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As I sat outside on a perfect, sunny day in Silicon Valley, watching dogs play in the grass, and men in suits ride by on brightly colored bicycles, I found it hard to believe what I was hearing. A group from Great Place to Work^® had just finished a tour of Google’s Mountain View campus, led by three members of Google’s People Operations team. “It’s not really about the perks,” they insisted. Sure, I thought, as I adjusted my chair so I could get a better angle on the outdoor volley ball game that had just started up, and slipped out of my jacket to get some sun on my arms.

Building a “Culture of Innovation” is certainly a hot topic these days, and rightly so; hiring great innovators almost universally coincides with being both successful and a great workplace. However, with all the information floating around on the topic, it still remains elusive.

Here at Great Place to Work^® we get an intimate view of the inner workings of innovative companies.

Workplace culture can be a fuzzy concept for some, which is why Great Place to Work^® has designed a framework for examining company culture. The key to this framework lies within the interaction between managers, supervisors and their employees; frontline management sets the tone and disseminates cultural values throughout the organizational ranks.

We should design workplaces for people first, then for work. If we re-frame the typical workplace-employee association from a workplace being an environment employees go to do work, to the workplace is a product employees use to produce work, then we can observe how well a product serves its user.

I was quite inspired watching the President’s inauguration and listening to the many speeches and readings in honor of the great tradition of leadership transition that we celebrate on inauguration day. I was particularly taken by the many ways in which people called out for all of us to reach for a higher purpose in our work, our lives and our interactions with others.

16 years of the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For list and the franchise is still going strong. When Great Place to Work initiated our relationship with Fortune Magazine to select the country’s best workplaces annually, we hoped, but never realized, just how big the list would become.

I want to suggest that the World’s Best Multinational Workplaces represent far more than a collection of winners of the ultimate workplace Oscars. They represent something very important for society in general. They are – I believe – the vanguard of the workplace of the future. Before looking forward, consider for a moment that this event would have been unimaginable some 28 years ago when Milton Moskowitz and I published The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America.

The Stevie Awards for Women in Business are the world’s top honors for female entrepreneurs, executives, and the organizations they run. More than 1,200 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration, and Great Place to Work’s very own Susan Lucas-Conwell was nominated in the Female Executive of the Year category for Business Services.

Creating and sustaining a great workplace culture takes work. As much as we might wish there was, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, there are steps that organizations can take to understand and define their unique cultures.

Singing in a choir, standing shoulder to shoulder, facing the same direction, being part of a joint endeavour, creates powerful bonds between people. Individually we may be ordinary but together we can make the most extraordinary sound. A good choir makes the sum of the singers greater than the individual parts. And that’s exactly how teamwork / camaraderie / sense of family — call it what you want — makes such a positive difference in the workplace.