Picture of the Bali team at the GPTW event in Jakarta

Third time on Indonesia's Best Places to Work list, and why the number isn't the point

Being named one of Indonesia's best workplaces three times is worth celebrating. What built it, and what keeps it true year after year, is worth understanding.

Marty Drill

19 August 2026

4 minute read

Last month in Jakarta, Luminary was named #3 on the Best Places to Work Indonesia list. This is the third time we've featured on that list, and if you'd asked me which of those three placements mattered most, I'd have a hard time answering. That's actually the point.

It's tempting to treat a ranking like a scoreboard, something that goes up or it goes down and you react accordingly. But culture doesn't work in a single direction, and neither does a business. What actually matters isn't where you land in a given year. It's whether the thing that got you there in the first place is still true a year later, and the year after that.

Picture of Marty and team members at the GPTW event in Jakarta

Where this actually started

We opened our Bali office over a decade ago to support one team member who couldn't work from Australia. That's it. That's the whole strategic plan. There was no market entry deck, no five year roadmap for Southeast Asia. There was a person we valued, a problem to solve for them, and a decision to solve it rather than lose them.

From that one decision, a team grew. Then a culture grew around that team, and it's the same culture we run in every office we have, in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Bali. Not a regional version of it. The same one.

Culture isn't a document, it's what happens when nobody's checking

You can write a values page. Every company has one. What you can't fake is what a team actually does on a Tuesday afternoon when a client meeting overruns, or when someone junior disagrees with someone senior in a Slack thread, or when a deadline and someone's kid's school pickup collide.

Robert Greenleaf, who coined the term servant leadership back in 1970, put it simply: "The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first." That's a harder standard than it sounds. Most leadership models still run on the assumption that direction flows one way, from the top down. Ours doesn't, and it can't, if you actually want people to bring their best thinking rather than just their compliance.

Picture of Marty in Bali speaking during a Bali meetup

What a workplace survey is actually measuring

Best Places to Work style surveys ask employees to rate things like trust in leadership, whether they feel they belong, and whether they'd recommend the place to a friend. None of those questions can be gamed with a good office fit out or free snacks. They're asking people to tell the truth anonymously about how it actually feels to work somewhere, and that's exactly why the result means something.

A few things we know show up in that answer, for us:

Belonging first. People do their best work once they feel accepted for who they are, not once they've proven themselves. Get that order backwards and you spend years chasing performance that never quite arrives.

Psychological safety. A team member needs to know that putting their hand up and saying "I don't know" or "I got that wrong" won't cost them anything. That's the difference between a team that solves problems and a team that hides them.

Flexibility that's actually flexible. Not flexible on paper with an asterisk. If someone in Bali needs to work around a different rhythm to someone in Melbourne, the job is to make that work, not to make them feel awkward for asking.

Consistency over performance. The culture has to be the same whether or not anyone's judging it that year. If it only shows up when there's a survey on the line, it was never really there.

Picture of the Bali team on a team night against the backdrop of the beach

Back in Jakarta

Standing in that room last month, watching the results come in, I kept thinking about that one person in Bali all those years ago, and the chance we took and the impact it has had on so many lives. We didn't build an office to win an award. We built it to support someone and were rewarded with a brilliant team across Indonesia. 

Our aim was and is to design a workplace where people feel safe, supported, and genuinely excited about their work. We don’t always get it right, but it is a worthy ambition. Recognition might well follow, but it only means something if we continue to strive for an environment where people can be themselves and their best. 

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