A Great Place to Woke - "NOT" GREAT Place to Work.

Great Place to Work (TM) Certification's Dirty BIG Secret A MUST READ for Corporate workers

So, if the company that you work for doesn’t have enough trans people, gay people, black people, hispanic people, or disabled people AND has too many Unoppressed gender aligned men and women, then according to the Great Place to Work® certification in 2025, you DON’T work in a great place.

Across the globe, the Great Place to Work® Certification has been heralded as an international benchmark for highlighting companies where employees thrive. Since its inception in 1992, Great Place to Work (GPTW) has built a reputation on helping companies evaluate and strengthen their workplace cultures through a rigorous assessment process. GPTW prides itself on assessing companies based on five dimensions of culture: credibility, respect, fairness, pride, and camaraderie. These five pillars have been the bedrock of the GPTW methodology for decades, setting a clear and seemingly objective standard for what constitutes a great workplace.

For companies, GPTW certification means public validation of their employee experience. Certified companies enjoy premier employer branding, accelerated talent attraction, higher retention, and increased investor confidence. Globally, it signals an organization’s commitment to creating a positive, high-trust workplace. Seven of GPTW’s most prominent certified companies include:

• Salesforce

• Hilton

• Accenture

• Amex

• Wegmans Food Markets

• Cisco Systems

• Deloitte

• American Express

• EY (Ernst & Young)

• Nerdwallet

• Mercury

• Paradigm

These companies have proudly displayed their GPTW credentials, leveraging the brand as a competitive edge in global talent markets.

In 2025, a fair question demands an answer:

Is the Great Place to Work Certification still the gold standard of culture assessments?

In 2021, Great Place to Work made a bold and explicit commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB). In August of that year, they formally launched a comprehensive DEIB strategy designed to encourage organizations to deepen their focus on inclusion and demographic diversity. Although we have no way of knowing when these questions were first included on the survey, we can say they were certainly solidified with the DEIB strategy. Companies seeking certification are now required to include highly personal and sensitive demographic questions that have NO relation to company leadership, performance or trust in their employee surveys…all related to pushing some of the WOKE agenda.

These questions include:

• What is your racial/ethnic identity?

• Do you identify as LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, +)?

• In your personal life, for whom do you have caregiving or financial responsibility?

• Do you have any chronic physical, mental, or emotional health problems, illnesses, or other disabilities?

When companies challenged these invasive questions, GPTW’s official position was unequivocal:

“We understand that demographic questions can feel sensitive or private. However, they are essential for identifying and addressing workplace disparities. This data helps organizations create a more inclusive environment where all employees feel valued.

Please note that excluding these required questions and demographic information will disqualify you from Great Place to Work Certification and Best Workplaces lists recognition opportunities.”

Well, then... If your company does not permit GPTW to ask these questions, you are disqualified. Period.

GPTW will not disclose how this information is used to grant or deny certification, but stated in an email that without having the demographics, they cannot look for “disparities.” When asked to describe the disparities, they didn’t provide an answer.

Objectively, the only way demographic information can be used to determine “disparities” is if they already have an established percentage of what they consider “acceptable,” and anything less than that number would be considered disparate. Well, isn’t that a quota?

GPTW does not publish the expected percentages or quotas regarding race, sexuality, disability, or caregiving responsibilities. While the organization notes that employees are not required to answer these questions, they avoided answering whether companies will be excluded from certification eligibility if their populations don’t answer those questions and meet a certain percentage.

Prospective companies seeking certification have every reason to worry that non-response rates — or lack of certain demographic representation — will likely count against them.

GPTW did maintain that any actions taken in response to survey results are rooted in the nine trust factors: caring, celebrating, hiring, sharing, thanking, inspiring, developing, speaking, and listening.

However, if they are truly dedicated to their trust factors, then why mandate these intrusive, politically left agenda questions in the first place?

It is increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that Great Place to Work does not rely solely on employee feedback or merit as it once claimed. Instead, it is highly probable that unpublished DEI metrics — targets and quotas undisclosed to companies — are now (and have been for some time) influencing GPTW’s judgments of what makes a “great place to work.”

In other words, the certification process is no longer based on merit. It is no longer purely about culture. It is no longer about employee voice. It has become, unmistakably, about advancing a DEI agenda.

That does not sound so “great” to companies across the United States and internationally today. Hasn’t it been established over and over that DEI has NOT created healthy work environments where ALL people thrive? Rather, it has had the opposite effect of creating environments of preference, oppression, and restriction with no regard to merit.

In light of the incredible national pushback against DEI mandates, which render criminal companies who are engaged in racial, gender identity, disability, or other class quotas, organizations like Great Place to Work Certification must evolve or risk irrelevance.

The era of DEI mandates is over.

Companies should not be judged on how many boxes they check on race, sexuality, or gender (and gender ideology). They should be judged on merit and the authentic feedback of their employees about how they are treated and supported.

Great Place to Work can only regain its integrity by returning to its foundational principles of employee experience based on trust and merit. Otherwise, the certification is perverted and should deservedly be relegated to the growing list of organizations that sacrificed credibility for ideology and tossed on the junkpile of another terrific idea destroyed by political insanity.

Feel free to share this broadly and widely.

Most companies don’t know about this, and they should.

Help us get this message across to GPTW.