The 10 Most Innovative Workplace Companies Of 2023

Source: Fast Company, Julia Herbst
Photo: Yann Bastard

These companies are enhancing collaboration and productivity for increasingly distributed and hybrid workforces.

Explore the full 2023 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 540 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 54 categories, including fashion, sports, business services, and more.

Looking to improve employee satisfaction and intra-team connection isn’t a new trend; high-achieving businesses have long prioritized worker engagement, says author and workplace development expert Julie Winkle Giulioni. But the combination of a tight labor market and the aftermath of the pandemic created “a perfect storm” when it comes to employee apathy and restlessness. It’s why we all read a million panicked takes about “quiet quitting” and the “Great Resignation” last year.

As leaders wrestle with the different challenges of hybrid, remote, or fully back in person teams, more are realizing they need to meet the moment by refocusing on their most valuable resource. “When you don’t have [employee engagement], you’ve got less discretionary effort. You’ve got productivity issues. You’ve got morale issues,” says Giulioni. “All it takes is a couple of people who aren’t feeling connected with the mission and excited about what everyone’s doing. . . . It does have that spreading, viral effect.”

The cure can take a variety of forms, and often involves harnessing remote-work technology in surprising ways. Owl Labs, for example, helps bridge the divide between remote and in-office workers during hybrid meetings with its 360-degree camera, microphone, and speaker device—so every employee can be easily seen and heard. Behind the scenes, Culture Amp allows HR teams to collect detailed employee feedback, track how initiatives are working, and develop personalized growth plans, while tech giant Microsoft’s two-year-old employee engagement platform Viva helps workers set goals, develop their careers, deliver feedback, and build connections. To address the challenge of team-building remotely, there’s Donut, a Slack app that randomly pairs coworkers and offers up silly icebreakers to bond far-flung colleagues, which may be more effective than a dozen chocolate glazeds.

1. AIRTABLE
For helping big companies get organized

Whether your team is colocated in adjoining cubicles or spread across five different time zones, working on complex projects requires everyone being on the same page. Airtable is certainly not the only company offering a “low-code/no-code” solution for teams that want to track projects from beginning to end, but it has created one of the most user-friendly. In fall 2022, the platform began rolling out a new suite of features meant to help eliminate information silos, especially at bigger companies. (Airtable counts Amazon, IBM, and Nike among its clients.) The new offering includes apps that serve critical business needs, from managing product road maps to tracking job applicants, and uses Airtable data to update the apps in real time. “If you’re a 10-person company, you can run pretty efficiently just by tapping each other on the shoulder, Airtable CEO Howie Liu told Fast Company last October. “But what we’ve found—and, frankly, what I didn’t understand when I founded the company—is that at a larger and larger enterprise . . . they actually need apps that connect to each other and form this kind of ecosystem that all operate on shared data.” Airtable, which has an $11.7 billion valuation, reportedly has been deployed in more than 80 of the 100 largest U.S. companies and 300,000+ firms overall and earned $142 million in revenue in 2022.

Read more about Airtable, honored as No. 40 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023.

2. CARROT FERTILITY
For providing family-building benefits

The fertility benefits provider is known for its hyper-customizable plans, which support various ways employees look to grow a family, including IVF, IUI, adoption, and surrogacy. In 2022, the company, which was founded in 2016, expanded its offerings to cover a wider spectrum of fertility care for its 800-plus customers, including benefits for people experiencing menopause and perimenopause—life stages that can be especially taboo in the workplace, despite affecting so many. Carrot also expanded its offerings for people with low testosterone, something that affects approximately 40% of men aged 45 and up. These sorts of benefits, which Carrot says more than half of its customers have opted to offer its employees, are especially in-demand as employers work to retain in-demand workers. The company is on track to surpass the half-a-billion-dollar mark in claims processed before the end of 2023, and it states that 96% of members who use a Carrot benefit said they’re more likely to stay at their company because it offers Carrot.

3. MICROSOFT
For improving teams’ ability to do meaningful work

Workers are exhausted. According to Microsoft’s own research, almost half of employees (and more than half of managers) report that they’re burned out at work. So it makes sense that this year, the tech giant—which has established Teams as a dominant platform for meetings and messaging—has focused on addressing this issue with Viva, an integrated experience platform that’s meant to help with goal-setting, career development, delivering feedback to managers, and building connections at work—all imperatives as companies work to stave off general workplace malaise and defections. First launched in 2021, Viva, which is either free for 365 enterprise customers or $12 per user per month, now has more than 20 million monthly active users and 1,000-plus paid customers, including REI and Nationwide. In June 2022, Microsoft added Goals to Viva, allowing workers to commit to objectives and key results (OKRs), and integrating them with Teams (for check-ins) as well as Microsoft Project and Planner so updates are automatically tracked. In September 2022, Viva introduced Pulse, which assists team leaders in soliciting confidential feedback from employees. According to a recent Forrester study, Viva helps reduce employee attrition by 20%.

4. CLICKUP
For simplifying workflows and helping workers focus

We all have those times where it feels like we’ve spent the workday toggling between Slack DMs, an overstuffed inbox, and approximately 17 Google Docs. ClickUp, which is used by more than 6 million users including teams at IBM and Samsung, is a single platform for users looking to cut down on time spent switching between tasks. In 2022, the company, which acquired search tool Slapdash in April, launched a universal search so users can find the information they need more quickly. Ninety-seven percent of users surveyed said they increased efficiency by using ClickUp at their companies, and 88% say collaboration with teammates has improved.

5. OWL LABS
For finally figuring out how to make hybrid meetings work

Ask any worker—remote or in-office—about how annoying they find most hybrid meetings. Employees working from home miss out on half the conversation (including body language clues and that vital pre- and post-meeting banter), and the employees in the room feel frustrated at having to slow down for their far-flung colleagues. Owl Labs, which claims use by 84 of the top 100 U.S. companies by revenue, provides a solution via its cute Meeting Owl product line. The Meeting Owl 3, launched in June 2022, includes a 360-degree camera, an 18-foot audio pickup, and a tri-speaker, so remote employees can see, hear, and be heard, respectively. The Owl gets better at recognizing speakers with use, and can be paired with an expansion mic to increase its audio range to 26 feet—perfect for your next big all hands. In November 2022, the company announced its $25 million Series C funding and that its products are now used by more than 130,000 organizations worldwide.

6. CULTURE AMP
For helping employees grow—and getting them to stick around

Used by more than 25 million workers, Culture Amp is a platform dedicated to improving the employee experience—something that’s especially critical for employers who don’t want to lose high performers in a (still) tight job market. The platform allows HR teams to collect detailed employee feedback, track how specific initiatives are working, conduct employee reviews, and compare how their company stacks up against others in their industry. In June 2022, the growing company (whose clients include Warby Parker, Oracle, and SoulCycle) launched Develop, which allows employees to create personalized growth plans. Culture Amp says that customers who participated in Develop’s pilot program saw a 30% increase in employees who agreed that they have a clear sense of their development goals.

7. MODERN HEALTH
For destigmatizing mental health support

In May 2022, the mental health platform—whose clients include Pixar, SoFi, and Zendesk—tapped four-time Grand Slam winner and mental health advocate Naomi Osaka as a spokesperson. As part of this partnership, meant to destigmatize mental health care (especially for underserved communities), Osaka is putting out personalized meditation tools and working with the company to support BIPOC mental health care providers. (American Psychiatric Association data indicates that only 3% of U.S. psychologists are Black.) This collaboration isn’t the only move the platform made to make it easier for people to get the help they need. The company, which has a $1.17 billion valuation, introduced Courses in December 2021, a self-paced series of exercises developed by therapists that helps employees “seek support in their own time and at their own pace,” and expanded Circles, group sessions led by therapists and coaches. The hope is that both options can serve as a friendly onboarding for those previously unlikely to seek out more formal psychological care.

8. OPENCOMP
For helping companies pay their workers more equitably

Perhaps the most prominent employment-related regulation sweeping the country are laws that mandate that companies share pay ranges for every job. The goal is to reduce the inequality that persists in pay that leads to women being paid less than men and people of color being paid less than white people. These laws, which have taken effect in New York City as well as California, Colorado, and Washington state, are also designed to give workers more information during the hiring process. OpenComp helps companies be smarter about their compensation strategies. The startup was founded in 2021 by Thanh Nguyen and Nancy Connery, former Salesforce HR execs. In June 2022, OpenComp released Range Builder to help companies automate the process of building out salary ranges. Range Builder uses AI to assess both market data and a company’s status to develop pay scales. OpenComp raised a $20 million Series A in February 2022 and has attracted several thousand customers to its platform, including the likes of Calm, Discord, and Reddit.

9. DONUT
For making company culture sweeter

With the influx of remote and hybrid work, many leaders are rightly concerned about building a sense of camaraderie and inclusion—especially for employees who have joined since the start of the pandemic. Donut is a suite of tools designed to do just that, through randomly pairing up coworkers via Slack DM and introducing spontaneous icebreakers into teams’ daily workflow. In 2022, the company, which is used by more than 20,000 teams (including all Ivy League universities), introduced “Celebrations,” a product that helps everyone recognize workplace milestones, like promotions, anniversaries, and birthdays. In the first six months, the tool helped teams recognize more than 30,000 of these events—with no need for anyone to awkwardly sing Happy Birthday in the conference room ever again.

10. WELLTHY
For helping workers who are also caregivers

Even as we exit the acute phase of the pandemic, the stress felt by caregivers has not lessened. Despite the fact that the majority of employers don’t track their employees’ caregiving requirements, 73% of workers say that they have a caregiving responsibility for at least one child, parent, relative, or friend, according to a Harvard Business School study. Wellthy provides support by matching these workers to an expert who can help them navigate complicated healthcare and insurance systems—and keep their care team on the same page. This year, the company has focused on partnering with employers like Hilton (as it did in June 2022) that have large populations of hourly workers who may especially benefit from this sort of assistance. The company’s services, which are available to more than 1.5 million employees, also launched Wellthy Community in May, a peer-to-peer platform “where families can connect with others who are caring to find support, share experiences, and feel less alone.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90849201/most-innovative-companies-workplace-2023