Why Fortune Magazine Called SAS the Best Company to Work for in the U.S.

Employees of SAS Institute live in a workers' Utopia. On the company's wooded campus in North Carolina is everything a person could need: doctors, dentist, on site childcare, masseurs...

SAS has just been chosen by Fortune magazine as one of the best companies to work for in the U.S. Like the other 99 companies singled out, SAS is not content to reward employees with a mere pay check. Instead, the company is dead set on making their lives easier.

Indeed, there is little these good employers will not do to take the load off their workers' shoulders. Some provide subsidized housekeeper. Some deliver ready-cooked gourmet meals to employees' doors in the evening. Others offer haircuts, free Viagra, cut-price sushi, free ergonomic chairs. One company even provides $10,000 (₤6,070) towards the cost of adopting a child.

Not content with the above, some employers are helping their staff fill their leisure hours too. Many offer swimming pools and fitness centers, some arrange guitar lessons or provide garden allotments. Some even lay on company holidays, whisking workers and their partners off to luxury island locations.

And that is not all: some companies also set the standard for employees to follow in their private lives. At First Tennessee, employees get a $130 cash bonus if they are seen to be practicing 10 specified healthy behavior patterns.

For these forward-looking employers the vexed problem of work / life balance assumed to be one of the greatest workplace issues facing us - is magically eliminated. These companies are mounting a take-over bad for their employees' lives with the result that the issues of balance no longer arises.

And at these companies hardly anyone ever leaves. Which might mean everyone is gloriously happy. Or it might mean the prospect of severing one's entire life from an employer is so daunting that it seems easier to stay put.

Amid all this bounty there is just one thing that none of these companies offer. And that is time. If employers really want to show that they are helping employees balance their lives, the answer is not to do their shopping, fix their teeth and issue them with laptops so they can work "flexibly" right through the night. It is to ensure that people do not work too hard. To write it into the company's culture that no one will be expected to work more than, say, 40 hours a week on average. And for the Chief Executive to show the way.

Certainly this would not be easy, and probably not cheap either. But an employer that tackled the long-hours culture would be reaching the parts that all the three hairdos, Viagra and guitar lessons in the world will never reach.