps you’ve taken a stand because of your values that’s risked  negative  public or shareholder  response, or you’ve invested time or money to do what you think is right.  How  have your  values  applied  when  your  workforce  has  faced  difficult circumstances  like a recession or layoff? How do  your  values apply to  your  customers  and  broader community when it might cost the company something?   

In short, great answers  to this question help us understand more about what  your organisation’s values  are,  why you developed them, how they shape your  strategies  and actions,  and how  they impact your employees’  day-to-day  experiences. 

What is your strategy and philosophy for ensuring a successful business? How are strategy, business direction, and goals developed and communicated across the organisation? (4,000 word maximum)

TIP: Help us understand what guides your business decisions through sharing specific examples:

• Explain how you developed your strategy, business direction and goals, including who was included.
• Describe how the strategy is implemented and communicated to all levels of the organization. (For example, how are managers supported in speaking to the strategy?
• Share how individuals connect the strategy, business direction and company goals to their daily work. Who and what influences changes to the strategy?
  
  

Our primary focus is  on  how employees actually experience their leaders; in this question we ask companies  to tell us about their approach to  a  key leadership  competency  (in less than 4,000 words). We ask: 

What is your strategy and philosophy for ensuring a successful business? How are strategy, business direction, and goals developed and communicated across the organisation? 

What is Great Place to Work® looking for in a response?  

We are not evaluating or  critiquing  your organisation’s  short and long-term strategy and philosophy through this question. Rather,  we are seeking to understand  how  your strategy, direction, and goals were developed and  communicated  with  employees at all levels  of the organisation, and how well-equipped leaders at all  levels are to  connect to  and  communicate  the strategy. 

Answers  stand out  when they: 

Share how your strategy, direction, and goals were developed.  It’s particularly useful to describe  who was included across the business and anything you did to ensure great ideas  could rise  to the top. While we do not believe there is  one “correct” way to develop a strategy, we do want to  understand your particular  approach  and why  it  works for your business and people.  

Provide examples for  how you implement that strategy, direction, and goals  through people  at all levels of your organisation. We want to  get a picture  not only how  compellingly  your executive team can speak to the company’s overall strategy, but how you  equip  leaders at every level down to frontline supervisors to be the torch bearers of your mission, vision,  and strategy.

For example, what communication, resources, training, and accountability do you provide so  leaders  can confidently speak to your strategies in every corner of the business?  Are there special ways  you support individuals  who are not leaders  to connect their daily work to the strategy, direction, and goals?  What feedback loops do you have so that employees can provide input or suggest how the organisation can make updates and adjustments? 

Call out any fundamental principle  that  ties  your business decisions and strategy together. For example, perhaps your retail organisation’s business and people strategy  centres  around sharing your  love of the outdoors and protecting the earth.  Or your customer-driven organisation  commits  to always putting people first. 

In some companies, this principle might be your mission,  vision, values, purpose, brand identity, or some other  key  philosophy that forms your organisation’s “true north.” Making  this guiding principle  explicit helps us understand how clearly your business and people strategies  integrate together and align your people in this direction.   

Engaging individual contributors and leaders at every level of the organisation in a clear and coherent strategy is a powerful indicator of great workplaces and drivers of their success. We look forward to learning more about the approach that drives your people and business forward. 

How does your organisation involve employees in developing new ideas and better ways of doing things that result in real improvements to your business performance? (4,000 word maximum)

TIP: Help us understand the systems, training and resources that drive your approach to creating and sustaining an innovation culture through sharing specific examples:

• Share how you encourage, recognise and reward innovation.
• Describe examples of ways that a wide range of people in your organisation are involved in innovation.
• Share specific metrics that reflect the impact of innovation on your business (for example, # of patents per employee, % annual revenue from new products, etc).
  
  

We are interested to find out how effectively leaders engage their  workforce  in innovation-driving behaviours.  We are asking you to tell us  what your organisation has done to  involve employees in developing new ideas (in less than 4,000 words). We ask  companies  to share:  

What is Great Place to Work® looking for in a response?  

Don’t get stuck on the word “innovation.”  Best companies are distinguished by having a unique ability to engage all their talent in fuelling new ideas and better ways of doing things that  drive their business success. Whether you call this empowerment, continuous improvement, innovation, or something else entirely doesn’t matter. 

Regardless of whether your people are engineers or cashiers, whether you are in  technology or banking, you need your people to help you be agile and improve. We understand that you don’t want accountants to invent new tax code – but what do you want them to improve? 

Help us understand any systems you have to  drive innovation.  Perhaps you have  programmes  to  enable  employee  collaboration and idea-sharing? Maybe you dedicate  resources  like a  physical space  for collaboration  or  time for training sessions that promote employee ideas? Perhaps you equip leaders at all levels of your organisation to respond to people’s ideas and  create  a clear path to move  them  forward?

How do your programmes work together to reach all corners of the business and positions within the organisation?  Your answers will make more sense to us if you  clearly communicate the intent and desired outcomes of these practices - we  want to  understand whether  innovation  happens intentionally or by chance.   

Great answers to this question will: 

Explain how you motivate  and reward  innovation.  Real examples are particularly useful to help bring this to life. They help us understand the complete life cycle of innovation at your organisation.  For example, how do you  recognise and  reward successful innovations?  What happens when you try something new but  the outcome  isn’t  a success?  What happens to ideas  that do not  get implemented? Is there a feedback loop for those ideas? Is there a sense of appreciation for the effort it took to come up with the idea?   

Reflect a diverse set of examples  of employees sharing new ideas and better ways of doing things and how those ideas have benefited your business.  Innovation from any corner of the business is great. Your examples stand out even more if  you  can share  examples that are not limited to a specific group of individuals – for example, just from management or just from your research & development team.  Examples from  people in roles where innovation is not considered part of their daily job  are particularly interesting because it shows that innovation is part of your culture at large, and not just part of  discrete  individuals’ job descriptions.  

Include metrics.  Any place you can tell us how many employees participate in your programmes or quantify the business impact of the innovations your people have driven is an opportunity to set your company apart. Many organisations may have similar approaches to innovation.  Evidence that your people are highly engaged in your programs and that they have a quantifiably positive business impact will stand out. 

What bold act of leadership has your organisation taken to improve the root conditions necessary to create great workplaces for all in your organisation or the community at large? (4,000 word maximum)

TIP: Help us understand specific ways your leadership has pushed to foster a great workplace in the last year, explaining:

• Who you are impacting & how?
• What kind of investment or risk that required
• Why you made these choices
  
  

Many of the leading Best Workplaces™  are so committed to changing the world  and ensuring  great workplaces for all are the norm, that  they are driven  to  act not only on behalf of their  own people, but  to positively influence the  broader  workforce, industries,  and communities they are part of.  We invite companies  applying  for  our  premier  national  lists  to  tell us  (in less than 4,000 words):  

What bold act of leadership has your organisation taken to improve the root conditions necessary to create great workplaces for all in your organisation or the community at large? How has this impacted your people and business? And how has this impacted your community? 

What is Great Place to Work looking for in a response? 

We are looking for a demonstration of your organisation achieving its purpose, having a powerful impact on the world, or creating a source of employee pride that goes beyond your products and services. Essentially, how  are  you  sharing in and  magnifying our vision to create great workplaces for all across the globe?  How are you  taking a stand on behalf of  this movement? 

To be frank – we expect that many companies won’t have an answer to this. This question is optional and organisations won’t need  to  answer  it  to  qualify for and  make the Best Workplace list. 

But our national list winners have always represented leadership and best-in-class employers at the vanguard of business culture.  We expect that just as the market has followed the Best Workplaces' winning practices in the past – no doubt  chasing the  3x stock out-performance  their cultures are so famous for – future employers will  soon be  following  these leaders  as they take a more thoughtful approach to strengthening the social and economic ecosystems their businesses  require  to thrive.

If your company is already acting on the vision that every organisation should be a great place to work for all, let us know  how you’re doing it!  (And if you’re not, keep an eye out for the inspiring examples we’ll be sharing next year of those leading the way.) 

Excellent responses to this question will stand out when they: 

Make clear connections for us.  Help us  understand why the example you are sharing will help create great workplaces for all. 

Quantify the impact you are having.  How much of what you’re doing  are fine words  –  and how much evidence do you have that  leads  to measurable results?  Please focus on providing examples and evidence rather than aspirational claims. 

Help us understand the scope of who you are impacting.  Are your actions focused on particular needs of your own people?  How many of them? Why those folks? Are you supporting people beyond your own walls? What kind of broader influence are you having?  

Provide perspective on how significant an investment this is for your company. Your work may cost your organisation money, time, or even a risk to your  brand  or social capital when you do what you  feel is right.  

Show  your  commitment.  How persistently are you chasing  your goal?  Is this a one-time event, or part of a multi-year commitment?  

This kind of context in your answer will really make your answers stand out – so we know the difference between a great volunteer day, and a company that’s making strategic investments they know are paying off to change the world.  We can’t wait to hear from you and together change the world by creating great places to work for all.