Seeking Bliss? The Top 50 Companies to Work for if you Want to be Happy
Are You Happy at Your Job?
CareerBliss.com has compiled a list of the top fifty companies in America that you should try to work at if you want to be happy in your job. They looked at nearly one hundred thousand reviews of companies completed in 2010 and then ranked the companies on a scale of one to five in a number of categories. In order to make the “top 50” list the companies were required to have at least twenty reviews completed about them during the 2010 year.
Some of the companies where employees are happiest were not surprising at all. After all, we all know that Google tries hard to keep its employees happy and it only seems appropriate that people working at The Walt Disney Company would be happy. However, did you know that the City of Los Angeles and the United States Military also have very happy employees?
The categories that were ranked to determine employee happiness included:
1. Opportunity for growth in the company and opportunity for career advancement. After all, you don’t want to just be happy in your job now but you also want to know that you’ll have the potential to keep growing and challenging yourself.
2. Salary. The amount of compensation that you receive for your work does play a role in how happy you are at your job. It’s not the only determining factor but it matters.
3. Employee benefits. People may be willing to accept a lower paying job if the benefits that they received were extraordinary. Of course, it’s even better to have a job that pays well and also has good employee benefits.
4. Job security. People want to know that they are likely to still have a job at the end of the year. This knowledge provides security that makes people happy at work.
5. Work-life balance afforded to employees. It’s tough to be happy when you have to work all of the time so a good work-life balance is a key factor among employees who say that they are happy at their jobs.
The survey also looked at whether or not the employee who completed the review would be willing to recommend the company to others.
Based on this information, CareerBliss.com determined that the Top 50 companies with the happiest employees in 2010 were:
1. Google
2. 3M
3. DTE Energy
4. Qualcomm
5. United States Military
6. LSI Corporation
7. Charles Schwab
8. PriceWaterhouseCoopers
9. TRW
10. Johnson & Johnson
11. Ameritech
12. Baker Hughes
13. Abbott Laboratories
14. The Boeing company
15. Cisco Systems
16. Texas Instruments
17. Wyeth
18. City of Los Angeles
19. Marriott International
20. First American Title
21. Fidelity Investments
22. GTE
23. Ericsson
24. Wells Fargo Bank
25. General Electric Company
26. Kaiser Permanente
27. McKesson
28. Novartis Pharmaceuticals
29. Raytheon Company
30. Costco Wholesale
31. Amgen
32. Microsoft
33. Blue Cross Blue Shield
34. The Walt Disney Company
35. Sony Pictures Entertainment
36. Albersons
37. Booz Allen Hamilton
38. Automobile Club of Southern California
39. Lockheed Martin
40. General Electric
41. American Heart Association
42. Catepillar
43. ADP
44. Waste Management
45. Deutsche Bank
46. Sun Microsystems
47. Verizon Wireless
48. Intel
49. JP Morgan Chase
50. FedEx
Of course, because of the nature of the study (requiring 20 independent employee reviews to make the list) this survey doesn’t consider the happiness of employees at small firms and employees who are self-employed.
What do you think? Do you think you’d be happy working at one of these fifty companies?
