Is a caring company born or created? When it comes to landing a place on PEOPLE Magazine’s Caring Companies list of 2022, one can wager this accomplishment requires a bit of both nature (having a caring mission at its core) and nurture (creating impactful activities) to even be considered a contender.
One can also safely assume that there’s an amazing EX at play—and that it lives on an intranet that inspires community activism. We know this to be true, in fact. And we’re highlighting three companies on PEOPLE’s list that clearly demonstrate exceptional EX qualities and their corresponding good works.
What are these qualities? Let’s quickly review what separates employee experiences to write home about from the ‘ho hum’ of the everyday organizational existence. This way, we can prime our lens to properly appreciate the success stories that follow!
Characteristics of an amazing employee experience
Cutting to the chase, an intranet offering an EX that’s amazing has four qualities in ample supply—they’re engaging, integrated, intelligent and effortless. More specifically:
- Engaging: In our increasingly distributed workplace, employees are often lonely and confused. An amazing user experience helps them feel seen and connected. And the most obvious indicator of ‘engagement?’ Employees actually use it to affect change in the world.
- Integrated: With so many cloud applications available, accessing them from one login is huge. Exceptional EX is built for communicators, with workflows that encourage engagement and ensure messages get read and acted upon. Organizing community events requires no less.
- Intelligent: Advanced AI is a must, offering users personalized information that’s relevant to them based on their role, location, and interests. And let’s not skimp on the interests here, as the best intranets not only offer ways to connect around them but inspire participants to act on them in some fashion. This could be as simple as sharing travel photos company-wide to coordinating supply drops for disaster victims in specific locations.
- Effortless: An intranet can be top of the line engaging, integrated and intelligent—and users avoid it because it’s just too much work. It needs to be user and manager friendly, crafted with clicks, not code, so content can be created and the platform itself can be administered with little effort. Something that’s as easy to use as Facebook, with no training required, minus the irrelevant posts from Aunt Ida.
With that in mind, let’s turn to a few of the caring companies on PEOPLE’s list. Can you spot these capabilities in action behind the scenes?
Vertex values diversity; giving back; and work/life balance for its employees
As a global biotechnology company, Vertex Pharmaceuticals understands the importance of diversity—and of connecting its distributed workforce. They focus on mentoring younger employees, offering a global mentoring program that supports 30% of its staff. In turn, this inspires workers to participate in Vertex’s mentorship program aimed at developing high schoolers from diverse backgrounds.
When it comes to work/life balance, they offer “up to 20 weeks fully paid leave to moms who give birth, up to 12 weeks paid time off for all new parents and 26 weeks paid military leave for employees whose family member was injured in the line of duty.
‘Vertex does not just talk about diversity, work/life balance and valuing employees, Vertex makes an effort every single day to listen, embrace and act on being a diverse company who embraces work/life balance while honoring employees as the greatest asset,’ says an employee. ‘This makes people want to do more, give more and work harder.’”
Although glowing, the employee quote above doesn’t fully capture the strength of the underlying culture that the company has carefully nurtured.
Calling themselves “Vertexians” the company has created a space where employees share their lives and join welcoming niche groups that are essential to the fabric of the company. Many companies talk about work/life balance, but how many showcase an employee mother and father of the year? Those who’ve leveled up their engagement and understanding quotient do!
Credit Acceptance creates community service initiatives
Credit Acceptance is a car dealer financing company that puts its community first. It is “prioritizing diversity with the creation two years ago of a Diversity and Inclusion committee. The group, working with the benefits department, created Inclusion Day, which gives staffers a full paid day off to recognize any religious or cultural holiday that may have personal meaning.”
But they haven’t stopped there – they also have a ‘Great Place to Work Community Service Committee’ where “any team member can ‘champion’ an event or activity to help a cause near and dear to them. The committee evaluates all ideas and runs with those we feel can make the biggest difference in our community, and in the pride our team members feel coming to work every day.” In 2021 alone, they’ve:
- Sold t-shirts to support military families
- Wrote holiday cards to nursing home residents
- Raised money for Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
- Contributed to National Hemophilia Foundation
- Donated to local food pantry
- Provided supplies to local schools
- Gave toys and coats to underprivileged children
- The inspiration is embedded in the company’s culture, one in which they proudly refer to themselves as a service-oriented company. It shows.
LiveRamp lives its values out loud
LiveRamp offers so much for employees, it’s hard to summarize it neatly, but we’ll try! They offer an array of physical and emotional well-being programs; a generous adoption assistance program; care for elderly parents and matching contributions for charitable donations and volunteer hours!
“All this adds up to what a staffer says is a ‘corporate culture that allows employees to develop and grow both personally and professionally. We are encouraged to be the best we can be and are trusted.’”
This is not lip service, but lived experience, as its DIB Council can attest.
DIB stands for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. And the DIB Council focuses on making this passion a reality by living the companies’ values. They inspire employees to join together to “help solve some of the world’s biggest challenges, disrupt the status quo, and contribute to a more equitable future.
They have a five-year plan with pillars supporting a diverse workforce and creating a community where employees can thrive – in and out of the office. They’re determined to:
- Leverage our financial assets to advance equity and inclusion
- Serve the community
- Inspire the next generation of technology leaders
With actions speaking as loud as their words and internal inspiration on point, we expect they’ll succeed.
Caring outcomes start internally
Each of these companies here offers a different approach to creating caring outcomes, and all with commonalities mentioned at the outset: They make it engaging, intelligent, interactive, and effortless. Do these qualities impact employees’ efforts? Absolutely.
And these are only three of so many examples of caring companies ensuring their mission critical values aren’t left to chance by embedding them in the hub of their employees’ home base. A home base that has been purpose-built to inspire.
Each company has given an internal voice to historically marginalized groups and offered support around ongoing struggles. They inspire employees to take action externally. Isn’t this what every innovative and forward-thinking company wants to see happen?
Better still? Each of these companies are successful in their given industries. Has this happened, at least in part, because they’ve created spaces for employees to feel valued for who they are? We think so, and we bet they do too!
Are you ready to foster your own intuitive and engaging internal teams with a killer EX offering a side of inspiration? Reach out for a demo to see everything a Simpplr intranet offers out of the box. And maybe we’ll see you on next year’s list!