IS your business one of the best places to work? Ask this question in any workplace forum where management is not present and I guarantee that you will hear the gentle chirping of crickets as a deafening silence descends on the audience. Colleagues might look furtively at each other (or down at their Jimmy Choos or Clarks) and grin sheepishly as they pause a minute to give full thought to the question everyone refuses to confront. Are the great places to work the stuff only found in urban legend and so are as mythological as the LochNess Monster of Scottish fame or the fabled Kraken?

What makes a company a great place to work anyway? Indeed, what would make an employee eager to jump out of bed, hurry to get dressed and sprint Bolt-like to work every morning without muttering (as we admittedly now do) expletives that even your local Half-Way Tree loitering reprobate would scorn ? Is it the lure of a fat paycheque – which, like the mythical ‘Bigfoot’ doesn’t really exist in these times anyway? Could it be the ‘perks’ that management doles out in dribs and drabs that seem to be the disappearing remnants of a by-gone pre-recession era? You’re lucky if you get a cup of coffee without it being deducted from your monthly stipend. Is it great to work where you do because you are guaranteed a pay cheque come month end, whether you work 40 or 10 hours each week?

Before we zero in on the reasons that make a company a great workplace – let us look at some of Fortune 500’s 100 best places to work and examine why they were chosen as such for 2010. So as not to be accused of being discriminatory I tried to find a list of the best places to work in Jamaica and Google delivered up to me a list of the best places to live, eat, go and stay in Jamaica. I’m just saying…

Anyway, SAS, the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market was ranked as the number one place to work. The list of benefits that it gives to its employees reads like the dream shopping list of any employer: “High-quality child care at $410 a month; 90% coverage of the health insurance premium: unlimited sick days; a medical centre staffed by four physicians and 10 nurse practitioners (at no cost to employees); a free 66,000-square-foot fitness centre and natatorium, a lending library, and summer camp for children.” No, I did not make this up.

Visit: money.cnn.com/ magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2010/ , and read for yourself. The architect of SAS’s culture — based on “trust between our employees and the company” — is Jim Goodnight, its co-founder, and the only CEO that SAS has had in its 34-year history.” And no, the company is not broke or in the red as a result of the benefits that it extends to its employees; on the contrary, it is quite profitable. Second place was Edward Jones, the investment adviser which weathered the recession without closing one of its 12,615 offices or laying off a single employee. According to information, salaries were frozen, but profit sharing continued.

Coming in at a breath-taking third place is: Wegmans Foods which has never had a layoff in its 94-year history. Google, the search engine king, is ranked the fourth best place to work and among its perks are a stock-option exchange programme for employees and a facility for engineers to devote 20 per cent of their time to projects of their choosing.

In explaining how they tallied up the best company scores, the researchers revealed that they relied “on two things: our evaluation of the policies and culture of each company and the opinions of the company’s own employees.” They said: “We give the latter more weight: Two-thirds of the total score comes from employee responses to a 57-question survey created by the Great Place to Work Institute® in San Francisco. The survey goes to a minimum of 400 randomly selected employees from each company and asks about things such as attitudes toward management, job satisfaction, and camaraderie. We score companies in four areas: credibility (communication to employees), respect (opportunities and benefits), fairness (compensation, diversity), and pride/ camaraderie (philanthropy, celebrations). After evaluations are completed, if news about a company comes to light that may significantly damage employees’ faith in management, we may exclude that company from the list. About 1,500 companies contacted us or were recruited to participate; of them, 466 finished the exhaustive survey process. (Any company that is at least seven years old with more than 1,000 US employees is eligible.)

Just in case we were not listening and taking notes, it might help us to see that one of the areas in which the scores were tallied is credibility (communication to employees). For some companies who are just emerging from the pre-historic Flintstone age, the terms ’employee communication’ are both expletives and an oxymoron. These workplaces no doubt have made it to the bottom of the worst 100 list. The measurement that the Great Place to Work Institute® used points to communications that “are open accessible; “competence in coordinating human and material resources and integrity in carrying out vision with consistency.” Is your workplace one of the best places to work in Jamaica? Are those crickets I hear chirping?

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson, (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with ROCommunications Jamaica, specialising in business communications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com. Visit her website at www.rocommunications.com and post your comments.