Certification
Build a culture where people thrive
Great Place To Work® Certification™ isn’t just a badge – it’s a symbol of your commitment to creating a workplace where people feel valued and engaged. And when your team feels trusted, they give their best, driving innovation and growth that sets your business apart.
Certification helps you show the world – and your team – that you’re serious about building a thriving, productive culture that fuels long-term success.
Ready to put a spotlight on what makes your company great?
”90% of our new hires said that Great Place To Work Certification was the key deciding factor in selecting IDOC.”
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What is Great Place To Work Certification?
Great Place To Work Certification recognizes employers who create an outstanding employee experience.
Certification is a two-step process that includes surveying your employees and completing a short questionnaire about your workforce.
Because employee feedback and independent analysis determine the scores, Certification helps job seekers identify which companies genuinely offer a great company culture.
Certification gives employers a recruiting advantage by providing a globally recognized and research-backed verification of great employee experience.
The Great Place To Work Model: Trust is the core
Trust forms the heart of an exceptional workplace, as captured by our Great Place To Work Model. According to our research and model, a great workplace is defined by four qualities: Employees trust the people they work for; take genuine pride in their work; enjoy collaborating with their colleagues; and experience a consistent workplace atmosphere, irrespective of their role, identity, or position within the organization. Businesses rooted in trust not only attract the best talent but also achieve significant long-term financial success.
“The Great Place To Work Certification process and all the information we get back from our employees through the Trust Index Survey has been critical to our growth”
Emily Forrester
, Senior Vice President of People & Culture at Workiva
Read more about Workiva's partnership with Great Place To Work
Join the ranks of other Certified workplaces
Meet the businesses that Great Place To Work Certification has transformed
How to earn Certification
01
Survey your employees
Select a two-week period to launch the Trust Index™, our research-backed employee experience survey.
02
Complete the Culture Brief
Fill out a short questionnaire about your company culture and workforce.
Once you are Certified
Promote and celebrate your certification
Once you meet our criteria and employee feedback benchmark, you’ll earn the special distinction of being a Great Place To Work Certified company.
Once Certified, you’ll have access to a suite of employer branding tools and promotional assets:
- A custom, royalty-free Certification badge to use on all your recruiting campaigns and assets
- Digital toolkit full of social media images, press materials, shareable content and more
- Your interactive Certified company profile on greatplacetowork.com
- Certification Celebration kit with party materials
- Access to co-branded swag and more
See how it works
Watch a step-by-step walk-through of the Certification process.
Benefits of Certification
Earn more company culture awards
Once Certified, you’ll be automatically considered for placement on 20+ Best Workplaces™ lists including the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list and the PEOPLE Companies That Care® list. One application is all you need.
Gain the opportunity to feature in Fortune and PEOPLE as well as the Great Place To Work blog, case studies, webinars, social media, and more.
”Getting Certified has increased our close rate by 30%.”
Fill your recruitment pipeline
- Top talent can work wherever they want. Earning Great Place To Work Certification proves you’ve created an amazing employee experience and elevates your status as an employer of choice.
- More than just saying you are a great place to work – Certification is the undeniable proof that your current employees want to work for your company.
- Get Certified and get more high-quality applicants and increase your offer acceptance rate.
Know your culture strengths & opportunities
Your Trust Index employee survey — step one in the Certification process — gives you an in-depth analysis of your company culture strengths and weaknesses. Uncover what is causing employees to leave and improve employee retention.
See how you compare to the Best Workplaces with benchmark data.
Build company pride
- Certification builds community and inspires workplace pride.
- Strengthen what your company stands for. Certification shows you have a clear social purpose and reinforces your company’s mission, vision, and values.
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:
- Survey employees with the Trust Index Survey.
- 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.