Best Companies To Work For 2011 – Employees Like Free Perks At SAS

By: Bill Waters
01/20/2011 06:37 PM ET

Best Companies To Work For 2011 — SAS wins. Best companies that employees like to work for in 2011 is North Carolina-based SAS. Only a few companies offer the kinds of perks the privately held software giant does.

Employees at its Cary, N.C., campus can help themselves to everything from a tailor, a manicurist, and a hair salon, to summer camp programs for kids, to car detailing — all of which helped land the company at the top of our list of the 100 best workplaces last year.

This year the feedback from employees — the core of our survey — was even stronger than last year, and SAS’s scores increased significantly. “They were head and shoulders above anybody else,” says Milton Moskowitz, the co-author of the list.

Landing the top spot twice in a row is a feat on the Best Companies to Work For list, where on-site gyms and 401(k) matches are de rigueur. (Free cafeterias, tanning beds, and an on-site life coach? Now we have a conversation.)

The top five this year reflect some names familiar to readers of our list: Boston Consulting Group at No. 2, Wegmans Food Markets in third place, Google once again in the No. 4 slot, and data-storage company NetApp (No. 1 in 2009) — is fifth.