Why on earth should you, as an out-of-state corporate executive attempting to choose the best location for a future manufacturing facility or outlying branch operation, even care about the relative quality of life of the various communities you are considering for your company’s next location?
It’s not that you’re a heartless person, totally devoid of any human feelings, but, come on, this is a business decision. The real goal of the site location process is to impact your P&L in a positive manner … and the more positive, the better. Leave the group hugs to Deepak Chopra and Oprah. Your job is to make the best location decision on behalf of your company and its stakeholders.
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The real goal of the site location process is to impact your P&L in a positive manner … and the more positive, the better. Leave the group hugs to Deepak Chopra and Oprah.
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As far as you’re concerned, if you pay your future employees a decent wage and treat them well, everything will work out just fine. Besides, most of the employees at your new facility will be local hires who already live in that community anyway. Why, you might ask yourself, should you worry about something that those folks were already at peace, as demonstrated by their decision to continue living in that particular community?
It’s hard to argue with that logic but, like most things in life, that’s only part of the story.
There are two ways to look at quality of life — from the outside and from the inside — and most of us are accustomed to looking at it from the outside. We have certain personal feelings about various locations, most of which we have probably never even set foot in. It doesn’t matter whether or not our perceptions are accurate. We routinely base important decisions on our feelings, fair or not, and we’re all guilty of doing that. I know I am.
Most traditional quality of life ratings tend to emphasize the artistic and cultural attributes of a community, but those ratings are more applicable for the senior people in your organization — those with sufficient disposable income to be able to take advantage of those cultural activities.
For the vast majority of your employees — the rank and file, if your will — quality of life involves being able to afford to tap into the American Dream of a middle class lifestyle. To them, access to good tickets to La Bohème is not nearly as important as access to good public schools, or being able to afford to own their own home, or to live in neighborhoods where they are in constant fear of being a victim of crime.
What Makes for Quality of Life?
That philosophy forms the foundation for Expansion Management’s 9th annual Quality of Life Quotient, where we compare all 362 metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) to determine where the average American is best able to afford to enjoy that middle class lifestyle. As in previous years, we looked at nine major categories to come up with our Quality of Life Quotient rankings.
Affordable Housing. For the vast majority of Americans, home ownership is a time-tested way to establish wealth. In fact, for the average family, it is the primary way they are ever going to build wealth.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Affordable Housing.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 Large Metros for Affordable Housing.
Good Public Schools. Education is the key to upward mobility, and being able to send your children to high quality public schools may be the most important quality-of-life issue.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 metrowide public schools rankings for Large Metro Areas.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 metrowide public schools rankings for Midsize Metro Areas.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 metrowide public schools rankings for Small Metro Areas.
Low Crime Levels. If you have to worry about being assaulted in your neighborhood, or about having your car stolen from in front of your house, it doesn’t matter how good everything else is. No one wants to live in a high crime area because the fear of crime takes away one’s sense of freedom and liberty.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Low Crime.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 Large Metros for Low Crime.
Adult Education Level. Living in a community of reasonably well-educated people is a desirable thing for most employers because that is where their employee base comes from. Having workers who are able to quickly grasp concepts and implement ideas is critical to most employers.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Adult Education Level.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 Large Metros for Adult Education Level.
Standard of Living. This category tries to measure where an individual’s income will go the farthest while, at the same time, not being mired in an area of extreme poverty.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Standard of Living.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 Large Metros for Standard of Living.
Traffic & Commuting. Being stuck in traffic for several hours a day is not conducive to quality of life, no matter how much money one makes.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Traffic & Commuting.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 Large Metros for Traffic & Commuting.
Continuing Education Opportunities. Education has traditionally provided a path for upward mobility for most Americans, who place a high premium on education because they understand, firsthand, its importance to their lives. Obviously, urban areas provide a major advantage for individuals seeking to further their education because of the proximity to colleges, universities and trade schools.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Continuing Education Opportunities.
Commercial Air Access. Convenient access to commercial air service is becoming a “hard screen” for many companies looking for a future location. The same is true for employees. Low prices for air travel enable families to substitute a long automobile trip with a quick flight home to visit the relatives. In general, the greater the number of flights and carriers serving an airport, the lower the price for air fares.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Commercial Air Access.
Labor Market. This category attempts to get a feel for the cost and availability of workers in various metro areas and includes such things as average annual pay, average wage per job and unemployment, as well as workers in the 18 to 35 age group.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Labor Market.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 Large Metros for Labor Market .
Which Metros Offer Employees the Best Access to a Middle-Class Lifestyle?
As with all of our other research studies we publish each year, we take the final results and group the metro areas into quintiles.
Once all the scores were tabulated, the top 20 percent of MSAs were designated as “5-Star Quality of Life Metros,” while the next 20 percent were designated “4-Star Quality of Life Metros.” Metros that finished in the bottom three quintiles were designated as “3-Star,” “2-Star” and “1-Star QOL Metros.”
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Large Metro Areas.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Midsize Metro Areas.
Click here for a list of the Top 10 overall rankings for Small Metro Areas.
Why Is This Important to Your Company
Let’s face it. We all have expectations of owning a comfortable home in a safe neighborhood with excellent schools. We view it as part of our birthright as Americans and, quite frankly, we can enjoy that lifestyle in most cities in the U.S. The only question is how much of a salary it will take to be able to afford the American Dream and that’s where it becomes important to you as an employer.
What’s important to an employee is not the salary, but what the salary will buy.
For instance, a $50,000 a year salary in some metros might be more than enough for one of your mid-level managers to buy into a comfortable lifestyle, while it might take a $70,000 salary in another metro area for that same mid-level manager to be able to afford the same living standard.
An even bigger fiasco is that, in some metros, an annual salary of $100,000 might actually buy that person a lower living standard than that of a person making $70,000 in a less expensive location. In this case, you get the worst of both worlds: higher wage costs and less employee satisfaction.
Sure, you can always find people willing to take less money for a particular job, but are you really getting the best value for your company? Most likely, at the lower salary, you’re either getting someone not quite qualified for the job or, if that person is qualified, that person will, within the first year, either demand a higher salary or leave the company.
As an employer, you want your people to settle into a community, to sink in roots, because they’re more likely to be hard-working, long-term employees. We all know how disruptive, and expensive, high turnover is, particularly if you have 50, or 100, or 500 employees who might fit into this scenario.
Remember, for the employee, what is most important is not so much the salary, but what that salary will buy in terms of lifestyle. On the other hand, what is most important from the employer’s perspective is the salary. Why, then, when you’re comparing various prospective locations around the country for a future facility, would you not pick a place where your employees can afford “live the good life,” while your company actually saves money on salary and wages?
Sure, how “outsiders” perceive the relative quality of life in a particular community will have a definite impact on your ability to recruit managers and executives if the job requires them to relocate to a different locale. If you have a plant or office in a city that is widely perceived, rightly or wrongly, as being a “hick town,” convincing a highly-prized potential employee to move there with his family is not an impossible task, but it will almost surely require you to offer more money in salary and benefits.
In these cases, money — or good tickets to La Bohème — will almost always solve the problem.
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