Winning Is a Habit: Inc. Names Alation a Best Workplace for Fourth Time

It’s my honor to share that Alation has been named to the 2023 Inc. Best Workplaces for the fourth time.

This news comes on the heels of a momentous past year. We’ve been fortunate to continue our growth trajectory despite fast-changing economic conditions because we continue to work hard and look forward together as a team.

We’ve been honored to receive numerous accolades from industry influencers. We also achieved “Centaur” status by reaching more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in September 2022, and then announced our $123 million Series E financing just a few weeks later. Along the way, we increased our team to our current 700-plus global force of Alationauts — and we’re still looking to fill dozens of openings worldwide.

It’s cliché to say that we couldn’t have achieved these and other milestones without our team, but it’s 100% true. We have put an extraordinary amount of effort into making our company culture one of the best in the world — not in tech, not in Silicon Valley, but in the world.

That said, we don’t take our Alationauts for granted. We thrive on a set of shared values, offer incredible benefits, and continuously improve on a workplace where every individuals can put their all into empowering a more curious and rational world.

The combined effort of 700+ Alationauts makes us a successful company and creates a wonderful place to work. I truly believe this… but don’t take it from me. I’ll let the results speak for themselves.

At Alation, we’ve made excellence in workplace culture a habit. On top of this recent win, I’m thrilled to share that Alation was also recently named one of the “UK’s Best Workplaces™ by Great Place to Work” and a 2022 UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Women based on anonymous feedback from women employees. We also have a 4.5/5 rating on Glassdoor, with a 93% CEO approval rating.

Being a “Best Workplace”

Inc.’s award means a lot to our leadership team because it’s based on employee input. It’s unvarnished, unfiltered, unguided opinions that determine who makes the list, which makes this award more genuine in our view. As Alation’s Chief People Officer, it gives me an immense sense of pride, not only in what my team and our global fleet of managers have accomplished, but in the effort every Alationaut puts into making this, well, the best workplace, I’ve ever had the pleasure of helping to build.

For many of us, what makes a workplace good has changed significantly over the past few years. Employee engagement is more important than ever as we work together in person less and feel disconnected across video calls and instant messages, no matter how many emojis we use. Engagement is also how we measure our People team’s success at Alation because we know that our Alationauts need to feel valued, appreciated, and challenged to do their best work. If you’re not increasing worker engagement, you’re taking them for granted.

Being a great workplace is also about developing our leaders and keeping them accountable to powering their team Our leadership behaviors program, which launched last year, aims to educate Alation managers on effective leadership practices through Constructive Candor Training and Manager Lunch & Learns. The program’s objective is to instill top-notch management principles and teach managers how to lead by example and use data to measure and drive outcomes. That begins with constructive candor.

Candor means we are able to give (and receive) feedback that’s sometimes hard to hear, but we do it with honesty and compassion. This demands empathetic accountability, which supports a competitive culture, in which we hold each other responsible for outcomes and results. This demands putting the company first in a servant-leadership mindset, and, finally, role modeling leadership behaviors that are courageous, embracing risk-taking in pursuit of lofty goals while always taking the time to explain our “why” and share context so others understand our motivations.

Being Our Best Workplace

Creating a “best” workplace is honorable, but only if it works for your business. We start with our primary goal of helping customers build thriving data cultures and empowering a more curious and rational world. We then challenge our people to focus on more than just building software.

Going back to our values, we empower Alationauts to move the ball by taking action, listen like they’re wrong to understand other perspectives, build for the long-term to ensure future success, and measure that success through customer impact. Along the way, we also strive for fairness and kindness in all interactions.

Empathy is the thread that ties these values together and binds our global team. We believe that flexibility, understanding, appreciation, and compassion are highly valued human traits. And when you encourage and reward those traits in the workplace, you create an environment people don’t just love, but thrive in. It also helps when you boost the bonding factor with events like our recent India Kickoff, which featured 3 days of networking and goal setting, ending with a talent show!

The last critical element to building our best workplace is…you! We’re hiring, in sales, in Canada, in marketing, in finance, in Poland, in India, and in your living room, or wherever else you call “the office” these days. Take a moment to check out the long list of available openings at Alation and consider applying. Adding you to our team would push us from best to bestest.