Michael Burchell - The Great Workplace: How to Build It, How to Keep It, and Why It Matters

Contents

More Praise for The Great Workplace

A wonderful road map for becoming a great place to work. Burchell and Robin present a compelling case for improving workplace culture. This book is ideal for any leader who wishes to improve team effectiveness and make a difference in the organization. Inspiring!

Tim Felt, CEO, Colonial Pipeline

Filled with practical examples of how great firms reinforce the trust, pride, and camaraderie essential to a great workplace. These are great ideas meant to be shared.

Jim Weddle, managing partner, Edward Jones

Well-researched and well-written, Burchell and Robins book captures the essentials of what it takes to transition to a truly great workplace.

Brian E. Keeley, president and CEO, Baptist Health South Florida

Many companies aim to be a great place to work, yet their leaders struggle with how to get there. Burchell and Robin do a wonderful job articulating the importance of building great workplace culture and provide great examples and ideas for how to achieve this. Everyone in a leadership position should read this book.

Andrew Botwin, principal, Rothstein Kass

Burchell and Robin tell real stories of how great organizations became (and remain) great workplaces by engaging the hearts and minds of the people who work there. The good news: the methods are transferable!

Peter J. Giammalvo, vice president, Organizational Development, OhioHealth

The Great Workplace is a blueprint for all business owners who want to create and maintain a happy and productive workplace. A valuable guide for managers looking to empower their staff at every level.

Jill Leonard Tavello, executive vice president of Culture, Stew Leonards

THE GREAT WORKPLACE

Copyright 2011 by The Great Place to Work Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burchell, Michael, 1967

The great workplace : how to build it, how to keep it, and why it matters / Michael Burchell, Jennifer Robin.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-59626-5 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-470-93168-4 (ebk), ISBN 978-0-470-93171-4 (ebk), ISBN 978-0-470-93172-1 (ebk)

1. Corporate culture. 2. Work environment. 3. Employee morale. 4. Organizational behavior. 5. Job satisfaction. I. Robin, Jennifer, 1974- II. Great Place to Work Institute. III. Title.

HD58.7.B867 2011

658.3'12dc22

2010034711

This book is dedicated to employees at great workplaces all over the world. Their words and stories have shaped the model of a Great Place to Work and forever changed how we think about workplaces.

FOREWORD

By Robert Levering

Great Place to Work Institute Cofounder

When I first picked up the manuscript of this book, I asked myself why I didnt write a similar book 20 years ago. The Great Workplace: How to Build It, How to Keep It, and Why It Matters gives practical advice to any leader who wants to transform his or her workplace culture. Indeed, it promises to help leaders achieve their organizational goals while having a positive impact on the working lives of their employees.

The reason I wondered why I hadnt tackled the same subject 20 years ago is that that was when I wrote A Great Place to Work: What Makes Some Employers So Goodand Most So Bad (Random House, 1988). In that book, I explained what distinguishes a great workplace from others based on what Milton Moskowitz and I observed in researching our best-selling 1984 book The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America . My definition of a great place to work became the basis for the Model that has been used by our Institute for its survey work and consulting, and is explained and discussed at length in this volume. So it would have been a logical next step for me, as a professional journalist and author of a half-dozen books on business subjects, to write the book that Michael Burchell and Jennifer Robin have done so beautifully in the volume youre now holding in your hands.

As I read through Burchell and Robins book, however, I understood that I was not the right person to have written this book. As experienced consultants, the two of them are in a much better position than I to offer practical advice to leaders. Prior to joining the Great Place to Work Institute in 2003, Burchell had firsthand experience inside a great workplace as an HR leader at W. L. Gore & Associates, one of only four companies that have appeared on every FORTUNE 100 Best list since 1998, as well as in our 1984 and 1993 books. At the Institute, Burchell has worked with dozens of companies all over the globe in applying the Great Place to Work Model to a wide variety of business issues. A former board member of the Delaware chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management, he currently is involved with the Organization Development Network. Burchell received his doctorate in diversity and social justice from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Robin also spent three years in a consulting role at the Institute before writing this book, working with leaders of a wide spectrum of organizations in applying the Great Place to Work Model. Robin brings the added dimension of having taught human resource management for three years at Bradley University in undergraduate, masters, and executive programs. She has a particular passion for applying the cutting-edge policies and practices as seen in her previous book focused on work-life balance issues, A Life in Balance: Finding Meaning in a Chaotic World (coauthored with Charles Stoner, University Press of America, 2006). She received a doctorate in industrial organizational psychology from the University of Tennessee.