Bay Area News Group hosted a lunch today to celebrate the winners of the 2012 Top Work Places in the Bay Area at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
Among the top work places were Fedex, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, Coupons.com Incorporated, TiVo Inc. and VMware, Inc.
The competition was among hundreds of nominated companies. The companies were selected for the award based on employees responses to surveys about their employer's values and ethics, training, career development, employee recognition and communication with staff among other areas.
Bay City News Group collaborated with Workplace Dynamics to pull together all the responses from the surveys which were sent out to 40,000 participants, and of which 23,000 came back, according to President of Bay Area News Group Mac Tully. 1400 companies were invited to participate in the contest, however only 10 percent responded, Tully added.
The companies that made the list are not just "good places to work, but they create jobs, and also a great environment around those jobs," Tully said.
Benefits Manager at TiVo Inc. Loretta Berg said that working at TiVo is great because of benefits employees receive, and because the company has an open door policy so employees can voice their comments or concerns.
"This award helps us to recruit people - we do advertisements saying 'TiVo' is one of the Top Work Places in the Bay Area to work at, and we have job openings," Berg said.
Chief Operating Officer at Coupon.com Inc. Brian Weisfeld said his company had just opened two new buildings and was also looking to hire more people.
According to Vice President of Human Resource Operations at VMware, Inc Jonathan Schoonmaker, the company is also hiring aggressively and one of the benefits is a three month leave which employees are encouraged to embark on to learn, grow and pursue their interests.
"To date we have hired 1000 people locally," Schoonmaker said, and added that they are looking to hire more.
The companies that received awards, did so because of their employees, Tully said. "This is a group of winners, each and every one of you were awarded top work status ... it is a tremendous achievement."
Bay Area technology giants Facebook, Linkedin, Google and Apple did not make the list.
