Why a car wash company beats big tech for workplace culture
I’m joined by Daniel Zhao, chief economist of Glassdoor, who talks me through their new rankings of the best places to work in 2026.
It’s an intriguing list, is a car wash really better than some of the most famous tech brands in the world?
The ranking allows us to explore what we want in a job: culture, connection, progression and autonomy.
Glassdoor: Top US places to work, Top UK places to work
Summary
- It is not just about the money: While baseline pay and work-life balance matter, things like career growth, great management, and an invigorating culture are what actually drive day-to-day happiness.
- Tech is losing its luster: Only 24 of the top 100 places to work are now tech firms. Companies across industries—from car washes to burger chains—are winning by offering unique culture, transparency, and clear paths for progression.
- Autonomy breeds flexibility: True workplace flexibility is about giving power back to employees. Giving people the autonomy to choose how and when they get their work done creates a five-star employee experience.
TRANSCRIPT
Introducing Glassdoor’s workplace culture insights
Bruce Daisley: Daniel, to kick off, I wonder if you could introduce who you are.
Daniel Zhao: Yeah, so my name is Daniel Zhao. I’m the chief economist at Glassdoor. I run Glassdoor’s economic research team and our team is really dedicated to using Glassdoor’s unique dataset to uncover what’s going on and what’s trending in the workplace with employee experience. You know, pretty much anything that you can think of about what’s going on for employees right now.
Bruce Daisley: And I wonder if you could just remind us how the Glassdoor mechanic works. How would people find themselves having to submit a review to glean something? Could you just point out for us how people find themselves reviewing and sharing information?
Daniel Zhao: Yeah. Glassdoor is really the place to go to for insights about careers and about companies. The vast majority of our data comes from employees who are coming to our site and telling us what their experience was at their current or previous employer. They leave a review that articulates the pros, the cons, any advice to management that they have, and some ratings as well about different parts of their experience.
That helps articulate at an aggregate level how well a company treats their employees or how poorly a company treats their employees. Because there’s a lot of detail that comes into these reviews, we can really dive down and try to get a better understanding of what is really driving a five-star experience versus a one or two-star experience.
What actually drives day-to-day job satisfaction?
Bruce Daisley: And tell me this, I’ve seen people draw upon your data. Donald Sull and his son Charlie Sull use Glassdoor data to help them really articulate how important workplace culture is. Is that something that you observe firsthand in the data? Is the culture that we work in a big determinant of where we work and how we feel?
Daniel Zhao: Yeah, Don and Charlie all do great work looking at what are some of these more specific determinants of culture. I think that one of the findings that comes out of the Glassdoor data is that, unsurprisingly, culture does really matter for how employees feel about their workplace.
One of the more interesting things is that when we actually look at what some of these determinants of the employee experience and employee satisfaction are, most people think it’s work-life balance or how much you’re getting paid. It turns out that those factors don’t really explain day-to-day employee satisfaction quite as much as say, career growth, management, or culture. Those tend to be the things that determine whether somebody is happy on a day-to-day basis.
If you think about it, that kind of makes sense. If your manager is terrible and they are driving you too hard on a daily basis, that’s really going to impact your experience in the workplace. You might be paid well, but that doesn’t really matter if you just dread going into the office every day.
That works both ways as well. There are plenty of people who maybe don’t feel like they’re being paid quite as much or have the best work-life balance, but they’re in a culture that is really invigorating for their career. It gives them a lot of growth opportunities and those are trade-offs that people often do make.
Surprises from the 2026 rankings
Bruce Daisley: We saw the new data today and certainly for the US list, it’s an eye-catching list because it has a degree of everything. It has a good deal more variety than you might anticipate, and it makes us reflect and ask ourselves what a good job looks like. The number one business was a car wash business, as far as I can tell. Nvidia is second, and we’ve got a burger restaurant along the way. Do you want to just describe for us what the findings were about the best places and what lessons that might teach us?
Daniel Zhao: Yeah, I think the way you put it there was a great way to describe it because you do have these companies that span a whole bunch of different industries. Also crucially, the way that these companies are creating a best place to work is different. Not every company is going to have access to the same tools or the same ways of creating culture.
If you are a food service company running a burger chain, you’re not going to be able to create employee culture in the same way that a large consulting firm is going to be able to. But the fact that we see such a wide variety of companies across a host of different industries, management styles, and operating styles really goes to show that it’s more about offering something unique to employees and being able to exceed their expectations.
To look at some specific examples, In-N-Out Burger is in the top three. This is a regional chain that’s really beloved by folks who live nearby. If you ever go to California, people swear by In-N-Out Burger. There really is this culture, not just within the employee base, but also within the customer base where people are strong believers in the company and in the product.
There is also an element of a different way that this company treats their employees. They offer better pay than their peers. You think of a food service job as traditionally not very well paid, but In-N-Out does offer better pay than their competitors. They offer benefits and crucially they offer career growth opportunities. You could have somebody who starts as a cashier, works their way up to store manager, works their way up to corporate. That’s a level of career opportunity that doesn’t necessarily exist at some of their competitors. That’s really how they stand out and that’s why they’re in the top three alongside firms like Nvidia or Bain & Company.
The role of pride and connection at work
Bruce Daisley: You’ve raised some really interesting points there. The psychologist Adam Grant talked about pride being a really important part of how we get value from our jobs. Working at an organization that we feel proud to tell people we’re part of is about our individual identity and group identity reflecting well on us. But you’ve mentioned a couple of other things along the way there, like the hygiene factor of pay playing a big part. To what extent does friendship, connection, or cohesion at work play an additional part?
Daniel Zhao: Yeah, on that last point, I think connection is really important. This is something that I often hear from employees who are maybe a little bit jaded or a little bit burned out. They say that for their next job they are not going to try to connect with their coworkers, and ask why they should care about being friends with them. They just want to go in, get their paycheck, and leave.
To some extent, that does sound appealing. It means that you don’t have to get as emotionally invested, and you won’t get hurt by a company that misuses that relationship. But that’s also the difference between a three-out-of-five company versus a five-out-of-five company. A company that actually creates that kind of environment and lives those values is really going to be able to stand out against a company where everybody just views it as a paycheck.
Everybody has a different level of emotional investment they want to put into their career, and it’s okay to not want to be friends with all your coworkers. That being said, the companies that are able to really create a unique and rewarding culture are ones where people feel connected to their coworkers, and feel engaged beyond just a nine-to-five job.
Has big tech lost its cultural luster?
Bruce Daisley: It’s really interesting to see the range of sectors in there as well. Do you think this represents the end of the age of tech firms being seen as the salvation for workplace culture? The idea that your best future might be working in tech doesn’t seem to be backed up here. What’s your take on that?
Daniel Zhao: Yeah, tech has lost some of its luster. We see that there are 24 out of the top 100 best places to work in the tech sector, which is down from 26 last year. This is part of a broader trend that we’re seeing where tech companies are putting a lot more pressure on their workforces to be more efficient and productive. They’re trimming budgets and trimming headcount, so there is a lot more pressure in the technology space.
That being said, it is still the most represented industry on the list. A lot of that has to do with the fact that tech does still offer enormous upside from a career and financial perspective. You have a company like Nvidia in the top three where employees talk about how amazing it is to be at the bleeding edge of this new AI revolution. Obviously that’s very rewarding from a financial perspective, but also from a career perspective as well, to be able to say you worked on an incredibly cool product that is really creating change in society.
Technology still is very attractive to people, especially when you think about how lucrative it can be for folks just coming out of university. It’s not like medicine or law where you necessarily need to go and get a graduate or professional degree. You have these jobs that are a little bit more accessible, they have this upside, and you have an industry that historically has been a big investor in employee culture. It has lost some of its luster in the last few years, to be fair, but it is still a very attractive industry for folks trying to grow their careers.
The hierarchy of workplace needs
Bruce Daisley: We’ve mentioned Charlie and Donald Sull before, and one of the things they’ve drawn from the Glassdoor data is that bad culture is seven times more effective than salary when it comes to us deciding to leave an organisation. Are there any other top-line figures that you might draw from this? Do you produce a hierarchy in your mind when you’re thinking about what is the most important thing for someone?
Daniel Zhao: Yeah, hierarchy is a good word to use because there is a similar Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when we are talking about careers. Part of the reason that we talked earlier about work-life balance and compensation not ranking as highly is because those are baseline things. They are the kinds of things where you wouldn’t even necessarily want to get into the job at all if you don’t meet those requirements.
There are many people who, when they’re applying to jobs, say that a role just doesn’t meet their bare minimum criteria, so they don’t even bother applying. Or if they get the offer and they realise that the compensation is too low, they just don’t take it. So it’s kind of a baseline filter on whether a job is viable.
How leaders can build a better culture
Bruce Daisley: What should companies focus on? Should they encourage employees to post? Should they incentivise employees to post? How should they handle it?
Daniel Zhao: To start, I think it’s important to try to understand where employees are. Asking employees for feedback, whether that’s on Glassdoor, internal surveys, or round tables, is the first step to improving culture because every company is different. Every company has different challenges, and even within a company, every team has different challenges. You’re not going to be able to address those problems unless you actually have a good understanding of what’s going on.
We don’t think that companies should incentivise that kind of feedback because you want that feedback to be honest, authentic, and truthful. That requires there to be no incentives attached to it. But it also means building a culture where people feel like they can be honest and authentic. Asking for honest feedback is really important.
Another aspect of that is in the other direction. It is really important for leaders and companies to be transparent. We see that transparency and communication are values that employees are really emphasising, especially in a post-COVID world. For a remote company, you need to go a little bit beyond what was normal pre-COVID because you need to be able to keep people connected. You need to make sure people have the information that they need, which they might have been picking up passively around the water cooler in the past. Transparency and communication are really important, especially in an uncertain world.
The last thing that I’ll mention here is flexibility. Post-COVID, this has come up as very important. That is not just remote work or hybrid work opportunities, though employees do value that. Crucially, underlying flexibility is autonomy. Workers want to feel like they’re being trusted by their employer to get the work done in the way that they know is best for them. If that means my best working hours are a little bit off from the traditional nine-to-five, but I’m going to be really productive from seven to three, that’s something I should be able to decide as the employee. Flexibility, which is downstream from autonomy, is another really important thing that an employer should think about as a way to give some power back to workers.
Embracing constructive feedback
Bruce Daisley: I was really struck, actually, when I saw the list. I went into some of the brands that I’d not seen before, like Crew Carwash, and went and read some of the reviews. They offer great career growth opportunities, and that’s a trade-off that many employees are willing to take. For some of them it won’t work out, and that’s okay. You’re creating a unique culture with a unique employee value proposition, and you’re going to get some harsh feedback as a result.
Daniel Zhao: Yeah, I think this is a really important point. You’re talking about some of these reviews being more balanced, talking about some of the pros and cons. The point of getting reviews on Glassdoor or getting feedback from employees is not to get purely positive feedback. The point is to get constructive feedback so you know where you can improve.
Obviously, it’s great, everybody loves to get positive feedback and hear all the things they are doing well. But if you’re only getting positive feedback, chances are you’re missing out on some of the things that you really can improve on.
Ultimately, if you are actually investing in improving the employee experience, employees will recognise that. That’s the organic way to improve your reputation and your employer brand—to make sure that you know the ground truth, and that employees feel like things are good and that they’re improving. That’s really the foundation for growing your employer brand overall.
Bruce Daisley: Fabulous. Daniel, I’m so grateful you took the time to talk to us on the day the research came out. Thank you so much.
Daniel Zhao: Yeah, it was lovely to chat.
