What makes a great place to work? It’s not just a big salary, or lots of juicy benefits, it’s more often the way management treats their employees. Leading With Kindness (airs Sunday, November 23 at 10:00 pm) profiled several companies whose employees are highly profitable and highly productive.

In every case, the company has explicit policies that encourage and allow management to treat people not as “human resources” but as people.

Here’s what they found:

Google

Google’s reputation as a great place to work is generally based on playrooms and valet services, but employees also enjoy free gourmet lunches, car washes, massage rooms and on-site laundries, not to mention managers encourage Googlers to use scooters to cruise the long hallways in their offices.
But these superficial perks are just the tip of the iceberg. The web search giant boosts innovation by granting extraordinary freedom to its employees. A good example is the company’s “20% rule,” which states that every Googler is entitled to use one day a week (20% of their time) to work on a personal project of their choosing. Popular products like Gmail and Google News were born out of employees’ 20% time.

Eileen Fisher

Highly successful women’s clothing manufacturer Eileen Fisher wants its employees to be whole people. That means no extra hours. Employees are encouraged to go home at 5.30 pm and not work on weekends. EF also grants its employees education and wellness allowances totaling $2,000/year. The wellness money can be spent on massages, yoga, gym dues or other healthy activities. The education allowance to develop new skills like dance or guitar helps employees grow as individuals. Eileen Fisher began her company 25 years ago with a small loan from her parents and a dream: make simple and elegant clothes. Her vision has turned into a 37-store company that made $254 million last year. Now EF is funding other women’s start-ups with five yearly grants of $10,000 a piece.

Pitney Bowes

They call it the Pitney Bowes University. This market-leading mail-sorting company pays college tuition to its employees to help them grow and expand inside the company. There are also free online courses that every employee can take. As a result, many employees rise up through the corporate ranks. Some of PB’s engineers started as workers on its assembly lines and studied their way up to their present jobs. Managers are also often shifted to positions not related to their field of expertise to build their skills and keep them motivated and engaged.

Besides this job training, PB has health clinics at the work place to save its employees’ time and money when they need to go to the doctor. The company also promotes healthy lifestyles among its employees with premium programs for those who eat a healthy diet, don’t smoke and exercise at the company’s gym or elsewhere. After all, healthy workers perform better.

They say that the goal is to create a culture of health so that they have healthy, engaged, and productive employees. Pitney Bowes also emphasizes the value of reliability, trustworthiness and honesty among employees, managers, and upper-level management.

Mitchells

Jack and Bill Mitchell, owners of this $60 million clothing retailer, have developed a corporate culture based on very close and special connections with their employees and customers.

Jack and Bill encourage their employees to hug their customers. Really. While he doesn’t necessarily mean a physical hug, (although he gives plenty of those), he says that a hug can be a simple thank you, or maybe an after-hours housecall. Employees are encouraged to make decisions on their own. For example, they’re free to send a customer a good bottle of wine for their birthday or a get-well card if they are sick. They can even leave the store to give a customer a ride back to the train station.

Julliard

During its long history, the school has built a special community, where kindness and respect are the norm and where students, faculty and administrators care about each other.It’s sort of an applause culture. People applaud one another. They cheer one another. They hug each other in the hallways. I have taught at many academic institutions in my life and I have never seen anything like this,” says Mitchell Aboulafia, Juilliard’s Director of Interdivisional Liberal Arts.

Juilliard’s managers are flexible and allow professional growth among its employees. I don’t think there is any faculty member that has been stifled in their attempt to grow on a personal level,” says Artistic Director Yoheved Kaplinsky. Whether they travel playing concerts, whether they want some time off in order to pursue a particular performing project, whether they want to attend conferences, the administration goes way out of its way in order to enable you to be absent and have people fill in for you.”

Get workplace dos and don’ts, learn motivational skills and more at Leading with Kindness online.