How TIME and Statista Determined America’s Best Midsize Companies of 2024
This year, TIME launched its inaugural list of the America’s Best Midsize Companies, in partnership with Statista, a leading international provider of market and consumer data and rankings. The result: 500 top-performing, midsize companies that are leading the way for American business. Here’s how the winners were selected.
Methodology
The research project “America’s Best Midsize Companies 2024” is a comprehensive analysis conducted to identify the top performing companies in the United States. The study is based on three primary dimensions:
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]- Employee Satisfaction
- Revenue Growth
- Sustainability Transparency (ESG)
The first dimension, Employee Satisfaction, was investigated based on survey data from a large sample of approximately 170,000 employees from U.S. companies over the last three years. The evaluation encompassed direct and indirect recommendations of companies as well as evaluations of employers across the dimensions image, atmosphere, working conditions, salary, and equality by verified employees.
The second dimension, Revenue Growth, was assessed using data from Statista’s revenue database, which contains company growth data for the last three years. The companies had to meet certain criteria to be considered for the evaluation, including generating a revenue of at least US $100 million but less than US $10 billion in 2022 or 2023 depending on whether the most recent data was published during the research phase. Additionally, the companies had to demonstrate a positive revenue growth in the last three years. Both relative and absolute growth were considered in the evaluation.
The third dimension, Sustainability Transparency, was evaluated based on ESG data among standardized KPIs from Statista’s ESG Database and targeted data research. To formulate a comprehensive ESG index, multiple Key Performance Indicators were collected. For the environmental evaluation, this included the carbon emissions intensity and reduction rate, as well as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) rating. The social dimension assessed the share of women on the board of directors and the existence of a human rights policy. The governance dimension evaluated whether a company had a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report adhering to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines and a compliance or anti-corruption guideline.
Once the data was collected and evaluated, it was consolidated and weighted within a scoring model. The scores of all three dimensions were added on an equal percentage basis to form the final ranking score of a maximum 100 points. The 500 companies with the highest score were awarded as America’s Best Midsize Companies 2024 by TIME and Statista.