Shortly after Fortunemagazine released this year’s list of the 100 best companies to work for (its 18th year of partnering with workplace consultant Great Place to Work on the top 100 roster), the founder of Gravity Payments, a small Seattle-based credit card processing firm, announced that the minimum salary for each of the company’s 120 employees would be raised to $70,000 annually within the next three years.
“Is anyone else freaking out right now?” founder and CEO Dan Price asked after announcing the news to his entire team and the clapping and whooping died down into a few moments of stunned silence. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
The announcement garnered national attention and may push Gravity Payments on to the list of contenders for next year’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. But as Fortunecontributor Geoff Colvin eloquently states in this year’s issue, it takes more than a hefty minimum salary to make the cut.
For all the sex appeal of Silicon Valley-like perks such as free gourmet meals, on-site gyms and bring-your-dog-to-work days, “the essence of a great workplace is just that: an essence, an indispensable quality that determines its character,” Colvin writes. “Here’s the secret of every great place to work: It’s personal — not perk-onal. It’s relationship-based, not transaction-based.”
Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz, the two men who assembled the first 100 Best list in the early 1980s, understood this important distinction from the start. “The key to creating a great workplace,” they said, “was not a prescriptive set of employee benefits, programs and practices, but the building of high-quality relationships in the workplace.”
Colvin adds, “As technology takes over more of the fact-based, rules-based, left-brain skills — knowledge worker skills — employees who excel at human relationships are emerging as the new ‘it’ men and women. More and more major employers are recognizing that they need workers who are good at team building, collaboration and cultural sensitivity. These are the new corporate MVPs.”
