4 WA Businesses Make Fortune's 100 Best Companies To Work For

WASHINGTON — The businesses ranked among this year’s 100 Best Companies To Work For have at least one thing in common: They treated employees well during the pandemic.

The 24th annual list, compiled by Fortune and Great Place To Work, honors the “most heroic companies supporting their people and communities in the U.S. during this historically challenging year,” according to a release by Fortune.

Seattle law firm Perkins Cole did the best of the Evergreen State's businesses, jumping from 40th place in last year's ranking to 24th in this year's nationwide ranking. Fortune says the firm performed well in part because they responded to the pandemic quickly, giving the team 10 days to transition to remote work, adjusting employee evaluations to be more flexible during the pandemic, giving them "emergency care time" and even letting staff take home work desks and chairs if they needed them.

Other companies on this year’s list from Washington include:

Zillow

• Industry: Internet Services and Retailing
• Rank this year: 47
• Rank last year: N/A
• Employees: 5,801
• Revenue in 2020: $3.34B

The list chose to recognize Zillow because of its flexible work policies, which gave employees the ability to cut their hours if they needed to take care of their children or families.

T-Mobile US

• Industry: Telecommunications
• Rank this year: 51
• Rank last year: 42
• Employees: 75,000
• Revenue in 2020: $68.4B

Fortune says T-Mobile's quick response to the pandemic allowed them to transition 92 percent of their frontline employees into working from home. They also elected to supplement pay for retail staffers who worked on commission and let them roll over an extra 40 hours of unused paid time from last year.

Slalom Consulting

• Industry: Professional Services
• Rank this year: 74
• Rank last year: 31
• Employees: 7,580

Slalom is recognized for avoiding layoffs and for sharing financial data with employees to keep operations transparent during the pandemic.

Cisco, based in San Jose, California, topped this year’s list. The company, which makes network and other communications equipment, employed 36,374 people as of March 2021. Cisco, ranked fourth last year, has been on the list every year since its creation.

Rounding out the top 5 were Salesforce, based in San Francisco; Hilton, based in McLean, Virginia; Wegmans, based in Rochester, New York; and Rocket Companies, based in Detroit, Michigan.

To compile this year’s list, Great Place to Work surveyed more than a half-million employees on issues including how trustworthy, caring and fair the company is in times of crises; employees’ physical, emotional and financial health; and the company’s overall impact on its community.

Companies also need to employ at least 1,000 employees to be considered for the list.

The results: A strong link surfaced between positive employee opinion and how senior leaders and direct managers responded to the COVID-19 crisis. In fact, 71 percent of workplaces on this year’s list scored better than in pre-pandemic years.

In a typical year, 75 percent of a company’s score is based on confidential employee feedback, while the remainder is the company’s response to an essay question focused on programs and practices. This year, however, the essay question focused on actions taken in response to the challenges of 2020.

These companies managed “not just to muddle through” the pandemic, according to Fortune’s release, but also to become “role models” for other businesses.

Read more about the 2021 methodology.