6. Employee Attitudes and Engagement

Every year, Fortune magazine conducts an annual survey of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Firms strive to be named to this list because they receive twice as many applications as firms that are not on the list, and they enjoy employee turnover levels that are less than half those of their competitors.1 In short, people want to work at places where they are treated well. If satisfied employees really do fuel corporate profits, one would expect “100 Best” employers to outperform broad indexes of firms that are publicly traded—and they do.2

In one well-controlled study, for example, researchers compared the organizational performance of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” with two sets of other companies, ...

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