While the pandemic offered opportunities for many white-collar workers to work from home, and in some cases (e.g., Twitter) suggesting that it would be a “forever” change, many organizations are embroiled in heated standoffs with employees as they’ve been having them report back to the office for 1, 3, or even 5 days a week. Like many cultural shifts, working remotely was a favored sign of the times. But like some of these changes to the zeitgeist, they’re only favorable until they’re no longer favorable. There are some tipping points that are hard to avoid, and then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. For example, Elon Musk recently wrote a memo (about employees at Tesla) that: “There are of course companies that don’t require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It’s been a while. Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in.” Also adding, “Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean ‘minimum’) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla.” Phrases like these are catchy enough and influential enough that they start to have stickiness to them. They’ll undoubtedly influence hiring managers, and eventually HR representatives. For this reason, the free-for-all on remote work is likely to be boundarized more-and-more by year-end. ConnectSolutions conducted a survey in 2015 about remote work, and 77% of remote workers reported greater productivity by working offsite. But remember “who” conducted the survey, and “who” answered the survey. Workers responded (with 100% confounded bias) that they perform better remotely. This is hardly scientific.

How to measure top companies

Ranking top companies by market performance is a strong way to come up with an unarguable, ordinal list. Strangely, the more employee-centric measures from the public of “top companies,” where they solicit surveys and polls from employees as to where they prefer to work are fully-encumbered by notions of worker comfort and convenience over actual work(er) output and company successfulness. Sure, unlimited days off, ping pong tables, onsite cocktail parties, and so on create layers of connectedness and goodwill, but they’re never accurate measures of what a “good” company actually is. There are some correlations between these offerings and employee longevity, resistance to turnover and higher poll rankings, but there are plenty of negatively-correlated datapoints as well that overall make these employment interventions ambiguous at best. Given a choice between working in a coal mine or an office with napping pods, dartboards, etc. is a no-brainer; but drawing a straight line between these offerings and company success is a fantasy. And sometimes the causality is reversed: High performing companies that then offer these amenities to employees can make it appear that the amenities themselves caused the high performance (which they didn’t). For example, there is a strong correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks. But maybe both are attenuated by another factor, like more people at the beach in the water on hot days? Top companies are also never immune from M&A discussions, nor of challenges to their organic growth versus acquired growth architecture. But playing the Top Company game well means playing all aspects of it well, and acquisitions (and mergers, etc.) can lead to great success for the right moves done well.

The rise and fall of social

Every company has strived to incorporate social, because at this point, if you aren’t doing it you should feel like you’re behind the curve. But it’s also true that in the pharmaceutical industry, there’s not a great social connection that’s been recognizable or sustainable. For example, when pharma companies tweet about their latest therapy, there are often overtly aggressive and humorous replies from the general public, reminding us that Big Pharma still represents one of the Ultimate Evils of the world—see the Tweets below for an example from Pfizer:   The anonymity offered to those on social media gives a charisma to the posters that they’d never have in public. But to some degree, what we call “social media listening” as an experiment gives us insight into opinions that are otherwise invisible in other channels. So, while many companies try to be the embodiment of “Companies that do good, do well,” I think they also largely have the causality reversed, as in the situations mentioned above. It shouldn’t be that every company clamors to run a campaign to show the most loudly how “good” they can be to public interests (in order to get more followership, and therefore more revenue). Instead, it’s supposed to be that successful companies would organically try to support public interests for the betterment of society as a whole, and through this connection, people feel good about that company. But the vast majority of the companies are doing the former to pull the public behavior lever, not the latter. This makes a lot of social campaigns and charities “noise,” with very few instances of “signal.” It’s nice to see the ones doing it well, though, as it restores hope in the future of civilization.

In summation

There are a lot of ways to measure companies that do well, and some measures are much better than others. The bandwagon effect is still very much in-play across the industry (and all industries, for that matter). So, it’s really about the Red Queen effect: People trying to copy others in order to not be left behind, in a corporate world moving at such high velocity. As much as some of the trappings I’ve discussed above are actually distractions from corporate performance, companies know the need to tread lightly around some of the more nascent elements, for it’s not always clear at the outset which ones will ultimately be powerful arbiters of future performance. Good leaders know this too, and they listen as much as they speak, for very much the same reason. And good leaders are never far from good companies.

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Ben Locwin Contributing Editor Dr. Ben Locwin is a healthcare executive, philanthropist and industry prognosticator. He has worked with and for many of the top companies, including helping direction-setting under conditions of uncertainty. He has been featured in top-tier media such as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Associated Press, Der Spiegel, and others.