How TIME and Statista Determined the World’s Best Companies of 2023

This year, TIME launched its inaugural list of the World's Best Companies, in partnership with Statista, a leading international provider of market and consumer data and rankings. The result of this quantitative study: 750 companies forging the path into the future. Here's how the winners were selected.

Methodology

The research project "World’s Best Companies 2023" is a comprehensive analysis conducted to identify the top performing companies across the globe. The study was based on three primary dimensions: Employee Satisfaction, Revenue Growth, and Sustainability (ESG).

The first dimension, Employee Satisfaction, was evaluated using survey data from employees worldwide. The surveys were conducted in 58 countries, with data collected from approximately 150,000 participants. 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 in 2022 and demonstrating positive revenue growth from 2020 to 2022. Both relative and absolute growth were considered in the evaluation.

The third dimension, Sustainability, 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 of 100 points. The companies with the highest score were awarded as the World’s Best Companies 2023 by TIME and Statista.

See the full list here.