The latest Fortune workplace rankings suggest that in an AI-saturated economy, companies may compete less on access to technology and more on whether employees actually trust the organization they work for
The Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces rankings are putting an increasingly important question at the center of the workplace debate: what happens when technology becomes widely available, but human trust remains scarce?
Fortune and Great Place To Work have unveiled their 2026 lists of the best small and medium-sized workplaces in the United States, with the rankings based on confidential employee feedback and the organization’s Trust Index methodology. The research covers more than 1.3 million employee responses.
The timing matters.
Companies are racing to adopt AI, redesign jobs and squeeze more productivity from smaller teams. Yet one of Fortune’s most striking workplace stories this week comes from the opposite direction. Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio wrote about laying off an employee, Jonathan Vidales, only to rehire him months later after realizing how much institutional knowledge and experience had been lost.
Taken together, the stories point toward a larger shift in management.
The competitive advantage may not be AI alone. It may be what companies do with the people using it.
Background and Context
For years, workplace culture was frequently treated as a soft corporate issue.
Perks mattered. Offices mattered. Employee events mattered. But the underlying assumption was that culture sat somewhere beside the actual business rather than inside it.
The latest Fortune workplace research makes a different argument.
Great Place To Work says companies on the Best Small and Medium Workplaces lists outperform peers by creating higher levels of trust, with trust associated with stronger productivity, engagement and business performance. The organization says higher levels of trust drove as much as 7.5 times higher revenue growth for small businesses and 3.4 times higher revenue growth for medium-sized businesses.
That does not mean trust automatically creates revenue.
It does suggest, however, that the companies building stronger relationships with their employees are also showing characteristics associated with better business performance.
That is becoming especially relevant as AI changes the economics of knowledge work.
Latest Update: Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces Put People at the Center
Fortune and Great Place To Work announced the latest rankings on August 27, 2026.
The small-workplace category covers companies with 10 to 99 U.S. employees, while the medium-workplace category covers organizations with 100 to 999 employees. Eligible companies must first earn Great Place To Work Certification.
The rankings are based on confidential employee responses to the Great Place To Work Trust Index survey.
According to the announcement, more than 1.3 million U.S. employees provided responses used in the overall research. The methodology incorporates 60 employee-experience questions designed to measure the workplace experience across roles and other employee characteristics.
The top five companies in the Best Medium Workplaces list are:
- Lumin Digital
- Home Genius Exteriors
- WestPac Wealth Partners
- PeopleTec, Inc.
- Community Financial Services Bank
The top five Best Small Workplaces are:
- 5
- Abile Group
- CTG Federal | National
- Mangomint
- Proper Roofing and Remodeling, LLC
The rankings are less interesting as a leaderboard than as a window into what these companies are doing differently.
Trust Is the Common Thread
Great Place To Work reports that 96% of employees at the Best Medium Workplaces said their company was a great place to work, compared with a lower figure for a typical workplace of the same size.
For the Best Small Workplaces, the figure rises to 98%.
That gap is significant because small and medium-sized companies have fewer layers between employees and leadership.
A bad management decision can travel quickly through a 50-person company.
So can a good one.
What the Winning Companies Are Doing Differently
Fortune’s reporting on the rankings highlights three companies in particular: e.l.f. Beauty, Stellar Solutions and Lucid Software.
Their industries are dramatically different, but their management philosophies share several characteristics.
e.l.f. Beauty: Employees Are Expected to Stretch
At e.l.f. Beauty, employees are encouraged to contribute outside their formal functions.
Kerry Preston, the company’s vice president of people development, describes a culture where employees are expected to bring experience from different parts of the business into new problems.
The company says 96% of employees are proud of their work, while 93% say it is a great place to work.
That matters in an AI economy because the value of an employee may increasingly come from combining knowledge rather than performing a narrowly defined task.
AI can generate an answer.
An experienced employee knows which answer is useful.
Stellar Solutions: Relationships Become the Sales Engine
For aerospace and systems engineering company Stellar Solutions, relationships are not simply a cultural benefit.
They are part of the business model.
Sara Walker, senior director of people and corporate strategies, says the company does not have a traditional business-development function because growth comes heavily through relationships and professional networks.
That is a powerful reminder that some of the most valuable assets inside a company do not appear neatly on a balance sheet.
They exist in people’s memories, relationships and reputations.
Lucid Software: Retention Is a Financial Decision
At Lucid Software, which makes products including Lucidchart and Lucidspark, the company explicitly views employee retention as a business issue.
Brittany Call, vice president of people operations, says the company calculates the cost of replacing employees, including recruiting expenses, lost productivity and effects on team morale.
That changes the conversation.
Instead of asking whether employee programs are expensive, executives can ask a different question:
What does it cost not to retain people?
The AI Connection Is Bigger Than It Looks
This is where the Fortune workplace story intersects with the broader AI economy.
AI is making some knowledge-work tasks cheaper and faster.
That creates enormous opportunities for companies.
But it also creates a management temptation: if software can perform more tasks, perhaps fewer humans are needed.
Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio describes learning this lesson after her company eliminated roles during a redesign and subsequently lost some employees it had expected to stay. One employee, labor economist Jonathan Vidales, eventually returned after applying for a newly opened position.
His return exposed something that spreadsheets often miss.
Institutional knowledge is difficult to measure until it disappears.
Colacurcio argues that experienced employees can become more valuable when given the tools and training to adapt to AI rather than simply being treated as costs to eliminate.
That is perhaps the most important connection between the two Fortune stories.
One asks what makes a workplace attractive.
The other asks what happens when companies forget why their existing people are valuable.
The answer may be the same.
Trust creates room for reinvention.
Expert Insights and Analysis
The strongest lesson from the Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces is that workplace culture becomes economically meaningful when it changes how employees behave.
A worker who trusts leadership may be more willing to:
- Learn a new technology
- Take on unfamiliar responsibilities
- Share an idea outside their job description
- Give management honest feedback
- Stay through a difficult transformation
- Build relationships across departments
- Invest in company-specific knowledge
Those behaviors are particularly valuable during technological transitions.
Consider the alternative.
If employees believe every efficiency initiative could make their job disappear, they have a rational reason to protect themselves rather than experiment.
That creates a hidden tax on innovation.
AI Makes Trust More Important, Not Less
Fortune’s workplace analysis argues that companies increasingly have access to similar frontier AI models. That means the technology itself may become less differentiated over time.
The scarce resource becomes implementation.
Two companies can purchase access to comparable AI systems.
They cannot instantly duplicate each other’s:
- Employee relationships
- Institutional knowledge
- Customer trust
- Internal communication
- Leadership credibility
- Organizational memory
Those are slower to build.
And much harder to copy.
Broader Implications
The Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces rankings arrive at a moment when the traditional employer-employee relationship is being rewritten.
The old model was relatively straightforward.
Companies hired people to perform defined jobs.
The emerging model is more fluid.
Companies increasingly want employees to learn new tools, move across functions, experiment with AI and generate ideas that did not exist when their job descriptions were written.
That requires a different kind of workplace.
Culture Becomes Infrastructure
A useful way to think about culture is as organizational infrastructure.
Nobody celebrates a company’s database because it works correctly.
They simply notice when it fails.
Culture can work the same way.
When trust is high, employees can move quickly because they spend less time worrying about political consequences, hidden incentives or whether leadership will punish experimentation.
When trust is low, every organizational change becomes harder.
That is why the Fortune research matters beyond HR.
It is ultimately about operating speed.
Internal link suggestion: The Tech Marketer should link this article to a related piece on AI-driven workplace transformation and the future of knowledge work, creating a topical cluster around AI, employment and corporate strategy.
Listening Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage
The Fortune workplace research repeatedly returns to listening.
At Lucid, employee engagement surveys are used to inform workplace initiatives. Fortune reports that 97% of employees say they feel cared for at the company.
At Stellar Solutions, employees can discuss what their ideal job would look like through an annual “dream sheet” process.
At e.l.f. Beauty, leadership creates opportunities for employees to interact directly with executives.
These are not identical programs.
The underlying principle is.
Information has to move upward.
An organization cannot adapt effectively if executives only hear what employees think through filtered reports.
In an AI transformation, that becomes even more important.
Employees are often the first people to discover where an AI tool works, where it fails and where customers are reacting badly to it.
A company that listens can adapt.
A company that does not may automate the wrong thing.
Related History: From Employee Perks to Business Strategy
The workplace culture movement has changed significantly over the past few decades.
The early corporate approach often emphasized compensation, benefits and job security.
Then came the rise of Silicon Valley’s workplace-perks culture, with companies competing through meals, offices, recreational spaces and increasingly elaborate employee experiences.
But the latest model is different.
The question is less:
“What perks do employees get?”
And more:
“How does the company behave when things get difficult?”
That distinction matters.
Pizza is easy.
Trust is harder.
A company can buy a new office in a quarter.
It can take years to establish a reputation for honest leadership.
The stories behind this year’s rankings illustrate that difference.
The Rehire Story Is the Warning
Maria Colacurcio’s account of rehiring Jonathan Vidales is particularly revealing.
After Syndio restructured, Vidales eventually returned to the company.
When his account was reactivated, he found the company’s previous restructuring announcement still sitting in his inbox.
Colacurcio describes the message as cold and corporate and says the experience changed how she viewed the company’s communication during layoffs.
The episode exposes a problem that many organizations underestimate.
A company can technically execute a restructuring correctly and still damage trust.
The people who remain are watching.
They are asking:
How did the company treat my colleagues?
That question can affect retention just as much as salary.
What Happens Next?
The workplace story is unlikely to end with a ranking.
Several larger trends are converging.
1. AI Will Force More Role Redesign
Companies will continue redesigning jobs around AI.
Some roles will disappear.
Others will expand.
Many will become hybrids in which employees supervise, validate or creatively direct automated systems.
The companies that can retrain existing employees may have an advantage over those that repeatedly replace them.
2. Retention Will Become More Strategic
As organizations become leaner, every experienced employee represents a larger share of institutional knowledge.
That makes unwanted turnover more expensive.
3. Trust Will Be Tested During Layoffs
The real test of corporate culture is rarely a good quarter.
It is what happens during a bad one.
Companies facing restructuring will have to balance financial necessity with communication, dignity and transparency.
4. Employee Feedback Could Become an AI Input
Organizations are collecting enormous amounts of employee data through surveys, collaboration tools and performance systems.
The challenge will be using that information responsibly.
The best companies may increasingly treat employee feedback as an operating signal rather than an annual HR exercise.
5. Small Companies Could Have an Advantage
Small and medium-sized businesses have fewer organizational layers.
That can make leadership more visible and allow employee feedback to influence decisions more quickly.
The rankings suggest that this proximity can become a competitive advantage when leaders use it effectively.
Conclusion
The Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces rankings arrive with a deceptively simple message.
Technology matters.
But people still determine what a company can do with technology.
The companies highlighted by Fortune and Great Place To Work are not being recognized merely because they offer attractive benefits. They are being recognized for building trust, listening to employees, developing talent and creating environments where people can contribute beyond narrowly defined job descriptions.
At the same time, Syndio’s rehire story offers a cautionary counterexample.
A company can move aggressively toward AI and efficiency while accidentally throwing away knowledge it later discovers it needs.
That may be the central workplace challenge of the AI era.
The companies that win will not necessarily be the ones that automate the most jobs.
They may be the ones that figure out how to make their existing people dramatically more capable with technology.
In an economy where access to AI is becoming widespread, trust could become one of the few advantages that cannot simply be purchased from a software vendor.
FAQ
1. What are the Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces?
The Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces are annual rankings produced by Fortune and Great Place To Work that recognize U.S. small and medium-sized companies with strong employee experiences and high levels of workplace trust.
2. What are the top Fortune Best Medium Workplaces for 2026?
The top five listed in the 2026 announcement are Lumin Digital, Home Genius Exteriors, WestPac Wealth Partners, PeopleTec, Inc. and Community Financial Services Bank.
3. What are the top Fortune Best Small Workplaces for 2026?
The top five listed are 5, Abile Group, CTG Federal | National, Mangomint and Proper Roofing and Remodeling, LLC.
4. How are the Fortune workplace rankings determined?
Great Place To Work says the rankings use its Trust Index survey and confidential employee feedback. The 2026 announcement says more than 1.3 million U.S. employee responses were collected, with the methodology based on 60 employee-experience questions.
5. Why is workplace trust becoming more important because of AI?
AI is making advanced technology more widely available. As access to similar AI systems becomes less differentiated, companies may increasingly compete through human factors such as institutional knowledge, relationships, employee engagement and the ability to adapt. Fortune’s workplace analysis makes this argument directly.
6. What happened at Syndio after its layoffs?
Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio wrote that the company eliminated several roles during a redesign, including the position held by labor economist Jonathan Vidales. He later applied for a newly opened position and was rehired. Colacurcio said the experience changed how she thought about institutional knowledge and communication during restructuring.
7. Can employee trust actually affect business growth?
Great Place To Work reports an association between higher workplace trust and stronger revenue growth, including up to 7.5 times higher growth for small businesses and 3.4 times higher growth for medium-sized businesses. That is an observed relationship in the organization’s research, not proof that trust alone causes revenue growth.
Sources & References
- Fortune: At the Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces, people fuel growth
Read the Fortune workplace analysis - Fortune: We laid him off. Then we hired him back
Read Maria Colacurcio’s Fortune commentary - Great Place To Work / GlobeNewswire: Announcing the 2026 Fortune Best Small and Medium Workplaces
Read the 2026 workplace announcement
