Great places to work? What you get may not be what you see in many of these surveys

By Jeffrey Pfeffer and M Muneer

It’s that time of the year when “great places to work” surveys and reports get published across the world. People love lists – even if the criteria for getting on the list is not transparent. The 2018 India list is yet to come out, but each year fewer and fewer seemingly good companies figure in this for-profit tamasha. Ever wondered why? Have they fallen to “good” from “best” or just stopped participating altogether? Fortune’s 2018 Great Places to Work (GPTW) list just came out in the US, and it was surprising to see a couple of specific companies in the top 10. That’s because when one of us (Jeffrey) interviewed a few people from these organisations for his research on toxic management practices, what they described was far from a healthy workplace. We did similar interviews of random employees from the 2017 India list of “Best Places to Work”, and the findings were similar.