Dive Brief:

• Employee happiness and company culture can be key indicators of a company's growth potential and health, and the 35 companies that made the cut on Battery Ventures and Glassdoor's highest rated cloud companies to work for list are benefiting from this strength in-house. The lists were compiled from online reviews of private B2B cloud companies with more than 200 employees and public companies with at least $500 million in enterprise value. 
• Algolia, Asana and Canopy Tax beat out the other private companies, earning an almost-perfect 4.9 out of 5 rating. In the public sphere, HubSpot took the No. 1 place for public companies with a 4.6 rating, followed by Ultimate Software, Guidewire Software and SendGrid, with each earning a rating of 4.5.
• In ranking cloud companies, employees at top companies regularly mentioned workplaces promoting transparency, experienced leadership with strong communication and mission-driven companies with unique cultures.

Dive Insight:

Technology companies, long hailed as among the best places to work across industries, are not a uniform block, and each field has its perks and drawbacks. As the prominence of the cloud has grown, the number of companies competing in the space has expanded, allowing Glassdoor to raise its bar to make the list from a minimum 4.1 rating last year to a 4.4 rating in 2018, according to Neeraj Agrawal, general partner at Battery Ventures, in an interview with CIO Dive. 

This 0.3 jump in minimum rating is significant for cloud companies, because it means CEOs can't stand still, but rather need to be continually investing in employee engagement, satisfaction and company culture, according to Agrawal. 

Earning a top spot is never easy. Ultimate Software came off of a No. 1 ranking in 2017 to No. 2 this year. Considering that the company is almost 30 years old, it's impressive that it's maintained its "mojo" for so long and is clearly doing something right to keep employees happy, Agrawal said. 

For companies with distributed workforces, maintaining a strong culture and employee morale can be difficult. But more distributed companies are finding ways to work around the challenges and making the list, such as Algolia, whose employees are split evenly between Paris and San Francisco, Agrawal said. But companies that benefit from proximity shouldn't use it as a crutch, and instead should always work to systematically embrace employees across the company.

The 25 ranked private companies scored a rating between 4.6 and 4.9, while the 10 public companies scored ratings between 4.3 and 4.6. The exact causes for this discrepancy is hard to pinpoint, but contributing factors could be that the public companies are more accountable to the market, are generally larger with more employees and have to maintain higher ratings at scale, according to Agrawal.