By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE

Are you seriously thinking of moving to Mexico, or are you already working in Mexico and want to see how your company sizes up?

The certifying organization Great Places to Work (GPTW), which has been around for nearly 30 years and which is relatively well-known across English-speaking countries, measures the workplace climate in 97 countries.

The organization had a slower start in Mexico, but it is now here and keeping tabs on workplace conditions.

This for-profit organization, which started out as a list of the greatest places to work, now measures workplace climate from every angle possible: best places for parents, best places for women, by region of the country, by type of industry, by over versus under 500 employees and by best CEOs.

GPW touts its lists under the premise that “top talent can work wherever they want.”

Earning a Great Place To Work certification, GPTW claims, proves you’ve created an amazing employee experience and elevates your status as an employer of choice.

The interesting oxymoron is that GPTW actually gets companies to pay it, so it can access quasi-intimate company info, creating a massive database where it can then legitimately pontificate on human capital best practices from everything from motivating hourly workers to the “language of appreciation” for company old-timers.

The certification process is a mix of an anonymous web-based survey that must meet a certain percentage of employee participation, depending on whether the company is attempting first-time or continuing certification, called the “trust index,” as well an on-site visits and random telephone interviews with a small sampling of employees to see if they were coerced or prompted.

GPTW offers interested companies the opportunity to self-evaluate themselves based on human capital best practices, as well as training for top brass who are deemed not-ready-just-yet to ask employees.

The end product are the obvious social media blitzes and access to co-branding swag, basically a tool for recruiting.

The less-mentioned reason for certification is the relationship between employee satisfaction and company profit.

Companies that go through the process are not doing it exclusively because they care about their employees, which they hopefully do, but for the bottom line, revenues and market share.

The process itself also gives company leaders the chance to discover opportunities for improvement as it privately shows results by department or division.

An area of a company most toxic for employees could have the best internal damage control to keep the cat in the bag. This process takes the blinders off.

GPTW has done a good job of codifying what employees consider good or great places to work, allowing companies to “scale their culture” based on credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie. While these five concepts sound like pie-in-the-sky and are hard to pinpoint, GPTW defines them quite precisely for the rank and file as well as technically for the company’s leadership.

The instrument itself makes sense to the employee.

Rather than asking about abstract labor concepts, it asks employees quite directly about their job, their supervisor, their team and their company or organization to get at the five conceptual concepts.

From the 2022 list for Mexico, the following came out as the top dogs for the massive companies, those with over 5,000 employees and in rank order: DHL, the Infonavit housing fund for employees, Gentera financial services and AT&T.

For large Mexican companies, those with between 500 and 5,000employees, the top winners were Cisco telecommunications, Dell, AtraZeneca pharmaceuticals, Interprotección insurance and Accenture consulting.

For the mid-size organizations, with 50 to 500 employees, the best rated were Carza real estate developers, Creditor Real, Cyberpuerta technology and SEA Cargo logistics.

The only top-five company with fewer than 50 employees that most people have likely heard of was, at third place, Sauza Tequila.

Think your your company made it to the list?