The last few years have been tough for companies in the UK, as they juggled remote work, lockdowns, hiring delays, and also round after round of layoffs. The layoffs especially have shaken things up in this year’s Best Places to Work 2023 by Glassdoor. No doubt former employees took to the review site to air their grievances, especially for tech companies like Meta who’ve seen multiple layoffs in 2022 and 2023. Last year Meta made the top ten, this year it can’t be found in the top 50 companies.
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Which are the best companies to work for?
Let’s talk about what’s changed over the last year, and discuss some of the biggest movements across the UK’s top-rated 25 companies.
At number one we have Bain & Company, a consulting firm with over 10,000 employees. Don’t ask me what consulting is or how they make so much damn money, I don’t know, but it seems like a scam. Bain hadn’t made the top 50 companies on this annual list for the last three years (2020-2022), which shows a lot can change in just twelve months. Leaderboard movements like this give me more faith in the ranking system since it shows companies can go both ways (up or down) very quickly.
ServiceNow held the top place in the UK in 2022 and has dropped slightly this year to second place. That being said, the company managed to increase its overall rating to 4.7 this year (from 4.6). For a huge company like this to increase positive ratings by a decimal point is quite an effort.
I noticed Salesforce has dropped down to 9th place, where it’s previously been ranked in the top three for the last couple of years. You might speculate the dip is due to layoffs (January 2023), but I don’t think we’ll see the full effects of that until next year. What seems more likely is that the company has stayed relatively the same but the benchmark has been raised by other top contenders increasing their ratings.
Lastly, Google got bumped up this year, which was a surprise — it seems like HR has been busy collecting those positive employee reviews. Last year Google was in 18th place at 4.4 and in 2023, they moved to 7th place at 4.6.
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Glassdoor ranking: The 25 best employers in UK
Methodology
Yes, ratings aren’t going to be a perfect metric to judge a company’s culture or employee health, but it’s the best data we have at present. I tend to think smaller companies are a better bet for employee happiness, the only real benefit of corporate culture is being able to brag to your friends about the firm you work for. It would be great to see Glassdoor share data on SMEs and startups for all the people who don’t want to work for consulting firms based out of Boston.
For the ranking, Glassdoor uses employee reviews submitted on the platform within a year. At least 20 such reviews must have been received to consider a company. Besides, only companies with at least 1,000 employees are included in the ranking. Smaller companies are not included on the list of “best” employers. Companies that simply haven't been rated enough by their employees on the platform also have bad cards.
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