Environmental Systems Design, Inc. (ESD)

Organizations partner with Great Place To Work to understand how effectively their leaders create the conditions for an overwhelmingly positive employee experience. Great Place To Work offers best-in-class data about the employee experience, sourced from surveys taken by millions of employees globally. This data offers organizations invaluable insight into how their workers will interact with the workplace and establishes benchmarks for working conditions around the world.

Great Place To Work’s employee-centric view of the workplace was revolutionary 30 years ago. Today, our Trust Model™ offers an unmatched opportunity to identify what’s happening within your organization. Great Place To Work’s survey and analysis gives employers the ability to measure and track employee experience against key metrics and industry leaders.

Earning Great Place To Work Certification has many benefits, including:

• Better recruitment metrics such as offer acceptance rate
• Higher business profitability
• Automatic Best Workplaces™ award eligibility
• Greater employer brand awareness 
• Improved employee trust
• Higher retention: 51% higher than a typical U.S. workplace
• Greater employee pride in the company
• Recognition for having great people managers and leaders

Great Place To Work Certification criteria are the global standard for quantifying and benchmarking the employee experience. Using the Great Place To Work Trust Model and the Trust Index Survey, Certification evaluates workplace culture from the perspective that matters the most — the employee — offering the most comprehensive picture on the market of the internal health of an organization.

To be considered for Certification, organizations must have 10 or more employees and must complete a two-step process: 

1. Survey employees with the Trust Index Survey.
2. Complete the Culture Brief™, a company questionnaire. 

Positive employee responses to the Trust Index Survey (four and above on the five-point scale) are averaged to provide an organization-wide assessment of culture: the Trust Index. Companies that score above the current threshold become Great Place To Work Certified.

Surveys must meet strict requirements for how they are distributed and the percentage of employees who respond to ensure they accurately represent feedback from the company’s full population. 

To earn Great Place To  Work Certification, the average score across your survey results must show that approximately 7 out of 10 of your employees are having a consistently positive experience at work.

Once you are Certified, you will receive an email from us with access to your survey scores, digital Certification badge, a toolkit of social media images, and press materials with shareable content. As an extra benefit, your organization will automatically be eligible for all our award lists through the entire 12-month period your Certification is valid.

In broad terms, the Great Place To Work Trust Index™ Survey measures the level of trust in your organization and the consistency of the employee experience. In other words: How often can employees count on something happening in their workplace, such as clear and honest leadership, fair treatment, and employee recognition?

More specifically, the Great Place To Work Trust Index Survey measures individual employee experiences of five dimensions of a high-trust company culture through 60 statements and two open-ended questions. Three of the dimensions are connected to the actions of leaders and building trust: credibility, respect, and fairness. The other two dimensions measure the workplace experience of employees in relation to their colleagues and the wider organization: pride and a sense of belonging.

These five dimensions create a workplace culture where employees feel empowered and encouraged to do their most meaningful work. High-trust cultures are shown in Great Place To Work research to outperform their competitors in recruitment and retention, productivity and innovation, and financial performance.  

Survey answers are assessed on a five-point scale, revealing the most common experience of employees in the organization. Employee scores are averaged to provide an organization-wide assessment of workplace culture: the Trust Index score.