In 1998, when Fortune published its first annual list of the Best Companies to Work For, Southwest Airlines was No. 1 (today it’s Hilton). With the dotcom boom in full swing—and its eventual bubble-burst not yet on the horizon—companies were eager to attract and retain talent with amenities that ranged from massages to dry cleaning, as well as an emphasis on fun in corporate culture. “Our goal is to keep people so busy having fun every day that they don’t even listen when the headhunters call,” declared Sun Microsystems’ head of human resources.
These days, “forced fun” in corporate environments is often derided (and is satirized brilliantly in the HBO show Severance, with its “music dance experiences” and melon ball buffets). This year Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For list focuses instead on more bread-and-butter concerns: paid parental leave, worker wellness, remote work, and the ability to volunteer.
There is much hand-wringing in today’s business world about the supposedly nontraditional demands of Gen Z at work. But Fortune’s inaugural Best Companies analysis shows that employees in 1998 shared many of the same priorities. The three corporate traits Fortune’s Ronald B. Lieber identified were: “inspiring leadership,” “knockout facilities,” and “a sense of purpose.”
At the medtech company Medtronic, Leiber noted, “Shareholder value…isn’t what gets workers out of bed and into a lab coat in the morning. Rather it’s the notion of helping sick people get well.”
And long before COVID shone a spotlight on working parents’ and other caregivers’ struggle to juggle professional and family responsibilities, a senior manager at Deloitte & Touche told Fortune that as a mother, having flexible work hours was the key to her job satisfaction. “This isn’t just about mommies,” she noted. “Generation Xers care about balance too. A young manager in my department is working reduced hours, and he doesn’t have kids. He does, however, have a life.
Perhaps most important to 1998’s happy employees: simply caring about their work. Investment in one’s employer’s mission and actions has lately been identified as a distinctively Gen Z concern, but it’s hardly a novel concept. In 1998, workers at the companies at the top of the list would “sing their employers’ praises,” observed Lieber, “and—though it’s very un-’90s—even declare pride in their corporate affiliation.”
