Southern NH Great Employers: Where art thou?

The Great Place to Work Institute, the organization behind the “100 Best Companies to work for in America" list that appears on CNN Money & Fortune magazine, works with over 5,000 companies worldwide each year, distilling that clientele into its prestigious top 100.

Searching the list on the CNN Money site for 2011 reveals no New Hampshire companies  made the ranking.   None made it 2010, either and, for that measure, none made it onto the list in 2006-2009.  Perhaps that’s not too surprising, given that New Hampshire is a small state, and these sort of distinctions are usually reserved for large cities and metropolitan areas that can sustain corporations capable of providing major perks, right?

Fortunately, the folks at the Great Place to Work Institute keep a separate list for small & medium workplaces, and they also offer a searchable index of companies by state.  According to them, the last time any New Hampshire employer made the list was 2008, when Hypertherm was ranked 22^ndamong medium companies and Northeast Delta Dental made the list at 13^th among small companies.

So why aren’t there more of the Best Companies to work for in New Hampshire?  Have we shunned them?  Are we simply too small to warrant a good workplace and, instead, required to suffer along in our semi-rural ways while hoping to earn a paycheck?  Or do we simply cross the border into Massachusetts to find a great workplace, where 10 companies made the 2011 list?

But, wait a minute – what of Business NH’s annual list of the best companies to work for?  Of the 5 companies chosen to be the best to work for in 2010, one is a State University, one is a utility provider, and of the three other companies on the list, only 1 has a majority of its total employees actually employed here in New Hampshire.  Kudos to the small businesses, however, who have a far greater percentage of personnel employed in the state.  The number of positions in these companies, however, helps to illustrate the point – according to these lists, great New Hampshire workplaces are hard to come by, and jobs in great New Hampshire workplaces are even harder to find.

Perhaps this is indicative of a larger, nation-wide trend.  After all, most workplaces fail to make the list, and New Hampshire is far from the only state without a representative on the list compiled by the Great Place to Work Institute (Vermont and Maine also have none).  Yet, they do exist, and Massachusetts claiming ten percent of the entire list is an indication that the issues are not based on climate or regional sub-culture.

According to a report from the NH Economic and Labor Market Information Bureau released on August 16^th, New Hampshire’s unemployment rate is 5.2%.  While this is far from the national average of 9.1%, there’s certainly the hope that both numbers will come down in the not-too-distant future.  One has to wonder, however, as the recession lessens and jobs become more plentiful and lucrative, what are southern NH’s major employers doing to draw people back to working here?