About
Make work a place to grow.
Best Place to Grow™ is an independent standard for one question that no employer ranking answers: do people actually become stronger here?
Mission
Establish a single, credible reference for employee growth, and make it possible to verify - organization by organization - whether people leave professionally stronger than they arrived.
Vision
A labour market where people choose employers for what they will become, and where organizations compete on the growth they create rather than the story they tell.
Belief
Work is the largest learning environment most adults will ever have. Whether it is used that way should not be left to chance, or to advertising.
Manifesto
- No one should give years of their life to a workplace without growing from them.
- Organizations should be judged not only by what people produce, but by who people become while working there.
- Growth that costs health, personal life or long-term capacity is not growth.
- A certification that cannot be refused is not a certification.
- Evidence over marketing.
Independence
Organizations pay to be assessed. They never pay to be certified.
Same price whatever the outcome
The assessment fee is fixed before the first data point is collected. A refusal costs exactly what a certification costs.
Commercial team ≠ auditors
No one who sold the assessment can review evidence, score a pillar or vote on a decision.
Advisory ≠ certification
Advisory work is separated organizationally and contractually. An adviser cannot audit their own client.
Evidence is verified, not declared
Every one of the 73 indicators is traced to a document, a system export or a measured outcome.
Certification can be refused, suspended, withdrawn
It has happened, it will happen again, and the transparency report publishes the numbers.
Rankings cannot be purchased
No sponsored placement, no paid position in a Grow Index™, no negotiated score.
Who is behind Best Place to Grow?
An institution that assesses others must say who it is
Verified identities are published as they are confirmed. Remaining fields stay explicitly unfilled: inventing a team member, partner or academic contributor would break the first rule this standard is built on.
- Founder
- Charles Hidier
- TeamTo be published
- Assessment, audit and research roles will be listed with their separation-of-duties rules.
- Legal entityTo be published
- Company name, registration number and registered address to be published before launch.
- Governance
- Standards Board (9 seats) and Certification Committee
- PartnersTo be published
- No partner is claimed until an agreement exists and that partner has approved the mention.
- Academic contributorsTo be published
- Contributors will be named individually, with their discipline and their declared interests.
People Growing
The only number that ultimately matters is how many people are growing.
1,000,000
Our ambition: people growing inside verified growth environments
There is no counter on this page yet. It will start at zero with the first real certification and move only as certified scopes are published - never as an estimate, a projection or a pipeline figure.
What will be counted
Only employees inside a scope that holds a certification in force, counted once, and removed when a certification expires, is suspended or is withdrawn.
What will not be counted
Organizations under assessment, refused organizations, uncertified sites of a certified group, and anyone outside the declared scope.
Roadmap
Where the standard stands today
- Employee Growth Standard v1.0Published8 pillars, 73 indicators, 4 sources of truth, 8 hard gates.
- Methodology HandbookIn progressScoring, sampling, integrity and decision rules written out in full.
- Pilot assessmentsNext stageCalibration of thresholds and indicator discrimination across sectors.
- Inaugural Standards BoardBeing constitutedNine seats, three-year terms, published conflicts of interest.
- First certification cycleUpcomingDecisions published in the public register - refusals included.
- First State of Growth reportAfter sufficient dataPublished only once real assessments support real findings.
We publish what we know, what we do not know, and what we are still testing.