Archive for March 10th, 2010

   At Grand Central, I bought a copy of the latest Fortune  with the World’s Most Admired Companies survey in it. I was checking out the feature because I found it easier to look at the list in the magazine than online.  As I looked at the new design at Fortune (bravo! love the paper quality) and came across this article by Geoff Colvin who wrote about how Most Admired Companies value their employee cultures. He says that the “top dogs” are great examples of companies that do indeed treat their employees as their finest assets. A few insightful details about the winners and losers in the Great Recession:

• Most admired companies (industry champs or the top three in each industry) laid off fewer people in the past two years compared to less admired ones (10% vs 23%)
• Most admired companies were less likely to freeze pay or hiring compared to less admired ones
• Most admired companies were much more likely to invest in employer branding, more so than marketing in fact,  compared to less admired ones

As Colvin sums it up, Most Admired companies understand that people are their most valuable and most enduring asset and not an expense. I bet they correlate highly with Fortune’s Best Places to Work too.