No. 3: Sharp HealthCare

Computerworld - Employees at some companies rave about the great benefits  generous stock options, for example. At other companies, workers say they love the location; maybe they can hike in the mountains or go to the beach on weekends. Still others cite some special corporate culture, the company picnics and retreats, or the accessibility of top management.

At Sharp HealthCare in San Diego, its all of the above, and more. Employees say the company has terrific management, great benefits, a warm corporate culture and a quest for professional excellence that makes them stay year after year. The companys efforts to improve on all those fronts pushed Sharp to the third spot on this years Best Places to Work in IT list.

Sharp hasnt found a magic bullet that other companies might rush to adopt. Rather, it comes down to a sustained commitment to six pillars of excellence: quality, service, people, finance, growth and community.

We call it the Sharp Experience, says George Gilmore, director of IS administration. Its about making Sharp the best place to work, the best place to practice and the best place to receive care.

Others have taken notice. Sharp has won numerous accolades. In February, for example, Modern Healthcare magazine named it the best integrated health care network in California and ranked it No. 18 nationally. Last year, Sharp received the state-level equivalent of a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award through an affiliate program.

Bill Spooner has been at Sharp for 26 years, the past 11 of them as CIO. What keeps me going? Sharp has a really good reputation in the community. We have absolutely the best boss in the world and a great leadership team, he says. Our CEO is a real people person and a great problem-solver. We dont have a big budget, but we look hard at the investments we make and really try hard to improve the organization.

Spooner says Sharp went through some financial difficulty in the mid-1990s and almost sold out to another health care firm. But instead, it embarked on a number of quality programs that grew successively more refined before culminating in the Sharp Experience umbrella program in 2001. We started to improve satisfaction at all levels of employee, Spooner says. A lot of it was employee empowerment, rewards and recognition, motivation and cheerleading.

Indeed, quite a lot of cheerleading goes on at Sharp. There is an annual assembly of all 14,000 employees, held in three half-day shifts. We celebrate our accomplishments from the past year, we have some leadership and motivational presentations, and we talk about what we are trying to do for the next year, Spooner says. We also have awards  not money, but recognition, trophies and so on.