Company Pride Helps Create Great Workplace

Nice companies can finish first, according to Robert Levering, author and founder of the San Francisco-based Great Places to Work Institute.

Levering was keynote speaker at the Fourth Annual Family-a-Fair Workplace Awards luncheon Wednesday at the DoubleTree City Center in Spokane.

Levering, who co-authors Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for, told more than 250 at the luncheon that a great place to work is “one where you trust the people you work for, have pride in what you do and enjoy the people you work with.”

“Any company can become a great place to work,” Levering said, citing Continental Airlines, which, once would have been “on a list of the 10 worst companies in the country to work at.”

Now, he said, Continental is one of the best, realizing that getting good effort from employees “was the only way to become financially viable.”

Among other programs, when the airline finishes in the top three in on-time arrivals in any month, every employee gets $85, he noted. Staffers with perfect attendance in any quarter are in a drawing where six employees win new sport utility vehicles. And job-swapping is open to 40 percent of the work force, he said.

Local firms honored included:

Gross-Hatch Associates (1-25 employees); second, Auto Rain Supply Inc.; third, Deborah’s Jump Rope Academy.

Planned Parenthood (26-50); second, Post Falls Middle School; third, Vera Water and Power.

Hospice of Spokane (51-299); second, Lutheran Social Services; third, Spokane Public Schools Administration.

Metropolitan Mortgage and Securities (300+); second, Seafirst Bankcard Services; third, Toys R Us.