Great Place to Work® UK, the leading employee experience consultancy has released its 2020 UK’s Best Workplaces™ awards list. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the rigorous Best Workplaces™ ranking, which comprehensively audits both the employee experience and the practices of organisations across various UK industries, including tech, pharmaceutical, FMCG, retail and manufacturing.

The latest research shows that employees’ intention to stay in Best Workplaces™ is 20 percentage points higher than those in the national average. In addition to this, in Alex Edmans recent book Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, he states, ‘Companies with high employee satisfaction outperformed their peers by 2.3%-3.8% per year over a 28-year period’. Ultimately, the culture at Best Workplaces™ are embedded with high levels of trust – 85% compared to just 54% at the average UK organisation – which, especially in uncertain times such as these, fuels business performance and creates a better employee experience.

In the 20th anniversary of the Best Workplaces™ annual report, Great Place to Work® UK looked at the past 20 years of trends and changes in the employee experience. Key insights included:

• The number of Best Workplaces™ with women in leadership roles has almost doubled from 17% in 2001 to 30% this year in 2020.
• In 2005 only 34% of UK organisations offered either paid maternity/paternity leave. In 2020 86% of organisations offered paid maternity, and 77% offer paid paternity.
• With a large trend towards corporate social responsibility, there has been an increase in the hours offered to employees for volunteering, from an average of 3 hours offered per year in 2005 to 14 hours per year in 2020.

Who made the Best Workplaces™ list in 2020?

This year’s ranking of Best Workplaces™ ranges from major brands such as BritVic, Gap, Adobe, Hilton and Salesforce to smaller organisations including the FinTech platform Quickbooks UK and London based marketing agency Synergy Vision. Ranked No.1 in the Super Large, Large, Medium and Small categories are Salesforce, The Sovini Group, Foundation SP and McCarthy Recruitment respectively. Salesforce and McCarthy Recruitment took the No.1 spots in our 2019 awards list, demonstrating the sustainability of their people practices and programmes. In honour of the lists 20th year anniversary, Great Place to Work® UK also gave special recognition to Lifetime Masters: Gowling WLG (UK) LLP and Admiral Group. Both organisations have been a recognised Best Workplace™ for 20 years consecutively.