Why should a small business owner care about a list of the best workplaces in the world? Because such a list reveals those things that attract the best and brightest employees.

We can modify and incorporate in-demand perks into our own hiring practices.

We can study how business giants in our sector run their operations and perhaps modify our own operations to copy their success.

For example, a survey about employee benefits by Fractl found the following items to be the top considerations among job applicants when choosing a job:

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible hours
• Vacation time
• Work-from-home options
  
  

Other perks that were frequently mentioned included:

• Free fitness and yoga classes
• Snacks
• Company retreats
  
  

Of course, we don’t have the financial resources and budgets of famous multinational corporations like Cisco or Salesforce. So we can’t ever compete directly with them.

However, we can draw from this knowledge to differentiate our companies from our competitors when it comes to hiring or operations. That’s a battle in which we can engage and win.

If we own a local business, we can partner with other local businesses to provide benefits at a lower cost.

For instance, there are probably many local trainers, gyms, and yoga studios who would be delighted to partner with you in providing regular fitness services to your staff. In turn, you provide something of value to them.

With the recent virus upheaval, work-from-home options have become the norm. Perhaps your business embraced remote work out of necessity. Going forward, you might offer it as a perk, especially if all the infrastructure is already in place.

Perhaps Hilton has a way of dealing with regular customers that we could use locally or in ecommerce. What is it that makes Hilton so popular among employees? Can we make use of that?

Business ideas and insight often transfer well across industry niches, as long as we’re open to the idea.

The Best Companies to Work For from 2011 to 2019

Below is an infographic by Resume.io from Great Place to Work’s annual “World’s Best Multinational Workplaces.”

According to Great Place to Work, “To be eligible for the list, a company must have been named to at least five other best workplace lists and have a workforce of at least 5,000 employees, with at least 40% of the workforce based outside of the company’s home country.”

If you’re a small, local business owner, or you run an ecommerce shop, you can learn a lot about strategic growth by exploring what the big boys do.

Have you learned a valuable lesson or re-packaged a business tactic from a corporate giant? Tell us your story in the comments below.