100 Best Companies To Work For 2019

INNOVATION BY ALL.

- Michael C. Bush And Christopher Tkaczyk

How do you encourage it? How do you harness it? And most important, how do you make sure you’re not stifling it? As we talked to top-performing companies of every size and across every industry on our 22nd annual list, the challenge of getting the best ideas from all your employees is the theme that came up more than any other. One obvious example is at our new No. 1: Hilton. Relying on a Millennial Team Member Resource Group is just one of the ways this 100-year-old hospitality company is making sure all employees (in this case, its youngest) get a chance to contribute their best ideas. Attempting to “actively solicit input, new ideas, learnings, and experiences” has become paramount, says Hilton’s chief human resources officer Matthew Schuyler.

Elsewhere on our list, Cisco (No. 6) is developing more and more programs to seed innovation, such as an annual companywide competition in which employees can “invest” tokens in the best ideas (the contest has led to seven proofs of concept and eight patents). Indeed, this list includes dozens of role models for encouraging innovation (which is also the theme of our February Great Place to Work for All Summit). Still, we wondered: Could this magic formula be quantified?

This past summer, the team of data scientists and researchers at Great Place to Work set out to discover what helps set these organizations apart from their peers. As a result, we developed a new metric, which we call the Innovation Velocity Ratio (IVR). It’s a measure that quantifies the friction a company’s employees experience when it comes to having opportunities to develop new ideas, products, or processes. The lower your friction, the higher your score.