Best Workplaces 2023

Meet the 591 companies that get it. You know, how employee happiness drives productivity

Workplaces How the Best Manage to Give Their People What They Want

Lumin Digital CEO Jeff Chambers took four weeks off in 2022. The 49-year-old founder promises to do better this year: He's booked five weeks in vacation spots from Lake Tahoe to Hawaii. His company, which runs an online banking platform for credit unions and community banks, is heading for another year of 25 percent growth-evidence that his team clearly can function without him. "It's like we have 180 CEOs," he says. "I'm OK with that."

Although Lumin is a five-year-old tech startup whose cloud-based platform and weekly, zero-downtime upgrades give it a competitive advantage over legacy systems, the company actually isn't built around the technology. "We said let's go build a company that can build a better experience for employees and customers," Chambers says. "We can make investors a little less money and employees can have a happy life." For starters, he says, Lumin pays 10 percent above the going rate in its industry. And, young as it is, Lumin recently overhauled its benefits package to dial up the happiness knob another notch with such offerings as employee equity.

Like all the companies that made Inc.'s 2023 Best Workplaces list, Lumin seems to be running against today's tide. Located in San Ramon, California, in Silicon Valley, it sits at the epicenter of the economic temblors that may or may not end in recession: More than 120,000 tech workers have been drop-kicked by companies such as Meta Platforms and Salesforce. And, of course, Lumin was a customer of Silicon Valley Bank and had to do some scrambling to find funding as the nation's 16th-largest bank cratered, jeopardizing financing for Lumin and hundreds of other startups.