Think “great place to work,” and big companies like Google typically spring to mind. But across the country, many small businesses and nonprofits have built workplace environments and cultures that rival — or even outshine — the big names.
The Wall Street Journal teamed up with Winning Workplaces, an Evanston, Ill., nonprofit that helps small and midsize companies create better work environments, to spotlight five Top Small Workplaces.
While each company is very different, we encountered some common themes: These small businesses tend to let employees at all levels make key decisions, and they groom their future leaders from within. They offer generous traditional and untraditional benefits (how about a six-week sabbatical?). And they constantly hunt for new ways to improve the employee experience or engage employees.
Hanging onto talented employees is a continuing struggle for many small businesses. Without ample opportunities to move up, good employees inevitably move on.
Alaska Wildland Adventures Inc., a Girdwood, Alaska, tour operator with 11 year-round and 76 seasonal employees, seems to have found a way around that problem. The average tenure of current year-round employees is 7½ years, and eight were promoted from other roles within the company.
General manager Kyle Kelley originally started in 1997 as an Alaskan safari driver during a summer internship. The company later promoted him to natural-history guide, then safari manager, then program director, and then an operations manager before he assumed his current role in 2006. “They’d always rather hire from someone in our entry-level pool and train them up” than hire an outsider who’s already trained, says the 33-year-old Mr. Kelley.
This upward flow through the company means employees acquire a holistic understanding of how the business functions and can assume one another’s jobs on short notice, says Heather Dudick, marketing director. Because the company is so small, all employees chip in on mundane tasks like stuffing envelopes, licking stamps and answering phones. But that coziness also means the company accommodates each employees’ personal goals and will custom-fit jobs and schedules to their needs.
Photo by Alaska Wildland Adventures.
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