Best companies to work for in Colorado '07: The Medical Center of Aurora and ReadyTalk rate the best among 30 finalists judged for having great workplaces in the state.

• Author: Cote, Mike
• Position: Cover story - Company rankings

If you were looking for the ideal place to work, you might shop for a company that offers a few of these:

Flex-time where you can set your own hours.

Unlimited sick days you can use even to care for a family member.

An office that shuts down at 5:30 every day.

A work week that rarely tops 45 hours and usually ends at 40.

Time off on the company dime to do volunteer work.

Casual Friday every day.

Impromptu picnics.

Random holidays.

"Love" as a company value.

Great pay and great benefits.

There are Colorado companies for which this scenario is more than a fantasy. All of the above benefits and perks were culled from this year's "Best Companies to work for in Colorado" finalists.

For the second year, ColoradoBiz has joined with the Colorado State Council of the Society of Human Resource Management and Jobing.com, an online employment advertising service, to produce a list of the best companies to work for in the state.

Thirty companies made the list and are profiled here. The 10 largest companies employ 250 or more employees. The small-to medium-size category includes companies with workforces under 249.

To participate in the rankings, companies paid $575 to $1,165 to sign up with Harrisburg, Pa.-based Best Companies Group Inc., which partners with Modern Think, a workplace excellence consulting firm.

About 75 percent of the rankings are based upon employee responses to the 65-question surveys, said Peter Burke, president of Best Companies. The company surveys all employees up to 250. For larger companies it surveys a random selection of employees, peaking at 400 for employers larger than 2,500 workers.

Companies that fare well in these surveys often are among those that provide generous benefits packages, flexible hours and other employee perks. But those offerings aren't what make a company one of the best places to work, Burke says.

It's the work culture that counts.

"You can have the best benefits package in the world and still be a lousy place to work," he says. "Do the employees love to come to work? Do they feel respected? Do they have a good relationship with their supervisors?

Each company that participated received an Assessment Findings Report that summarized the employee data and included averaged benchmarks from the companies that made the list. The report cards help companies make the adjustments they need to make their shops the best place to be.

"It's really a culture that gets created from the top down, from middle management and supervisors, creating an environment where employees feel like they're making a difference and love what they do," Burke says.

And that's all for the best.

BEST LARGE COMPANY WINNER

The Medical Center of Aurora/Centennial Medical Plaza

The Medical Center of Aurora/Centennial Medical Plaza has gone to impressive lengths to encourage wellness--not only for the patients it serves in Denver's eastern metro community but for its 1,579 employees, too.

In January, the three-campus medical center launched "Wellness 2007," a campaign that included a $500 bonus to any employee who quit smoking or achieved a weight-loss goal of at least 20 pounds. As of late June, six of the company's employees had gone through a formal, audited stop-smoking program and kicked the cigarette habit. Another 25 employees had shed a total of 500 pounds in pursuit of the $500 bonus.

"I figure we've saved their lives," says Kathy Yeager, vice president/human resources, of the six employees who quit smoking. She notes that the wellness campaign got employees across the board to think more about their own long-term health.

Employee programs like Wellness 2007 are one reason The Medical Center of Aurora/Centennial Plaza was judged Best Company to Work for in Colorado among firms with at least 250 employees after placing fourth a year ago.

Yeager says more employee programs are on the horizon for the organization that operates two medical centers in Aurora and one in Centennial.

"For 2008, it's going to be education," Yeager says. The company has enlisted Webster University to provide a master's program for employees on the medical center's main campus starting in October. As of late June, 10 employees already had signed up.

"They'll actually come here and teach the courses," Yeager says of the arrangement. "The idea is you're going through it with a group of peers, your friends."

Another program, dubbed "School to Work," will be aimed at helping the company's entry-level employees to explore the various careers in health care. A human-resources staff member will conduct two eight-week courses. The first eight-week session will focus on basics like creating a resume and preparing for an interview. The second session will focus on career opportunities.

Employees who complete the 16 weeks of courses on their own time will receive a bonus equal to their pay for that period of time.

"It benefits us, too," Yeager says. "Because if they figure out, 'Gee, I want to go be a lab person,' they'll go to school and become a lab person for us. So it's retention, too."

Because many employees in the health-care industry tend to be short on time to run errands, the company some time ago introduced a concierge service for employees for a $5 monthly co-pay. The concierge service is not only intact, it's been enhanced. There's no longer a co-pay for using it.

Along with the employee perks at The Medical Center of Aurora/Centennial Medical Plaza is a commitment to core values such as workplace accountability that is stressed from the time a new employee goes through orientation.

"We have a great mission and vision and values, and we have an advantage because it's health care--we're helping others," Yeager says.

BEST SMALL-MEDIUM COMPANY WINNER

ReadyTalk

ReadyTalk, founded in 2000, is a Lower Downtown audio and Web conferencing business that beats its competitors on price, up to 30 percent lower, the company claims. A typical charge is 24 cents a minute per participant, and that includes Web slides in addition to audio. True to its tradition as a LoDo biz, some employees commute 35 miles from Boulder on bicycles to work in space just above the Tattered Cover bookstore. And there's almost always one person with a dog in tow, de rigueur for LoDo.

Oh sure, there's the cachet of being right above the Tattered Cover. "When we want to brush up on our knowledge, we head down into the store, grab a chai from Steve and browse the stacks," according to the company website. It also helps to be right in the transportation nerve center for Colorado, Union Station. You could grab your suitcase and board a bus for the airport, or in the future, ride the Air Train.

The company says its priorities for employees are health, family and work, in that order. Amenities include a fully stocked kitchen, flexible work hours, a casual environment, cubicles but no private offices, 100 percent paid health insurance, employee Eco Passes and matching contributions to not only the 401(k) plan but also to employee charitable contributions.

But CEO Dan King, one of the company's co-founders, says it takes more than great benefits, flex-time, a pingpong table and a fireplace to create a great company to work for. The key, he says, is to match the personality and talent to the job, especially in the recruiting process. If people do what they're good at, it makes for a better work environment, he says. The job interview focuses on the applicant's talent and also on his or her values.

"What I noticed in all my jobs is there were great managers and really bad managers," King says. "The impact those people had on the work environment was tremendous. As a company grew fast and didn't have an infrastructure for who ought to be in what role, then it was everyone for themselves and they became political, territorial. People stop working for the interest of the business."

The trick is to keep people doing what they do best, not promote them to a different area they're not good at, such as moving a great programmer into management. The rest is to make sure people don't "dead-end in the area where their talents lie," King adds.

ReadyTalk's culture is based on accountability, collaboration and teamwork, King says. The goal is to have a flat organization that has a lot of interdependence. The practices have resulted in "very low employee and customer turnover. They go hand in hand."

"It's important for us to have a good understanding of the culture we want and hire around it and have continuity over time," King says. "It's really expensive for companies to have high turnover, to have talent walk out the door."

BEST COMPANY WINNER SECOND

EDWARD JONES

Last year's "Best Company to Work For" winner among large firms impressed judges again, placing second in 2007. Edward Jones, the St. Louis-based financial-services firm, has about 11,000 offices nationwide, the vast majority of them consisting of one financial adviser and one office administrator.

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"It's the best business opportunity in America, hands down," says Donna O'Bryant, a financial adviser who has operated an Edward Jones office in Colorado Springs for 15 years. In all, Bryant has been with Edward Jones in four different states for 21 of the last 25 years, the only interruption occurring during a four-year child-rearing stretch.

"Their business model of setting up a single broker with a full-time assistant in a convenient neighborhood location is just an excellent, brilliant model," O'Bryant says. "We're able to give one-on-one personal service in a way that's very client-friendly and really build...