Why was Trader Joe’s Named America’s Best Large Employer?

Trader Joe’s has been named America’s best large employer by Forbes, following an employee-based survey. 

The survey, which surveyed more than 217,000 people across mid-sized (companies with more than one thousand employees) and large (companies with more than five thousand employees) organisations in America, asked employees to rate their employer based on a range of criteria. 

This included pay, work environment and advancement opportunities. 

Creating a strong company culture for retail employees

Trader Joe’s has long been known for its high rates of employee satisfaction and supportive company culture, having previously been awarded America’s best large employer in 2019. 

The company has developed a people strategy centred around its employees, as it believes creating an environment where staff are happy and empowered leads to a better shopping experience for customers. 

In particular, the company prioritises advancement opportunities for its employees by ensuring shop floor staff – or crew members – are trained to work in all areas of the store to understand different aspects of the business and prepare them for promotion. 

To give employees further ownership of their work, the company will assign ‘section leaders’, placing staff members in charge of the merchandising and ordering strategy for a particular product, helping them better understand wider business operations. 

As part of this strong commitment to employee development, Trader Joe’s will often hire internally for leadership positions – 78% of the company’s supervisors, or ‘Mates’, began their careers as crew members. All of its store managers – in this case, ‘Captains’ – are promoted from the company’s pool of Mates. 

Trader Joe’s has prioritised the employee experience in part because of the company’s belief that employees are critical to the customer experience – with the company refusing to implement self-checkout services for this very reason. 

On an episode on the company’s podcast, Inside Trader Joe’s, CEO Bryan Palbaum said self checkout is “not fun”, and does not want customers working within their stores. 

Jon Basalone, Vice CEO and President of Trader Joe’s – who began his career at the company as a crew member in 1990 – added: “We believe in people, and we’re not trying to get rid of our crew members for efficiency’s sake or whatever the — I don’t know what the reasons are people put self-checkout in”.

This prioritisation of people has paid off, with the company having no history of layoffs and an average employee turnover of 5% – compared to an average of 50% in the retail sector. 

Developing data-driven people strategies 

Other leading companies named on the list include Google at number three, Microsoft at number four and NVIDIA at number seven. 

Google in particular has transformed its people strategy to provide a stronger employee experience aligned with the company’s ‘AI-first’ model – integrating AI into its human resources function to boost efficiency, employee empowerment and company innovation. 

This includes increasing the level of data used in HR decision-making and reskilling employees to give them the capability to focus on high-impact work in the AI era. 

Fiona Cicconi, Chief People Officer at Google, shared the news on LinkedIn, saying: “This ranking is special because it’s based directly on Googler feedback. To me, it reflects the genuine enthusiasm I see across our offices as we build for the AI era. 

“A huge thank you to every Googler who makes our culture what it is – and to our People team for helping everyone do their best work.”