Red Hat named to Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list for 2nd year in a row

If you ask Red Hatters why they love working for Red Hat, you’ll hear a common theme. The culture and the people. I frequently hear from new Red Hatters that it just feels different to work here. It’s clear our associates are passionate about being apart of something bigger than themselves, a movement. As a result, Red Hat has been ranked No. 48 on Fortune Magazine's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For! This is our second consecutive year making the list and it’s most gratifying that in a year full of exciting change, one thing has remained constant. Red Hat is still Red Hat and it is a great place to work! 

Thinking back on this year and all that we’ve experienced, I’m grateful that we have put a great deal of attention and focus on continuing Red Hat’s culture because of the value it brings to our associates, customers, partners and the industry as a whole. We are all committed to preserving our way of working and this latest recognition is a testament to this effort. As we move forward, we are laser focused on maintaining what we do and how we do it—the open source way.  

The big question is, how do we scale our culture as we grow into the opportunity ahead? As we continue to grow, adding more new associates, many of whom do not come from the open source industry and aren’t familiar with our way of working, how do we ensure that our culture grows with us? This is something that many of us across Red Hat are constantly thinking about. So we’ve rolled out several new initiatives this year aimed at advancing our ability to collaborate, particularly at greater scale, among a more diverse population. 

If you’re familiar with Red Hat you’ve no doubt heard about Memo-list, our internal mailing list that every associate is subscribed to when they join. Inspired by how open source software communities work, it provides a platform for any associate, regardless of title or tenure, to provide feedback, contribute ideas, or ask questions. But with great power comes great responsibility. While we encourage associates to participate, share different opinions and engage in productive debate, as we add more people we run the risk of misunderstandings and people opting out of the discussion. We turned to all Red Hatters to help, gaining alignment on what productive communication looks like on Memo-list and within our many other online discussion forums. We asked for volunteers and got dozens of Red Hatters, from across the world and the business, who wanted to help support the health of our open forums and our ability to have important discussions on our lists. This year, we will launch our Online Community Caretakers, who will shine a light on the subtle differences between communicating in a business environment versus a personal environment. These passionate associates will help sustain our culture of candid, respectful debate and refocus conversations when they stray from the valuable discussion of ideas and into areas that could damage relationships or be hurtful to our fellow Red Hatters. 

We are working to scale our ability to collaborate, which is central to our culture, with Project +1 and 2¢. Our People and IT teams are collaborating to build out a platform that supports open and inclusive decision making by improving how feedback is gathered, analyzed and used to make business decisions. Right now input is gathered from Red Hatters across numerous, separate platforms (surveys, mailing lists, our intranet) and it can be difficult to track. Project +1 and 2¢ aims to improve and scale how we apply the Open Decision Framework by creating an open source platform where soliciting, sharing and analyzing feedback happens all in one place. Our vision is a platform where there are different ways for Red Hatters to participate in the decision-making process--answering survey questions, sharing their own thoughts, or reacting to each others’ opinions--so that we can increase the diversity of feedback used to drive decisions.

We have also continued to move forward on our diversity and inclusion journey. We believe the full spectrum of diversity is a strength for Red Hat. By including all voices, the best ideas can emerge, and we use these ideas to drive innovation. Two new Diversity + Inclusion communities, Native + Indigenous and Unidos, were created in 2019 year furthering our efforts to create an environment of belonging, respect, and mutual support. Our commitment to D+I was recognized by Fortune when Red Hat was named among the 100 Best Workplaces for Diversity, and in the year ahead we will look to continue on our journey to increase the diversity of, and feeling of inclusion for, associates. 

These are just a few of the ways that we are all working together to scale Red Hat’s culture and ensure that current and future associates get to experience the great place to work that we pride ourselves on. Congratulations to all Red Hatters, it is because of you that we received this award! Thank you to those who have been with us for years and to those who just joined. Thank you for your commitment to our purpose and for seeing the opportunity ahead. And we’re always looking for passionate people to come on board, so come see what all the excitement is about!