Startups, top talent and the cycle of success

#LinkedInTopCompanies

Yesterday LinkedIn’s Daniel Roth published an article of LinkedIn Top Companies: Startups, and it highlights the 50 startups that are attracting top talent more so than any others in 2017. To compile the list, Roth used LinkedIn data to determine the top companies out of nearly 25,000 competitors.

According to the list, Uber, Airbnb, WeWork, Lyft and Slack are the top 5 in-demand startups to work for in the US and the UK.

We are accustomed to these Top 10, Top 50, Top 100 lists that rank companies in order of (i) how coveted they are by employees (ii) how much they’ve earned (iii) how much they’ve grown, and so on. And, we break it down by startups, Fortune 100, Fortune 500, and more.

Ranking can be a useful method to measure how Company A competes with Company B is a specific way. The thing we're ranking in this article? Employee satisfaction.

Employee satisfaction did not, historically, carry as much weight as customer satisfaction. And this is not to say that these two satisfactions are mutually exclusive. Only, we are seeing how employee satisfaction empowers the overall cycle of satisfaction. Meaning, more than ever, employee satisfaction translates to customer satisfaction which translates to a healthy bottom line. Hence, it's increased importance.

The companies at the top of this list have succeeded in providing most or all of the following:

1. High compensation
2. Expansive benefits and perks
3. Interesting projects - top technology
4. Healthy and supportive culture
5. Work-life balance

It may seem that being able to manufacture these elements in the workplace is simple, or can be done after a quarterly team meeting by following a series of bullet points.

My main point here is to emphasize that fostering a workplace with these elements is anything but simple. It truly is built from the top down with careful consideration of each new teammate and with constantly evaluating the evolution of the workplace culture.

Ultimately, all of those happy employees result in greater output, a greater bottom line, and then reinvestment in the company. Reinvestment and new investment (more capital) leads to companies working on more challenging technology, which in turns attracts even more of the top talent.

It can be easy to get carried away with simply reinvesting in technology since this will make your company grow very quickly in the short run. Rather, growing at a more controlled pace and reinvesting your culture and preserving your culture will yield an enduring company, a company that will last for decades and beyond.