About Us

We want to help make the world a better workplace. It’s something we really care about. We care because we truly believe that people who are fully engaged at work feel happier and more secure, which makes them more productive. To achieve this, we live by our five key principles Care, Humility, Responsibility, Discipline and Hunger.

Best Companies is the brainchild of our founder and CEO Jonathan Austin. He was inspired by a Servant Leadership conference in the USA in 2000, where he attended a seminar with the top 2 companies to work for in America at the time – Synovis Financial and TD Industries. They talked about how they attributed their over-achievement as a business to the level of engagement they had within their workforce

As the owner of several businesses, Jonathan wanted to create a true measure of workplace engagement so he could learn how to build a happier, healthier workforce. The first step was to develop a world-class methodology, which he did in collaboration with academics at the University of Plymouth.

We launched the first Best Companies to Work For list in 2001, and have continued to grow and develop ever since. We now have the people in place to not only measure true engagement, but to improve it. And with improvements in the way the data is reported on, we can look into businesses in a more detailed and effective way than any other organisation.

Our Best Companies to Work For Lists and Best Companies Accreditation are now recognised as the standard in workplace engagement. We recognise those in the small, mid-size, large and big categories on a national level, with recent expansion seeing us add additional categories by region and sector.

Today we work with some of the world’s best-known organisations: measuring, improving, and recognising.