Plenty of major tech companies have been under fire in the last year for their surprise layoff announcements, return-to-office battles and a skepticism about whether the Big Tech dream job is still alive. Even so, they remain some of the top companies where employees feel happiest with their pay.
That's according to the latest rankings from Comparably, the employee reviews site, which measured worker sentiment from August 2022 to August 2023 through a series of questions.
Workday, the HR tech company, takes the No. 1 spot where workers felt happiest with their pay, according to the analysis. Not only do employees feel they're paid competitively in the market, but they also said they felt paid fairly in comparison with their colleagues. "Fairness is a meaningfully contributing variable to how somebody feels about their employer," says Chad Herring, the chief human resources officer at ZoomInfo, Comparably's parent company.
Overall, Herring points out, many tech companies, and especially cybersecurity firms, scored highly on the compensation analysis.
These are the top 15 companies where workers are happiest with their pay:
- Workday
- Boston Consulting Group
- Uber
- Adobe
- Calix
- Proofpoint
- Instacart
- Chegg
- Palo Alto Networks
- SAP
- AT&T
- Experian
- Meta
- Squarespace
The top three companies where people feel they're paid well — Workday, Boston Consulting Group and Uber — also have some of the happiest workers in general, according to Comparably data, which considers compensation as well as factors like work-life balance, alignment with company values, holistic benefits and others.
Meta and Google fell from their 2022 spots (when they were ranked No. 3 and No. 5, respectively), but they remain in the top 15 companies where workers are satisfied with their pay. While workers may feel satisfied with their compensation there, the two tech giants did not fall into the top 100 companies with the happiest workers overall.
Workers at the top 100 companies with good pay scored their satisfaction at 87.5 on a 100-point scale, compared with the overall average score of 63.5 across Comparably data. Employees expressed their sentiments by answering questions such as:
- Do you believe you're paid fairly?
- How often do you get a raise?
- Are you satisfied with your benefits?
- Does your company give annual bonuses?
- If applicable, are you satisfied with your stock or equity?
Herring says companies that not only pay well but are transparent about their pay scales across the organization rank highly on the Comparably list this year. Many are headquartered in California, which enacted a salary range law in January 2023, which applies to employers with 15 or more workers and at least one in California.
And organizations that have valued salary transparency and pay equity for years now are pulling ahead. Herring notes companies like Workday, Adobe and AT&T signed the White House Equal Pay Pledge in 2016 to commit to better hiring, promotion, and pay policies to close the racial and gender wage gaps.
These companies were "focusing on salary transparency and doing gender and race pay equity analysis long before it was legally required," Herring says. "I do think that has a positive impact for employees on how they feel about their employer."
He hopes more businesses commit to pay transparency and equitable pay practices: "I do think it's a meaningful causal contributor to how employees feel about their company," he says.
"Employees overwhelmingly respond to employers being proactive about those elements of their business. So my suggestion would be, for any company that's wondering, 'Should I do it even though I don't have to?' My advice is, you absolutely should do it."
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