Business Insider recently published a list of the
Here's how the list was put together:
All of the data used were collected from workers who successfully completed PayScale’s employee survey and only companies that were on the 2012 Fortune 500 list were considered for this
All of the surveys were from employees who work in the United States. This sample does not include U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico or Guam.
Below are the different factors that were taken into account for the final scores:
Total Cash Compensation (TCC): Combines base annual salary or hourly wage, bonuses, profit sharing, tips, commissions, overtime, and other forms of cash earnings, as applicable.
TCC does not include equity (stock) compensation, which can be a significant portion of pay for some executive and high-tech jobs. In addition, salary does not include cash value of retirement benefits, or value of other non-cash benefits (e.g. healthcare).
High Job Satisfaction: This is the percentage of people who responded Extremely Satisfied or Fairly Satisfied to the question, “How satisfied are you in your job?”
Low Job Stress: This is the percentage of people who responded My Job is Relaxing or Not Stressful to the question, “How stressful is your job/work environment?”
High Work Schedule Flexibility: This is the percentage of people who responded On any day, I can change my schedule and time-off or With advanced notice, I can set my schedule and time-off to the question, “How flexible is your job?”
High Job Meaning: This is the percentage of people who responded Very Much So and Yes to the question, “Does your job make the world a better place?”
Years of Experience: This is the total number of years a person has in their field / career. Therefore the years of experience will incorporate all applicable jobs in the field, not just the current job.
Experienced Median Pay: This is the median (50th Percentile) TCC for people who have at least 5 years of experience and work at the given company. Half of the employees with 5 or more years of work experience will earn more than this amount, while half will earn less.
Salary Delta: This measures whether a given employer typically pays above, below or at market price for their employees. By utilizing PayScale’s database of more than 35 million employee profiles, we have determined how various compensable factors, like years of work experience, education, and job responsibilities, affect pay, all else equal. From this analysis, PayScale can then calculate what a worker with a given set of compensable factors will earn across different employers.
This measure is reported as a percentage premium or loss. Any employer that pays above market will have a positive percentage. The larger the percentage, the higher the premium these employers pay for their workers. On the other hand, if an employer pays below market, the percentage will be negative.
Scoring:
In order to turn these different factors into a score, Payscale standardized each company specific measure by dividing the company specific value across the set of companies.
Next, the scores were turned into a distribution where the final company specific score is between 0.6 and 1.4 and evenly proportioned by rank. This step was needed in order to remove the heavy influence of outliers on the overall rank of an employer.
Once a company specific score for each of the six factors were determined — high job satisfaction, low job stress, high work schedule flexibility, high job meaning, experienced median pay and salary delta — the final score was reached by multiplying each of the factors together.
Each score has equal weight and equal effect on the resulting outcome except for the Experienced Median Pay Score which was weighted twice as heavily as all the other scores to place extra emphasis on companies who pay their employees well.