At a time when attracting, developing and retaining the best possible talent has never been more critical or more challenging, when being able to credibly market your firm to prospective new hires as an employer-of-choice is more valuable than ever, dozens of agencies competed for our Best Agencies to Work For honors.

A record number of employees from agencies in North America participated in the survey, with close to 3.500 individual survey responses.

Respondents were asked to rate their agency on 40 questions related to agency leadership, personal empowerment, people and co-workers, workplace culture, diversity and inclusion, interesting and rewarding work, internal communications, ethical standards, work-life balance, professional development, and benefits and compensation. In addition, open-ended questions asked respondents to describe the best and worst things about their agencies.

The agencies themselves were asked to submit information and their innovative workplace policies and their commitment to DE&I.

Based on the responses to our survey, we are naming five Best Agency to Work For winners:

Best Large Agency to Work For: Finn Partners
Best Midsize Agency to Work For: Citizen Relations
Best Small Agency to Work For: Coyne PR
Best Boutique Agency to Work For: The Hoffman Agency
Best Micro-Boutique Agency to Work For: The Levinson Group

Full analysis of each winner, including employee feedback and cultural highlights can be found here. 

These five Best Agencies to Work For will be presented with their trophies at the 2022 North American SABRE Awards dinner, which takes place at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York on May 2. Tables and tickets are available now.

The overall Best Agency to Work For 2023—the outstanding workplace from among these five finalists—will be announced at the dinner.

“Building a great workplace culture—diverse and inclusive, flexible enough to accommodate a continuum of home-office preferences, devoid of the obstacles that continue to hinder the advancement of women—has never been more critical than it is today,” said Paul Holmes, who has worked on PRovoke’s Best Agencies to Work For Research for more than 20 years.

“The past few years have seen a remarkable change in what a great workplace looks like,” he added. “The pandemic forced companies to acknowledge that employees can still be productive—maybe more so—working from home. But the return to the office also highlighted to importance for corporate culture, creativity and collaboration of actually knowing, meeting and interacting with your co-workers in a shared environment.

“At the same time, employers have been dealing with the desire of younger employees in particular to bring their ‘whole selves’ to work. Even before the Black Lives Matter protests, that meant a greater focus on equity and inclusion in the workplace. And employers need to be more mindful than ever of the mental health pressures that the PR agency environment can create: dealing with stresses of this profession is a major challenge.”