How We Did It
Business Today has conducted 18 editions of the 'Best Companies To Work For' survey in collaboration with HR solutions company PeopleStrong. In the 19th edition, as more millennials join the workforce, we have re-imagined and revamped it as 'India's Coolest Workplaces' - and joined hands with Taggd, a PeopleStrong Recruitment Solutions brand that manages permanent talent recruitment for over half a million jobs.
Over the past year, the world of work has changed dramatically. As people get used to emerging workplaces, which are boundary-less, virtual, and accessible from any place, what keeps people glued to the employer or employers (in case of gig workforce), is different. People need better and exciting opportunities, but linear growth is no longer expected, nor is it feasible in flatter systems.
An employer or its employer brand doesn't just need to be the 'best' in class but also the most loved to be the talent magnets they aspire to be. That is what this survey aims to capture with the corporate workforce of today - which is younger, has lesser attention span and measures an employer with a different benchmark.
As always, we followed a survey open to employees from various industries. To cross-check the authenticity of respondents and to ensure that the quality of responses were of acceptable standards, checks were done by calling a certain proportion of respondents randomly. We reached out to salaried employees across sectors. We had over 26,000 respondents to the survey this year as opposed to 17,000 plus last year. Taggd then constructed a ranking of companies and analysed the various aspects that go into making a company a cool workplace by deep diving into the aspirations and perception of employees.
The parameters include clarity of goals at company and individual level; culture of innovation; work flexibility and employee wellness policies; growth and learning opportunities; ease of operating in virtual workplace; job security and stability; fair and objective processes and policies; focus on individual wellbeing among others.
The survey resulted in identifying the Top 25 Best Companies to work for in India, and the factors that make employees choose a job or a workplace over others.
Sample Size and Representation
Most surveys accept that beyond 95 per cent confidence level and 5 per cent standard error, the trade-off between the high cost of survey and the precision enhancement are not worthwhile. For instance, the sample required for 95 per cent confidence level and 5 per cent standard error for a population of 100,000 is around 660. As one increases the precision to 99 per cent confidence level and 2.5 per cent standard error, the sample requirement jumps to 2,647 a four-fold increase in the required sample size. Such precision or higher is usually recommended in research of rare diseases or similar such issues.
For this survey, any segment with a sample size of around 600 random selections has an outstanding representation. Segments with sample size of 200 random selections are also good samples because they give us a confidence level of 90 per cent with a 5 per cent standard error. Even a segment of 100 random selections give us a confidence level of 90 per cent with an 8 per cent standard error.
We do not report for any segment where the sample is less than 150 with 90 per cent confidence level with 6 per cent confidence interval.
We have taken the standard deviation of 5 per cent and a confidence level of 95 per cent to derive the sample sizes of each of the sector to come out with the required sample size in each of the sectors. The summation of the sample sizes of each sector is our total sample for data analysis. We have removed those sectors from the analysis which did not meet the threshold sample size value which is 150.
The analysis is done using the representative sample from the total population
Ranking of Companies
We ask respondents to select and rank the three companies which in their opinion are the Coolest Workplaces in India. Rank 1 has higher weight as compared to rank 2, and so on. Also, the gap between rank 1 and rank 2 is considered to be more significant than the gap between rank 2 and rank 3, and so on. This difference will be implemented by using 90 per cent rule, wherein rank 2 gets 90 per cent of the weight as rank 1, and rank 3 gets 90 per cent of the weight given to rank 2, and so on.
Once they selected these companies, we ask them for views on how they would rate them on each of the four factors specified - People Growth Initiatives; Going Beyond Business; Wellbeing Initiatives and Engagement & Connect. Respondents will rank companies on various parameters. Once rank scores are computed, the top ranked company was given an index score of 100 and the scores obtained by the other companies will be indexed to the score of the top ranked company.
They will be asked to rate each of these factors on a scale of 1-5 (1 being low importance, 5 being high importance), based on which the percentage weights of each factor would be computed.
