Stephen Neff couldn’t have been more ecstatic — his company, Aviv Centers for Living, was named among the Top Places to Work in 2009. A survey of employees conducted by The Boston Globe ranked the Swampscott-based Aviv number 15 overall and, in midsized companies, number five.

“Thank you to all our employees,” a beaming Neff said Monday morning as he made the rounds to all Aviv’s facilities to enjoy festive celebrations marking the honor. Aviv, with its 420 employees, is comprised of the Jewish Rehabilitation Center and the Shapiro-Rudolph Adult Day Center, both in Swampscott; Woodbridge Assisted Living in Peabody and Aviv Home Care for elders where they reside. “We are very proud of all our facilities,” he said.

Aviv was among 1,000 Massachusetts employers invited by The Globe to apply for the newspaper’s second annual Top Places to Work. Of those, 269 organizations completed the entire process. The Globe’s research partner, WorkplaceDynamics of Exton, Pa, contacted scores of Aviv employees and reviewed their completed surveys. Overall in Massachusetts, 160,000 employees were contacted and 86,000 individuals completed surveys.

The story was published in a separate supplement to The Boston Sunday Globe on November 8.

Employees were asked to grade their company’s performance in 24 distinct statements and each employer was measured according to six factors: do employees have confidence in their leader and do they believe it operates ethically; do employees believe managers understand what the company needs to do to succeed and are they sharing information; do managers listen to employees; is there opportunity for growth; is the environment free from hostility; are workers fairly compensated?

Neff, the president and chief executive officer of Aviv, came on board in January 2007. He says only good things about the organization at that time — it had an excellent reputation and good financials. However, under his leadership, the board rewrote the bylaws and reorganized the management team. Aviv grew from a $20 million company in 2006 to a $27 million one today.

“We have grown by one-third in three years,” Neff said. “Our financials are much stronger than they were and our operations are profitable.”
He counts as advantages that Aviv is a nonprofit, tax exempt organization which permits it to use municipal bond markets, so it costs less to borrow capital. Another advantage is that donors may deduct their gifts whereas they cannot with for-profit companies.

Neff said Aviv has grown because it diversified and added services: home care, Medicare-certified and private duty nursing and it increased its rehabilitation and restorative care services so that now 20 percent of its care goes to those who have been discharged — generally from the Jewish Rehabilitation Center — after having brain injuries, cardiac disease and other ailments.

The Boston Globe distinction comes on the heels of another announced last week in which the JRC was recognized by North Shore Elder Services for its Functional Living Space, a homelike setting at the JRC where residents are retrained to bath and cook for themselves so they may be discharged to their homes.