Today, in collaboration with our primary research partner Yrdstck, we’re excited to launch our latest franchise – The Best Employers in Sports Award.
The Best Employers in Sports Award recognizes the organizations that are doing the best by their employees. Whether its competitive pay, a good work-life balance, or even great leadership, the Best Employers in Sports Award looks to recognize those who are pushing our industry forward.
Four years ago when we launched the Rising 25 Award, we did so with the hope that it would provide measurable impact not only for those who won but for those who now had something to strive for as a 25 and under professional working in sports.
With the Best Employers in Sports Award, we strive to make a similar impact.
Our goal in launching this award is to ensure that organizations strive to achieve this recognition year after year, and that those who aren’t recognized will ask themselves what they can do better as an organization to foster a positive work environment for their employees.
After more than a year of brainstorming and ideation as to what the next FOS award franchise would be, we landed on this. The thoughts of our readership base suggested that there is great interest in the workplace culture of other organizations in the sports industry. While many may say they are at the forefront of employee growth and happiness, we wanted to establish a level of objectivity to those claims.
How do we determine who wins the award? We don’t – employees do! The award is based entirely on anonymous survey results from people like yourself. There will be no entry fee, nomination process or application form for PR teams to fill out. Our goal is to officially recognize and celebrate the best employers in sports, with no barriers to entry for any organization, for any reason.
Yrdstck has created a landing page with a specific set of statements that will give people working for any organization the chance to rate their employer and state exactly why they would or would nor recommend their employer to a friend or family member. (That landing page can be found here.)
Yrdstck will formulate the statements and evaluate thousands of open-ended responses over the course of the next few weeks using patented natural language processing technology that taps into the world’s largest database of modern dialogue and virtually eliminates all forms of human bias when doing primary research.
In order to preserve the integrity of this award and eliminate any perceived biases, Yrdstck will be handling the entire research and analysis process from start to finish.
In early November, after the results have been mathematically tabulated, yrdstck will provide FOS with the organizations that scored in the Top 10%. Those organizations will be announced as an FOS 2019 Best Employer in Sports.
The goal of this initiative is simple, create a benchmark that gives those companies who are doing right by their employees a chance to celebrate and reap the benefits in being able to recruit and retain top talent within their organization. For those organizations that fall short, the benchmark can be used as a goal they can look to obtain next year.
This is an industry-wide award, meaning that every entity from college athletic departments to the industry’s largest agencies, brands and teams have a chance to take home the title of an FOS 2019 Best Employer in Sports.
Thanks as always for your support of what we are building. I can’t wait to see who comes out on top.
If you are interested in taking the survey, click here. Nominations are open until October 11th, 2019.
Best,
Adam White
Founder and CEO, Front Office Sports
