Corporate Culture
By Ed. Filed in Business, Computers & Internet, Technology |
There is an article on Yahoo that links to the new Fortune magazine piece, “Best Companies to Work For.” The online article lists the top 10 companies, based on things like low employee turnover, employee satisfaction (from surveys), and company paid perks.
The number one company this year is SAS, a software company based in Cary, NC. I did not realize that SAS is based in Cary until I read that this morning. I used to know some people who worked for SAS in the Washington DC and Huntsville, AL areas.
What impressed me about SAS is the philosophy of their CEO, Jim Goodnight, about taking care of the employees and the corporate culture that he models.
“My chief assets drive out the gate every day,” Goodnight likes to say. “My job is to make sure they come back.”
Goodnight backs that up with impressive statistics. According to Fortune, the average tenure at SAS is 10 years. The company has 300 employees that have worked 25 years or more. The SAS annual turnover rate was just 2% in 2009, compared with the software industry average of about 22%. Women make up 45% of the SAS workforce in the United States, with an average age of 45.