Key Highlights
- Job seekers are 15 times more likely to choose a company that’s been Certified as a great workplace by its own employees.
- The companies that get the most value from their first year treat Certification as a 12-month program, not a one-time badge.
- Even organizations that don’t reach the certification threshold walk away with benchmarked culture data and a plan for improvement across five trust dimensions
So you’ve decided to get Great Place To Work Certified. Smart move, and not just because we’re the ones saying it. Job seekers are 15 times more likely to choose a company they know has been Certified as a great workplace by its own employees. Not 15 per cent. Fifteen times.
If you’re a HR officer, you’re already calculating what that means for cost-per-hire and thinking about what that badge would look like on your careers page. If you’re a mid-level people manager trying to stop your best engineers from ghosting you for a competitor, you’re wishing you did this six months ago.
The Great Place To Work Certification process is simpler than most people expect. The real value is often to be found in what happens after the badge lands. This is the practical, month-by-month guide to getting it right.
Months 1–2: Laying the Groundwork
Before a single survey question goes out, you need two things: internal buy-in and a communication plan. The buy-in piece is usually quite simple, because the business case is clean. Companies that actively invest in employer branding see a 50 per cent reduction in cost-per-hire, according to LinkedIn’s global employer brand research. For a mid-market company running 40–60 hires a year, that’s a line item any CFO can get behind.
The communication plan matters more than most organizations realize. Employees have been conditioned to treat internal surveys with the same enthusiasm they reserve for fire drills, something to endure. The companies that get strong participation (and therefore stronger data) are the ones that explain why they’re running the survey, what will happen with the results, and when people will hear back.
Great Place To Work provides communication templates and suggested timelines as part of their packages — either Assess™ or Accelerate™, depending on the depth of analysis and consulting support your organization needs. Both are built around the same core survey, but the difference is what happens with the data afterwards.
Your Pre-Launch Communication Timeline
Two weeks before launch: CEO or senior leader sends a company-wide message. Keep it short. Explain the purpose (measuring trust and culture, not policing individuals), confirm confidentiality, and set the expectation that results will be shared openly.
One week before: People managers brief their teams in person or via video. This is where you address questions like: “Is this actually anonymous?” The answer: responses are confidential. Great Place To Work sees individual responses, your organization sees aggregate data only.
Launch day: Survey invitations go out via email or SMS. Employees have a two-week window. It takes roughly 15 minutes to complete, 60 statements rated on a five-point scale, plus two open-ended questions.
The Survey: What the Trust Index™ Actually Measures
The Trust Index™ survey has been refined over 30 years across more than 170 countries. It measures five dimensions of workplace culture: credibility (do employees trust leadership’s competence and communication?), respect (do people feel supported professionally and personally?), fairness (are pay, recognition and promotions equitable?), pride (are employees proud of their work and their team?), and camaraderie (is there genuine connection and belonging?).
Each dimension maps to specific survey statements that employees rate from “almost always untrue” to “almost always true.” Positive responses (four or five on the scale) are averaged to produce your Trust Index score.
Alongside the survey, your HR team completes the Culture Brief™ a short questionnaire about your organization’s background, demographics, and workplace programs. Think of it as context for your numbers. The survey tells Great Place To Work what employees experience; the Culture Brief tells them what you’re doing to shape that experience.
Month 3: Results Have Landed. Now What?
Results are available as soon as the two-week survey window closes, and they’re detailed: overall Trust Index score, dimension breakdowns, benchmark comparisons against Best Workplaces™ and, crucially, the open-ended responses.
A quick note on those open-ended responses: they’re the real goldmine. The quantitative scores tell you where you stand. The written comments tell you why. Consulting Director for the ASEAN region, Stuart Elliot, says that he learns more from reading 200 open-text responses than from six months of skip-level meetings.
One thing most nervous HR managers ask is what happens if you don’t hit the certification threshold? Organizations need an overall Trust Index score of 65 per cent or higher to earn Great Place To Work Certification. If you fall below that, you don’t get the badge. However, you still get all the data and insights. The benchmarks, the dimension breakdowns, the open-ended feedback.
Organizations that don’t certify in their first year often find the diagnostic more valuable than the badge. They know exactly where trust breaks down, they have a clear set of priorities for the next 12 months, and they come back the following year with a score that’s moved meaningfully.
The smart play is to treat the first survey as a baseline, not a pass-fail exam.
Months 3–6: From Badge to Employer Brand Asset
If your Trust Index score hits 65 per cent or above, you receive your Certification badge which is valid for 12 months, royalty-free, and ready to deploy across every channel your employer brand touches. This is where the real work starts, and where most organizations leave value on the table.
According to Glassdoor, 83% of job seekers want to know about company culture and values before accepting a job offer. In a highly competitive talent market, people want third-party proof and that’s the major value of Certification.
Your First 30 Days After Certification: An Activation Checklist
When your company achieves certification our design team will be there waiting with a full pack of bespoke assets to help you celebrate.
Careers page: Add the badge above the fold. Link to your Certified company profile on the Great Place To Work website you’re reading this one, which includes your Trust Index highlights and a description of your workplace.
Job ads: Every listing should reference Certification in the opening paragraph. Candidates skim job ads so you need to make the proof point unmissable.
LinkedIn: Update your company page banner. Publish an announcement post tagging Great Place To Work. Share it from your CEO’s personal account too, LinkedIn’s algorithm is famously generous with personal posts. According to employer branding data, 82 per cent of employees will research a CEO’s online presence when deciding whether to join a company.
Internal comms: This is the one so many organizations forget but should absolutely prioritize. Your current employees created this result, tell them. Celebrate it in all-hands meetings, on Slack or Teams, in your office (if you have one). Employee pride is one of the strongest drivers of retention and it costs you nothing to activate.
Recruitment collateral: Update your pitch decks for campus recruiting, talent agency briefings, and any EVP documentation. Great Place To Work provides a digital toolkit with social media assets, press materials, and shareable content as part of the Certification package.
ALSO READ: How Happy Workplaces Show Up On LinkedIn
Months 6–12: Sustain the Momentum (and Prepare for Year Two)
Certification is a 12-month credential, and the companies that extract the most value from it treat it as a year-long program rather than a one-time event. Here’s what the most effective organizations do in the second half of the cycle.
Act on the data. Your Trust Index results will have flagged specific areas where trust dips, maybe fairness scores are lower in one department, or camaraderie drops for remote employees. We can help you build a focused action plan around two or three priorities. You don’t need to fix everything at once; you need to show your people that the survey led to tangible changes. That’s what drives participation, and higher scores in year two.
Track your employer brand metrics. If you weren’t measuring cost-per-hire, time-to-fill, offer acceptance rate and inbound application volume before Certification, start now. These become your proof points for renewal.
Prepare for Best Workplaces™ list eligibility. Once Certified, your organization is automatically considered for our globally recognised Best Workplaces lists during your 12-month Certification window — including Best Workplaces in Australia, Best Workplaces in Technology, Best Workplaces for Women, and more. But timing matters: your survey results need to fall within the qualification window for each list.
Start the recertification conversation early. The best time to plan your year-two survey is around month nine. This gives you time to communicate improvements, set expectations, and run the survey before your badge expires. Year-on-year Certification sends a powerful signal and becomes part of how you run the business.
Why the First Year Matters Most
There’s a clear, tangible relationship between workplace culture and business performance. High-trust companies deliver stock returns that beat the market average, with the best companies seeing nearly four times the returns according to our global data. They also report half the employee turnover of a typical workplace.
But the reason the first year matters is the shift in how your organization thinks about culture. Before the Trust Index, culture may be something leaders can talk about in vague, aspirational terms but after it, culture is a dataset. It has dimensions. It has benchmarks. It can be tracked, improved, and communicated with precision. The badge is how you tell the world about it.
