BRW Magazine named on Wednesday financial services company Optiver as the best place to work in Australia. The list of the top 50 companies considered the best places to be employed was after a survey of 179 workplaces across the nation and feedback from more than 25,000 employees.

After Optiver came Atlassian and NetApp. BRW will release the full list on Thursday after the award ceremony in a special issue of the publication.

Among the winning strategies of Optiver that gave them the top spot in the survey are new recruits being teamed with a friend to help them familiarise with their tasks, providing them with ethics training and cutting red tape and bureaucracy.

BRW editor James Thomson said majority of those in the list are smaller companies that often value the shared experience of dining together, regular catch-ups during Friday afternoons and brief pauses during the workday.

To help build real relationships, he said these companies engage their staff.

Included in the list of best companies to work in are firms that had redundancies such as Quicksilver, a surfwear company, which handled the task of addressing job cuts by open communication and commitment to help affected workers with outplacement services.

Second placer Atlassian is an information technology and software information company and third placer NetApp Australia is into data management.

On fourth spot is salesforce, another information technology and software firm and on fifth spot is The Physio Co, which provides health care services.