Taylor Morrison homes in the Siena development, located in French Valley, Calif. An average house in … [+] a Taylor Morrison development runs $600,000.
Courtesy of Taylor Morrison
The missile part coming down the Lockheed Martin aeronautics line wasn’t quite right. The installer knew it, and paused to think. Delays could cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in contract penalties—even millions.
Maybe it was Lockheed’s interactive ethics training, which included industry-specific law and legislative decisions, that every single company employee takes annually. Maybe it was the seriousness of the job; like a significant amount of the company’s work, the production facility involved public safety. But regardless of any financial implications, she stopped the line.
“We were able to address the issue and prevent delivering a discrepant product,” says Frank St. John, Lockheed Martin’s chief operating officer. “Even though it held up deliveries for a little while, that employee was recognized for taking that action and speaking up.”
Decisions like that are one reason Lockheed Martin ranked No. 10 on Forbes’ first-ever list of the Most Trusted Companies in America. Created in partnership with research companies HundredX, Signal AI and Glassdoor, the list combines data on dozens of factors across four categories to generate the ranking: employee trust, customer trust, investor trust and media sentiment. More on the methodology is here.
Of the 2,000 companies ranked, the top 300 made the list. As with all Forbes rankings, companies pay no fee to participate.
The top scorers represent a variety of industries where trust is critical. Three makers of ubiquitous technology components (No. 1 NVIDIA, No. 5 AMD, No. 11 Apple) made the top of the list, as well as a maker of business process software and services (No. 2 ServiceNow) and a cybersecurity company (No. 7 Fortinet). Two investment and analysis companies (No. 3 KKR and No. 4 S&P Global) share space with a pharmaceutical company making significant strides in deadly diseases (No. 6 Vertex Pharmaceuticals), a maker of medical devices (No. 9 Boston Scientific) and a builder of homes (No. 12 Taylor Morrison). Lockheed Martin and No. 8 Parsons are crucial infrastructure manufacturers.
HundredX compiled customer-trust data via a survey of hundreds of thousands of consumers, incorporating their thoughts on reliability, a huge factor driving trust, but also brand values, community support and sustainability. Companies were compared not just overall but against others in their sector.
“No one loves their phone company. No one loves a cable company,” says Andre Benjamin, vice president of strategy and partnerships for HundredX. “But if you are doing a great job focusing on what those customers need and what engenders trust, you are rewarded relative to your industry.”
Higher rankings correlate strongly with future purchasing decisions, Benjamin says. Even if a company scores lower on key variables such as product quality and customer service, trust raises future purchase intent: “The higher you are on the list, the more people want to buy from you,” Benjamin says. “It’s not squishy. It’s real.”
Engendering employee-management trust in the workplace allows a company to innovate for customers, says Karen Pavlin, ServiceNow’s chief equity and inclusion officer. Case in point: when listening sessions identified a need among the staff for more focus on wellbeing, the company launched initiatives such as six additional, flexible wellness days off, peer sponsorship and mentoring, and a two-week global festival of events and classes for the company’s 26,000 employees.
“Being able to trust our own people and leaders definitely filters in to the customer,” Pavlin says. “It’s a business imperative.”
At Taylor Morrison, employee and consumer trust also go hand in hand. The company takes steps to create transparency for both, says Stephanie McCarty, Taylor Morrison’s chief marketing officer. Half of Taylor Morrison’s customers build homes from scratch, so the company has made an unusual commitment to put pricing, design and preparation right on its website—quite a feat, considering that each of the company’s 22 divisions builds slightly different homes in different areas.
All 3,200 Taylor Morrison employees get the same transparency via quick daily company-wide meetings by department. Recent topics included the company’s veterans; butterfly migrations (in a partnership with the National Wildlife Federation, Taylor Morrison builds butterfly gardens in every development); the results of a shopper survey; and divisions leading the company for home readiness scores, a punch list of items that must be perfectly complete to deliver a home to a customer.
In turn, strong sales have made Taylor Morrison quite trusted by investors: its stock price has doubled in the past two years.
“I can’t think of anything more powerful than trust,” McCarty says.
One last form of trust, more esoteric but no less important, rounded out Forbes’ ranking formula: media representation. How the news portrays companies’ behaviors, products, and future not only demonstrates public trust but shapes it, too. Thus, we partnered with research firm Signal AI to analyze billions of media reports, social media posts, research reports, podcasts and broadcasts to assess positive and negative mentions by the media; recent coverage was weighted more heavily.
Eight companies received the highest scores in this category: Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, NVIDIA, Oracle, SAP, and Toll Brothers. Tesla received many positive portrayals as well; however, partly because of Elon Musk’s increasingly controversial persona, it received a strong amount of negative coverage, as well.
“Polarizing companies cannot make it all the way to the top,” says Shann Biglione, Signal AI’s senior vice president of intelligence and corporate strategy. “We are rewarding companies that get a lot of positive mentions and don’t get too many negative mentions along with it.”
Public trust is important to Parsons, the infrastructure and defense firm that ranked No. 8. Strong media coverage of its massive municipal projects has helped to drive its overwhelmingly positive profile in the mainstream press.
Just this year, Parsons appeared in upbeat articles on a rail safety project in Oakland, Calif.; a contract with the Air Force related to vehicles that collect unexploded ordnance; and software for communication and coordination on the battlefield for the Department of Defense, among others.
Parsons has also prioritized strong internal communications throughout its 80-year-old company as it has grown to 19,000 employees scattered around 23 countries and all 50 states. The key, Yaley says, is how the company can internally share ideas, such as sophisticated technology for creating “digital twins,” computer models that can react like the real thing during testing.
“We are making sure that when we talk about things like digital twins, the same things we’re applying on airports in California are things we can apply in Qatar or Saudi Arabia or Dubai,” Parsons chief corporate affairs officer Jason Yaley says.
But Parsons is not the only defense sector company benefitting from strong trust. Lockheed Martin scored highly in media sentiment as well, ranking in the top 3%. Public perception is crucial to the company’s business, St. John says.
“Our customer set has really demanding requirements, whether that’s deep space exploration or keeping the world safe,” he says. “It sets a foundation for a whole enterprise that’s built on trust.”
Most Trusted Companies in America
Forbes
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=67408977b5a74488ae19d228347e5040&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fhnewman%2F2024%2F11%2F21%2Fmeet-the-most-trusted-companies-in-america-2025%2F&c=10628755133506862044&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-11-21 03:45:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
