Frequently Asked Questions

As a Top Workplaces participant, you have a comprehensive, single dashboard view of every award your organization is eligible to win. This includes Top Workplaces Regional, National, Culture Excellence, and Industry awards. And don’t forget, by completing one engagement survey, your company qualifies to participate in awards year-round.

The dashboard also enables you to plan resource allocation, inform strategic plans, and align timing with other initiatives, such as award announcements, recruitment and sales campaigns, company meetings, and more. 

If you haven’t registered yet, go here to get started. 

The Top Workplaces national awards – including USA, Industry, and Culture Excellence awards – are open to all companies with more than 150 U.S. employees. To qualify, companies must achieve a Workplace Survey response rate of 35% or higher.

Top Workplaces national awards are open to all industries except those primarily regional, such as local real estate agents/brokers, local hotels, and K-12 educational institutions.

No! Completing a single Workplace Survey puts you in the running for year-round Top Workplaces recognition. This includes all national, regional, Industry, and Culture Excellence awards.

However, you can choose to refresh your survey data at any time. 

Here is the Top Workplaces national awards schedule.

Go here for the Top Workplaces regional program information.

Because the Top Workplaces national program looks at U.S.-based employees, those who are based internationally are not considered.

You may, however, include them in your Workplace Survey. 

The company size bands for Top Workplaces national awards are based on total U.S. employees as follows:

• 150-499 employees
• 500-999 employees
• 1,000-2,499 employees
• 2,500+ employees

Over the past year, Energage has invited almost 42,000 organizations to compete for our national awards, which include Top Workplaces USA, Industry, and quarterly Culture Excellence awards. 

Please note: The national awards are in addition to the Top Workplaces regional awards we offer through more than 55 media partners.

On average, fewer than 3% of eligible organizations earn a Top Workplaces designation, making these achievements clear differentiators among peers. Here is a breakdown of the percentage of invited organizations over the past year according to size band:

150-499: 54%

500-999: 15%

1000-2499: 13%

2500+: 18%

Whether it's for Top Workplaces recognition or for the purpose of collecting data, gathering feedback from all levels of employees is key towards building a strong workplace culture. Employee inclusion in the survey at the discretion of the organization, though Energage encourages organizations to include as many voices as possible.

While surveying all full-time employees is required (random sampling is available for large organizations), the following categories of employees are encouraged to participate in the survey, but are not required:

• Part-time employees
• Seasonal employees
• Consultant/Freelance/Per Diem employees
• Employees outside the U.S.
• 1099/Individuals placed at a client by a staffing agency
• Unionized employees
• Employees on extended leave (i.e. maternity and paternity leave, or other FMLA related reasons)

*The above excludes real-estate and insurance organizations, which are required to survey all employees

​​​​​​Additional considerations:

• Volunteers should not be included as they are not paid.
• Those under the age of 13 should not be invited to take the survey.
• New employees should be included if they started prior to the survey launching. There is no minimum time requirement an employee needs before being offered the survey.
• Shareholders/partners should be included if they are actively working at the organization.

Remote employees - for regional Top Workplaces recognition, remote employees should be associated with the physical location that makes the most sense for the organization. This may be based on reporting structure, physical location nearest to the employee, or an alternative option that makes the most sense for the organization to distribute their remote employees. Each remote employee can only be counted toward one region for Top Workplaces participation.

For fully remote organizations (those without a physical office location), employees should be included in Top Workplaces regions based on where they physically live/work as determined by the organization.