Nowadays, we are bombarded with stories about difficult conditions for employees. We must be productive, while having to deal with pressing managers, clients, colleagues and unreasonable deadlines. Seems like finding a work environment where you are not under pressure most of the time is extremely difficult today.
My girlfriend ( who doesn't work in this field ) is dealing with such an environment and we can see the effect it is having on her health. One day, she told me: "Wouldn't it be nice to connect humane employers to employees you can't really handle productivity at all costs?"
Now, it got me thinking on how you would define a "humane" employer. The first thing that came to mind was Basecamp. The way the look at the world, treat their employees and customers... That looks like a place I would love to work at.
There seems to be a label called Great Place to Work. I didn't know about it, but after visiting their website, here is what seems to be a great place to work:
- Camaraderie ( relationship with other employees )
- Pride ( relationship to your job )
- Trust, Respect, Fairness, Credibility ( relationship with management )
For more info, you can visit this page
Now, I don't know if other labels such a this one exists, but let's assume you would be in charge of creating such a label. What would you look for? What would you like to measure to qualify a environment as a Great Place to Work?
Top comments (7)
I think that KeyValues is making great strides in promoting this conversation. @lynnetye is a DEV member and can probably speak more to the motivation of KV and general places to learn more about the "best places to work" from a cultural perspective.
This is definitely a conversation that needs to get more attention. "Candidates" are increasingly motivated by work/life balance, quality of life, etc. over simple prestige and compensation.
Sorry that I didn't see this until now! 🙈
@peter is right, I could talk about this... forever. 😜
Asking someone where the best place to work at is like asking someone what the best city is to live in, or who is the best person is to be in a relationship with. It's not a simple question with a simple answer. It "right" answer depends on the person, and to make things more complex, the "right" answer changes for each person over the course of their life.
The hardest part about finding the "right" job or company is knowing what exactly that looks like to you. @damcosset, you should absolutely choose a humane employer, but I'd like to think that that's table stakes. There are countless humane employers to choose from, so the next question is really identifying what your goals are and what matters most to you, and then finding companies that align w/ your goals and care about the same things you do. Anyway, you can find the long list of things other devs care about on Key Values!
Can't wait for keyValues to include more and more countries other than the US. Love it so far :)
KeyValues looks awesome! Bookmarking this for a future job hunt :D
🙌
I would look for remote friendly or even remote first, light meetings, and promoting within. Ideally, the places I would want to work trust me to do my job, allow me the time to do my job, and reward me for excelling at my job.
Right now, where I work only ticks off the third of those, but I'm not actively looking either. Eventually, though, I imagine the distrust around remote work ("Yeah, sure, enjoy your day off" I work harder when I'm not spending all day BSing, hmph) and how it seems like half of my calendar is meetings planning for planning for planning to work rather than working will get to me.
In my perspective, blunt honesty when comunicating anything to the employees, involving the team in decisions, respecting everyone as the professional and adult person they are and avoiding any kind of assumptions in a "because I thought so" fashion throughout the company's lifetime is what makes a place great to work.
I am actually in one of those places (not the whole company agrees with that, and we're working on that), and even when I'm doing extremely boring work, I know WHY I'm doing it, what kind of conversation happened that led to this work, why the short deadline is actually that short, and what comes next. It is motivating in many ways and makes minor issues stay that way, minor.