Rackspace Ranks Among Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For

Some companies regard employee engagement as something nice to have, perhaps as a way to trim the high cost of turnover.

At Rackspace, we take a different view. We differentiate ourselves through our expertise in cloud technologies — and equally through a brand of results-obsessed customer service that we call Fanatical Support. Such exceptional service can’t be commanded. It must be volunteered, by employees who are inspired and empowered to delight customers. So if we aren’t a great place to work, we don’t have a business. That’s why we’re proud to be honored by Fortune magazine in its latest annual ranking of The 100 Best Companies to Work For.

This is the seventh time we’ve made the Fortune list over the past decade. We’ve ranked as high as #29. But this year’s ranking of #74 is especially sweet, for two reasons. First, because we had fallen off the list for the past two years. Second, because we’ve just gone through a challenging period, when we transitioned from public to private ownership.

We’ve made some hard but necessary decisions to transform our business, get our costs in line and accelerate our growth so that we can provide value to our customers and great careers for our Rackers for years to come. Earning a spot on the Best Places list during this transition demonstrates the strength and resiliency of the culture that our Rackers have built, brick by brick, over the past 18 years.

Over the past year, we’ve been encouraged that Fortune, in partnership with the Great Place to Work organization, recognized our workplace culture on several of their specialized lists: Best Workplaces for Millennials, Best Workplaces for Working Parents, Best Workplaces in Technology and Best Workplaces in Texas.

We’ve also been recognized as a top workplace by Forbes, Glassdoor, the Sunday Times in London and other prestigious ranking organizations in the U.K. and Australia.

I want to thank all the Rackers around the world who take the time to answer surveys from these organizations. The feedback we get through these surveys helps supplement what we learn from our regular internal polls. You can dig deeper into the most recent Fortune survey results, and our company perks and stats here.

We are very deliberate about our workplace culture, as the Fortune and Great Place to Work articles make clear. It all starts with hiring. We certainly look for technical expertise, but we’re even more interested in a candidate’s attitude and aptitude. We do a lot of training: about 5% of our workforce is in some sort of class on every work day. We regularly survey customer and employee sentiment, down to the level of our smallest teams.

We reward and promote Rackers who delight their customers, and leaders who inspire their teams. We hold each other accountable to an agreed set of core values. We work hard, and we also play hard — with our headquarters located in a refurbished shopping mall that includes its own coffee shop, visiting food trucks, and a two-story playground slide.

Rackers at our headquarters fly over their desks the flags of more than 60 nations of origin. They carry U.S. passports and green cards and H1B visas. And the Rackers in our offices on three other continents are even more diverse. We represent many races and all the world’s major religions. Those differences make us stronger, and better able to serve customers who are spread across 150 countries.