The management consulting firm Bain & Co. was recently voted the second-best workplace in the US, according to Glassdoor rankings.

In the 10 years since Glassdoor began issuing the rankings, Bain has placed first three times and has never fallen outside the top 10.

A combination of colleague support, flexible work environments, and high pay help make the company so fulfilling.



I was less than a minute into my first conversation with Danny Hong when I realized I was in the presence of a man who unapologetically loved his job.

Hong and I were sitting in a pristine conference room on the 43rd floor of the Grace Building, a towering midtown Manhattan skyscraper that overlooked both ends of the island. Hong had a warm, easy smile and fine black hair that fell over his ears. His enthusiasm for his work caught me off guard, but it shouldn't have. Hong's workplace is one of the best in the United States.

Hong is a partner at Bain & Company, a titan in the world of management consulting and, according to this year's Glassdoor Employees' Choice awards, the second-best place to work in the US. The Boston-based company is no stranger to the distinction. In the 10 years Glassdoor has issued its rankings, Bain has never fallen outside the top four. This year's second-place finish follows a three-time finish at No. 1, the first being in 2012, the second in 2014, and the third in 2017.

In the popular conception of great workplaces, that is surprising. Tech companies such as Facebook and Google — whose offices look more like rec centers than stuffy corporate headquarters — are often the ones that get the most press. But Glassdoor's survey of employee satisfaction, which gives special preference to things like how often and consistently people give positive reviews, shows mainstream appeal matters little in the grand scheme of things.

For a workplace to be ranked so highly for nearly a decade straight, there has to be a lot going on behind the scenes. Endeavoring to figure out what exactly that might be, I took a trip to the New York office to see what makes Bain so special.

Bain & Co.'s 43rd-floor lobby. Sarah Jacobs

'A Bainie never lets another Bainie fail'

"I think about what I've been doing over the last year, and it's a lot of existential questions for these companies," Hong said of the clients he works with. He helps them answer questions like, Why are we even in business? What are we trying to do?

"You can't talk to a Bain person for more than 30 seconds and them not mention it's also the culture and the people," he said. "It's a real thing. They're just kind, good people."

Glassdoor As Hong and other Bainies attested, Bain is a great place to work because everyone understands that teamwork matters. And it doesn't matter in a nebulous rah rah, we're all in this together way. It's real.

When consultants make mistakes, their coworkers share in the responsibility to correct them. They've been there before, and they know they'll soon find themselves in similar binds again.

When Hong forgot his passport on his way to London last year, so many people in the New York office offered to get it to him in Boston that he had to pick the least senior person from a long list of possible lifelines to be his courier. He made his flight without delay.

Bainies come to respect this safety net from the beginning. On day one, when young associate consultants walk into the office, their orientation teaches them about Bain's culture of support. They learn the company motto, "A Bainie never lets another Bainie fail," which was repeated to me unironically whenever I asked why Bain is so great.

Bain's New York office has plenty of small breakout spaces for people to work. Sarah Jacobs

'Build your own Bain'

In addition to making people feel safe and welcome, great workplaces need to give workers a sense of control. Chris Congdon, Steelcase's global director of research communications, said the most obvious way a sense of control comes through is in physical workspaces.

People need to feel like they aren't chained to a desk. If they want a quieter environment so they can focus, they should be able to duck into a one-person lounge. They should be able to shut a door. According to Steelcase's review of its productivity research, half of employees have trouble focusing at work because of distractions, which leads to an average loss of 86 minutes of work each day. Flexible spaces help recover that lost time.

The office comes with a nap room that serves as a private space to think in peace. Sarah Jacobs Bain's offices aren't buzzing with electric scooters or robots in beta testing, but they do embrace the recent insights into the importance of nooks and crannies. People hunch over laptops in the kitchen's diner-style booths and block out noise in high-backed couches. There's a one-person Rainbow Room, so called because it overlooks Rockefeller Center, which houses the actual Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of the Comcast Building.

Control also looks like choosing the trajectory of your own career. When I spoke to Som Sowani, a manager who until recently spent nine years working in the London office when she wasn't taking business trips to Africa and around Europe, she said the mantra of support isn't the only one Bainies like to repeat. People are told to "build your own Bain," Sowani said.

Often that means playing the role of globetrotter. "People move around the world a lot," Sowani said. For some, that's a have-to scenario, an obligation. But she says for most people it's a "get-to," a luxury.

The company's business is so global that by the time Bainies become managers, 50% of them have called a foreign office home. For Sowani, the travel-intense approach made transitioning to the New York office seamless. "I've got peers who used to work with me in London who are also here," she said, "so there was that little bit of a comfort zone."

But Bain also goes to great lengths to ensure people leave that comfort zone in small but important ways. Instead of dividing the office by departments or rank, each bay of cubicles contains a mix of consultants, managers, and partners. The shakeup is meant to reflect the company's "one team" attitude, which values all opinions regardless of rank or role.

These kinds of considerations stand in stark contrast to what is really a rather plain workspace. Save for the bay puns ("Bayoncé," "Obay-Wan Kenobay") that accompany life-sized cutouts, Bain's office looks like, well, an office.

Instead of focusing on flashy art or frivolous perks, the company directs its energy where it counts most: people.

Bain's plaza is a combination kitchen, pingpong area, and coffee bar just on the other side of the 43rd-floor lobby. On one side are floor-to-ceiling windows, where Bainies can peer over downtown Manhattan from 450 feet in the sky. On the other are dozens of framed, black-and-white photographs of Bainies' children assembled into two giant mosaics.

Joseph White, the director of workplace strategy, design, and management at Herman Miller, believes those kinds of adornments are what turn a polished office into a shared, homey space. "You can use the physical environment to tell a story, so that as you move through it you learn more and more about the organization," he says.

An Austin Powers cutout watches over the "Groovy BayBay." Sarah Jacobs Benefits make everything sweeter

A little over a year ago, Danny Hong returned from a second stint on paternity leave after his son Pablo was born. While he was away, he didn't answer a single work email, nor did he feel compelled to, he said. "I left the city for two straight months. I was a ghost."

As it turns out, Bain's generous parental-leave policy is probably its least generous perk. Every parent, regardless of gender or caregiver role, receives eight weeks of fully paid leave, which they can use however they want until the child turns 1 year old.

Earlier this year, the company expanded the leave for birth mothers, from 12 to 16 weeks.

Putting such an emphasis on families is rare but important. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a minimum of 12 weeks of leave for all new mothers. The top three employers in Glassdoor's rankings all hit the mark.

If there is a great downside to employment at Bain, it's the hours. Hong and Sowani both said that 10- or 12-hour days aren't unheard of, but they also said Bainies tend to have an easier time managing their schedules as they move through their careers.

Healthy paychecks no doubt make that grind easier to tolerate. Russ Hagey, Bain's chief talent officer, said Bain's salaries are competitive to the industry, as a typical consultant makes just shy of $140,000, excluding about $30,000 extra in bonuses, stock options, and profit sharing. Fresh out of college, associate consultants already make over $75,000, a threshold that behavioral-economics research suggests improves a person's happiness.

Danny Hong, 36, has been at Bain for 14 years. Sarah Jacobs Hagey said these perks contribute to Bain's having "the lowest turnover in our industry" with rates in the single digits. Normally, consulting is notorious for being a job-hopping profession. Bain's ability to keep people around longer — not just in general but relative to its own peer group — speaks volumes about what it's doing right.

Hong said he likes to remind himself of that every few years when outside job offers come around. Each new offer is a chance to review what has made the past 14 years so worthwhile, and perhaps even leave for greener pastures. But so far, curiosity has yet to get the best of him. Even small interactions with his friends, many of whom are CEOs at startups and public companies, put the bigger picture in relief.

"Maybe I'm just hearing things," he said, "but it really does sound like I enjoy my job better than they do. When we break it down, that envy's not there. I don't see what else they have that I don't."