How to Get on a Best Places to Work Finalist List: A COO's Playbook

This is how, as COO, I got our company on a Best Places to Work finalist list, multiple years in a row. I found the award the way most people probably find it, which is by remembering it from somewhere else. Two companies I worked for earlier in my career had won it, and I could picture the certificate near reception at both places. So one afternoon I searched our metro area along with the phrase "best places to work," found the program that ran it here, and read the rules. A business journal administered it, nominations opened a few months out, and the entry fee was a few hundred dollars.

What follows is the honest version of how we made it, including the part that is inconvenient for anyone hoping to find a shortcut. Almost nothing that got us on that list happened during the application window. It happened in ordinary weeks over the two years before it, in a repeating loop of asking people what was wrong and then fixing some of it in a way everyone could see.

How These Awards Actually Work

Most Best Places to Work programs are run by a local business journal, a state business publication, or an industry association, and nearly all of them hand the measurement itself to an outside research firm. There are two components. You fill out an employer questionnaire covering headcount, benefits, turnover, parental leave, training, and how you handle reviews and promotions. Your employees take a confidential survey that the research firm administers directly, and in the program we entered, that survey carried the overwhelming share of the score. The questionnaire mostly served to explain the survey results rather than to outweigh them.

Two mechanics in the rulebook matter more than everything else combined, and both of them caught me off guard the first year.

You need most of your team to respond

For a company our size the threshold was around 80 percent, with the bar sliding down as headcount goes up. Miss it and you are disqualified before anyone reads a single answer. That rule is more punishing than it sounds, because a response rate is itself a trust measurement. Teams that believe a survey is a formality do not fill it out, and a company sitting at 55 percent participation has already learned something important about its culture without seeing one score.

You cannot guide the vote

You may tell people the survey is coming, that it is confidential, that an outside firm is running it, and that you would like them to take it. You may not suggest answers, tie any incentive to the scores, sit nearby while people fill it out, or ask afterward what someone wrote. Some programs will disqualify you for it, and frankly you should disqualify yourself, because the results are worth something only for as long as they are genuinely your team's own. I said one thing to my team the first year, which was that I had no idea what they were going to say, that I was not going to ask, and that if we did not make the list, that was information I needed more than a plaque.

Finding the Program in Your Area

There is no single national list. There is a patchwork of regional and industry programs, and the one that will actually help you recruit is the one your candidates have heard of. Search your metro name with "best places to work," then your state name with "best companies to work for." Check your local business journal directly, because these programs often live in an events section rather than in editorial. Then check your industry association and your chamber of commerce, which frequently run a smaller version with a much better ratio of effort to visibility.

Once you find one, confirm four things before you commit. The application deadline usually falls six to nine months ahead of publication. The survey window is fixed and is not yours to move. The size categories decide whether you are measured against companies with your headcount or against a hospital system with four thousand employees and a benefits budget you cannot approach. And the total cost is more than the entry fee.

What It Costs, and What You Get Back

Expect to pay at least $500 to apply, and more as headcount goes up, since most programs tier the fee by company size. That is the entry alone. The detailed results report is usually a paid add-on, tickets to the awards event are priced per seat like a banquet, and some programs sell a separate marketing package covering the logo and its usage rights. Budget for the entry plus the data report, and treat the event tickets as optional in your first year.

I would spend that money again in a year we did not make the list, because you are buying a professionally administered and genuinely anonymous read on your own company, benchmarked against every other employer in your region that entered. You cannot manufacture that internally at any price. A survey you administer yourself always carries a quiet asterisk in employees' minds about who can see the answers, no matter how sincerely you promise otherwise.

Then there is the recruiting side, which is where the money comes back.

Putting it on your careers page

The badge belongs at the top of the careers page, near the open roles, with the year and the size category next to it. Add one line explaining what it measured, because "voted by our employees in an anonymous third-party survey" does considerably more work than the logo does on its own. Candidates have learned to discount everything a company says about its own culture, and this is the one claim on the page that you did not write about yourself.

Putting it in your job postings

Put it in the first two lines of the description rather than in the boilerplate at the bottom, where nobody reads. The change we could actually measure was not a flood of applicants. It was better applicants, more of whom arrived already predisposed to say yes, which shortened time to fill and made offer conversations easier. Referral volume also moved the month the list was announced, because forwarding a job posting to a friend means asking that friend to trust you, and the award gave people something external to point at.

Two more effects were worth as much as the recruiting. The list told the employees we already had that their experience was measurably good compared to the alternatives in the same city, which is a quiet and real retention effect. And the client-facing team started putting it into proposals and RFP responses, because buyers in services worry about staffing stability whether or not they say so out loud. Use it in email signatures, on the LinkedIn banner, in offer letters, in onboarding materials, and in the lobby, checking the usage rules first, since most programs specify the year and the exact logo file.

The Thing That Actually Won It: eNPS, Every Quarter

We ran an employee net promoter survey every quarter. The question is the boring standard one, zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work. What mattered were the two open text fields underneath it, asking what is working and what you would change.

The score itself is the least useful part of eNPS, because it is a trend line and nothing more. I have watched leaders spend an entire meeting arguing about whether a four point move was significant while ignoring forty comments that told them exactly what was wrong. The comments are the product. The score only tells you whether you are getting better.

The loop we ran

• Read every comment personally. Not a summary and not a slide from HR, because the phrasing people choose carries the intensity and a summary strips it out.
• Group the comments into themes. Twenty comments usually collapse into four or five real issues, and you should name each one in the team's words rather than in management language.
• Pick two or three themes, not all of them. This is the discipline that keeps the whole practice alive, because picking nine means finishing zero.
• Turn each theme into a project with an owner and a date. A theme without an owner is a complaint that you have now written down.
• Publish the list. Everyone sees which themes were chosen, who owns each one, and when it is due, including the themes you are not addressing this quarter and the reason why.
• Report back before the next survey goes out. You said, we did, here is what shipped, here is what slipped, and here is what we decided against and the reasoning behind it.

That last step is not a nice touch, it is the entire mechanism. If you survey people and nothing visibly changes, you have taught them that surveys are theater, and the bill arrives the following quarter when participation collapses. At that point you cannot hit the 80 percent threshold on the award survey, and the disqualification you receive is technically about response rate but is actually about credibility.

The projects that came out of this were unglamorous. We rewrote an onboarding process that left new hires idle for their first three days. We replaced a tool everyone quietly hated. We made the schedule predictable further out so people could plan their lives around it. We published promotion criteria that had been living in my head. We cut a recurring meeting that four people told me separately was pure overhead. None of that makes a press release, and all of it moved the score.

Weekly Meetings the Team Ran

I met with my team weekly, and they ran it. That was not a delegation trick, it was a deliberate change in who talks first, because when the leader sets the agenda and opens the meeting, everything that follows is a response to the leader. When someone on the team owns the agenda, the meeting becomes a conversation about what is actually in the way.

I held three questions for the end of it. What do you need from me, what is blocking you that I have the authority to remove, and what did I commit to last week that I have not delivered. That third question does more for trust than any policy in a handbook, because asking it out loud means the team gets to hold you to a list in public. The first few weeks of that are uncomfortable, and after a quarter it becomes the reason people tell you things early instead of late. Everything that came out of those weekly meetings had to become tracked work with an owner and a date, because commitments that live only in a meeting recap evaporate in about nine days.

Quarterly One-on-One Check-Ins

Separately, once a quarter, I sat down with people individually, and I said at the top of every one of those conversations that it was not a performance review. That matters, because people who think they are being evaluated answer strategically rather than honestly. Three questions carried most of it: what do you want to be doing in two years, what part of your job would you hand to someone else tomorrow if you could, and what do you need from me that you are not getting.

Then I wrote the answers down and kept them somewhere I would see them again, because the failure mode of this conversation is having it four times and never acting on any of it. The value shows up on the day a role opens and you already know, from a conversation eight months earlier, exactly who has been asking for it.

People First, in the Specific Sense

"People first" survives on posters because it costs nothing to say. The version that shows up in survey scores is narrower and considerably harder.

Flexibility as the default posture. We started from trust rather than from proof, which meant you tell me what you need, we make it work unless there is a real operational reason we cannot, and I tell you the reason when we cannot. Flexibility gets much easier to grant when you can see workload and coverage, which is the unglamorous prerequisite most people skip. Without visibility into schedules, hours, and who is already at capacity, flexibility feels like flying blind, and leaders who feel blind start quietly saying no.

Promoting from within. Every internal promotion did more for our growth and performance scores than any training budget line ever did, because people update their beliefs from what they watch happen to their peers rather than from what they are told is possible. Post roles internally first. Publish the criteria before you open the role rather than after you fill it. And go back to the people who were not selected with a specific answer about what would change that, which is the conversation everyone avoids and the one that decides whether they stay.

The Extreme Perks Other Companies Use

You will read about companies offering six-week paid sabbaticals at five years, unlimited PTO, four-day weeks, on-site chefs, or a stipend to go travel. Those make good headlines and they work in the specific places they exist, which tend to have deep headcount and margins to match.

I looked seriously at sabbaticals and decided against them. On a small team, one person out for six weeks is not a perk, it is a staffing event, and the four people absorbing that work develop an opinion about the perk that bears no resemblance to the opinion of the person on the beach. Unlimited PTO has a similar shape, because at small scale it often reduces the time people take, since nobody knows what normal looks like and everybody is watching everybody else.

What settled it for me was reading the actual survey questions. They ask whether your manager cares about you as a person, whether you understand where the company is going, whether you are paid fairly for your work, whether you trust the people leading, whether you have the tools to do your job, and whether your work matters. Not one of them asks whether the company offers a sabbatical. Those items are built out of consistency, which is expensive in a different currency than perks are.

Buying the Survey Data

The program we used sold a detailed results report as an add-on, and I bought it every year. It included the full breakdown by category, benchmarks against the other employers who entered, segmentation by tenure and department and role, and the anonymized verbatim comments. Buy it, and buy it especially in a year you do not make the list, when the temptation to skip it is highest and the information is worth the most.

The piece you cannot generate on your own is the benchmark. "We scored 6.8 on career growth" is a number your leadership team can argue about for an hour. "We are eleven points below comparable regional employers on career growth, and the gap sits almost entirely in people with two to four years of tenure" is a project brief that writes itself.

If you run eNPS internally with something like Updoot, you already hold the trend line, the verbatims, and the cuts by department and manager, four times a year rather than once, and you can line all of that up against performance review history and turnover in a way the outside report cannot. What the purchased data adds is the outside comparison and a level of anonymity credibility that comes from the survey being administered by someone who does not sign paychecks. Run both, because they answer different questions.

Program rules, fees, and participation thresholds vary by region and administrator. Confirm the specifics with whoever runs the list in your area before you plan around them.

A Twelve-Month Calendar

If you are starting from nothing, this is roughly the sequence I would run again.

• Twelve months out. Start quarterly eNPS if you are not already running it, and complete at least two full loops, including the report-back, before you go anywhere near an application.
• Nine months out. Find the program and confirm the deadline, the survey window, the size categories, and the total cost. Put those dates on the calendar as real deadlines with an owner attached.
• Six months out. Submit the nomination, pay the entry fee, and assign one person to own the employer questionnaire.
• Four months out. Assemble the questionnaire inputs, meaning turnover, tenure, benefits detail, leave policies, training, and your promotion and review process. This is tedious, and it is considerably worse if your HR records live in a folder of spreadsheets.
• Three months out. Close out the current round of eNPS projects and report back on them. Do not start new initiatives right before the survey window, because people can tell, and it reads as exactly what it is.
• Survey window. Announce it once, explain that it is confidential and third-party administered, make sure people can take it on the clock, and then stay out of it entirely.
• Results. Buy the data report and turn the two weakest categories into next quarter's projects, whatever the outcome was.
• Announcement. Update the careers page, the job postings, the email signatures, and the proposal templates in the week it goes public, while it is still news.

Common Mistakes

Announcing the award as a goal to the team. The moment people know leadership wants a win, the survey stops being a mirror and becomes a loyalty test. Some will inflate their answers to be kind and others will deflate them on principle, and you learn nothing from either group.

Running a campaign in the last eight weeks. Pizza, a sudden benefits announcement, and an unusually warm all-hands all read as recency, and people are right to read them that way.

Chasing the badge instead of the retention. The badge is a lagging indicator of something that is already true. Build the thing and the badge becomes a formality, skip it and you will spend $500 to be told what your exit interviews already said.

Letting the loop die after the first year. Making the list creates a quiet complacency risk, and the survey resets every year whether or not your habits do.

Where Updoot Fits

Everything above has to live somewhere, and the common failure is that it lives in five places at once: a survey tool, a spreadsheet of themes, a project board, a document of meeting notes, and somebody's memory of what an employee said in March.

Updoot runs that loop in one system. eNPS surveys go out on a schedule with anonymous open comments and full trend history, so you are watching movement rather than reacting to a single number. Themes become projects with owners, dates, and visible status, which is what turns feedback into something you can report back on. Meeting agendas convert commitments into assigned action items, so the weekly your team runs produces tracked work instead of a recap. Performance reviews and HR records sit alongside the survey data, which puts the growth conversation and the career history in the same place. Scheduling, PTO, and time tracking give you the workload visibility that makes flexibility something you grant confidently rather than nervously. And KPI dashboards let you watch turnover and time to fill move alongside the engagement trend, which is how you find out whether any of this is working.

The Bottom Line

The finalist list is not something you win inside an application window. It is the receipt for two years of asking people what is wrong, picking a few of those things, fixing them where everyone can see, and telling the team what happened either way. Ask honestly, act visibly, close the loop, promote the people already doing the work, and let your team run the meeting. Then pay the $500, stay completely out of the vote, and buy the data whichever way it goes.

Frequently Asked Questions