Glassdoor Unveils New Award List: Best-Led Companies

On May 15, 2024 Glassdoor unveiled the inaugural list of Best-Led Companies. The list features the top 50 U.S. large organizations (1,000+ employees) with the best rated executive teams, according to employee feedback shared on Glassdoor.

This new award list comes after a two year drought of no leadership awards when Glassdoor discontinued their Top CEOs award list in 2022. Like the old Top CEOs award, this new list takes into account CEO approval ratings submitted by employees. Senior management and other feedback from employees is also considered. Ranking on the Glassdoor Best Led Companies list is a huge honor that showcases strong reliable leadership all job seekers, employees, customers and even investors are looking for. 

Benefits of Winning Glassdoor’s Best-Led Companies Award:

Positive Investment Signal 📈
‍Many investor patterns and investment strategies are tied to CEO and leadership performance. Winning this award is clear evidence of exceptional leadership.

Strengthen Recruiting 🧲
Ever heard the advice to find a good leader to work for rather than a specific company? It’s a principle many follow. Finding your leadership team on Glassdoor’s Best-Led companies magnetically attracts top talent looking to follow exceptional leaders.

Boost Retention ⚓️
People don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses. Similarly to strengthening recruiting, when your leadership team is validated by Glassdoor’s list as a top executive team, this gives existing employees greater confidence to drop the anchor and stay.

Positive Publicity 📢
‍Making this list of top 50 Best-Led companies is a big feat. There are millions of employers on Glassdoor so this list represents the companies with the absolute top percentile of leadership teams. CNBC, Forbes and others have covered the 2024 list. Employees of winning companies have shared the good news. Both forms of earned media can have a significantly positive impact.

How is the Best-Led Companies Award different from Glassdoor’s old Top CEOs Award?

‍Glassdoor’s Top CEO award program, which ran from 2013 to 2021 focused primarily on the employee ratings and sentiment shared about the CEO. The new Best-Led Companies award launched in 2024 expands the scope of employee feedback considered to include senior leadership. 

When Glassdoor announced that they were indefinitely suspending the Top CEOs list on 3/9/2022, they gave this hint to the future: “we are refreshing our program to help people make even more informed career decisions.” We agree that this new list is more fair and well rounded. Even among CEOs and executives, turnover is real. Gauging employee satisfaction of the senior leadership team, rather than just the CEO, gives greater fluidity to what employees are actually rating even as one or more leaders leave or join the C-suite throughout the year.

Who was included in the 2024 Glassdoor Best-Led Companies?

‍The old Top CEOs award program had 6 lists:
- 100 Top CEOs – U.S. large companies
- 50 Top CEOs – U.S. small & medium companies
- 50 Top CEOs – UK, 25 Top CEOs – Canada
- 25 Top CEOs – Canada
- 10 Top CEOs – France
- 10 Top CEOs – Germany

In the inaugural list of Glassdoor Best-Led Companies, Glassdoor unveiled only one list:
- 50 Best-Led Companies – U.S. large companies

You can see the entire list of 2024 winners HERE. Included in the top 5 were: Bain & Company, Databricks, Protiviti, NVIDIA, Raymond James Financial

It is our opinion that Glassdoor was testing the waters to see how this list was received. Based on their Award FAQs, we have reason to believe that the Glassdoor Best-Led Companies list will be expanded in the future:

‍“While we won't be considering employee feedback in Canada, France and Germany this year, we may expand our lists in the future.” - Glassdoor Award FAQs

‍Eligibility Requirements for the Glassdoor Best-Led Companies award

Glassdoor publishes their methodology for determining winners for all of their awards each year. This new program is no exception. All details can be found here: Glassdoor_Best_Led_Companies_Methodology.pdf

Yes, Glassdoor uses their proprietary algorithm to determine their winners. No they obviously won’t share the exact specifics of how it works, nor will they give an individual company feedback of why they didn’t make the list or if they’re on track for winning next year. They say so specifically in their Award FAQs as seen below:

Screenshot from here: https://www.glassdoor.com/Award/index.htm#Faq

However, their methodology article gives specific hints at what matters and how to meet minimum requirements for being considered. Here are the requirements they shared:

1. Quantity of new reviews acquired during the eligibility period: 
- 100 CEO ratings
- 100 Senior Management Ratings

When an employee leaves a review of your company, there are several sub-ratings they can leave. One is CEO approval (positive, negative or neutral). Another is Senior Management (1 to 5-stars). These sub-ratings are an optional part of the review. That means you may need to collect 120 or 150 total reviews to ensure you have at least 100 that include these sub-ratings.

2. Eligibility period:
- Only reviews posted in the prior year count towards award eligibility. Glassdoor has confirmed this new award will be announced each May, so the eligibility window is about the same every year. For the 2024 list, the eligibility window to submit reviews was 3/29/2023 - 2/29/2024. 
- Glassdoor only includes reviews from current employees and former employees who left in 2024 or 2023.
- Additionally they do take into account reviews and ratings from individuals with other employment types, including full-time, part-time, contract and freelance.

This means if you have a history of bad reviews and ratings, there is still potential to win. Focus on asking for reviews during the next year’s award eligibility period.‍

3. Employee count at the end of the eligibility period:
- For the 2024 list, companies included had to have 1,000+ employees, which must be current as of Feb. 29, 2024 (last day of the eligibility period).

As previously mentioned, we anticipate additional categories for the Best-Led Companies award both by company size and region to be included in the future. If your company is smaller than 1,000 employees, it is still important to collect employee reviews to get more ratings of your leadership team.

4. Minimum ratings:
‍- No lower than a 3.0-star overall company rating during the award eligibility period.
- No lower than 2.5-star senior management rating during the award eligibility period.

5. Quality of reviews:
‍- This is an algorithmic measurement of the actual text in reviews. It’s the sentiment shared, positive or negative. Glassdoor also considered if reviews are helpful in sharing what it’s actually like working here for other job seekers to read. 
- Additionally, Glassdoor notes special attention is given to comments that mention “senior leadership” topics.

Longer form, more detailed and specific reviews have higher value than reviews with little to no written comments.

5. Consistency of reviews:
Glassdoor also looks at trends across time in reviews submitted on company profiles for data integrity. If Glassdoor determines official company representatives have tampered with the authentic collection of unbiased reviews or attempted to influence employee reviews, they may exclude the company from consideration. Specific actions Glassdoor states should not be done include, but are not limited to:
- Management attempting to leave false reviews
- Management coercion of employees to submit positive reviews
- Management attempting to suppress reviews or other activities and/or events, which could ultimately damage employees’ faith in the CEO, the company, its senior leadership and/or adversely affect its overall ratings on Glassdoor

Many people see this and think they cannot and should not ask employees for reviews. This is not true. Glassdoor openly encourages employers to ask employees for reviews. Not only does Glassdoor openly state that “encouraging reviews” is how to be considered for awards on Glassdoor.com, they also provide employers with a link-generation and emailing tool within the Employer Center to help you ask for reviews. However, unnatural review patterns may flag your profile for investigation. We’ve seen evidence of this with large volumes of reviews being posted in a short amount of time, many similar reviews being posted, among other things. The best practice is to consistently ask for employee reviews across time and asking for honest feedback. Mobrium’s anonymous and random requesting feature is compliant with Glassdoor community guidelines and FTC regulation.

Screenshot from here: https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/awards/best-places-to-work-2024/

The odd exceptions from the list:
‍Glassdoor specifically notes the following types of organizations are not eligible for inclusion in the award. Sorry guys.
- Universities
- Multi-level marketing agencies
- The armed forces
- Staffing/outsourcing agencies

How to win the Glassdoor Best-Led Companies award

‍First and foremost, having a great leadership team that actually cares about your team is a given.

Beyond that, you need employees to actually share reviews on Glassdoor. You can have the best executive team in the world, but without the ratings and reviews to prove it, no one believes you.

So ask for employee reviews!

But..

Don’t send out one company-wide blast asking for reviews. That act may trigger a content quality and consistency audit- potentially disqualifying you from the award altogether.

Since Glassdoor allows every employee to leave one review per year, you can space out your review requests to batches of employees across 12 months, then repeat the next year. We’ve seen when a company representative is the one to send these requests, it introduces a conflict of interest. The employee opens the review request email and says: “Who else got this? Am I being targeted? Will they know it was me when the review posts tomorrow?” This is why your HR team is frustrated when they ask for reviews and no one shares.

Mobrium exist to solve this problem. We automate review requests to employees on your behalf on a consistent, recurring basis. Doing so keeps anonymity in check and increases the quality and quantity of reviews being shared- maximizing your chances of meeting award eligibility requirements for the Glassdoor Best-Led Companies award. We do the same for other sites like Indeed, Comparably and more. 

Schedule a call with Mobrium now to learn more. (You’ll even get a free employer reputation scorecard to see how your employer reputation is trending today!)