Best Places to Work 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

A Grand Junction employer's problem: your workplace is on the ballot, and the rules are not in writing

If you work for a Grand Junction business that has landed on the Best Places to Work ballot, your first obstacle is not enthusiasm. It is that Grand Junction Media, the organizer, has not published the workplace category list, the per-person voting rule or the eligibility terms in any of its own material; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. That gap matters in a practical way. A manager who wants to rally a staff of thirty cannot say how often each person may return to the Second Street form, and an employee who hears about the ballot secondhand cannot check whether their own employer sits in the right section until the form is open in front of them.

What is known for certain is the shape of the programme. Best Places to Work 2025 is a business best-of ballot for the Grand Junction, Colorado market, run by Grand Junction Media and hosted on Second Street, the same platform that powers the publisher's other ballots at gjsentinel.secondstreetapp.com. The Daily Sentinel, whose offices stand at 734 S. Seventh St in Grand Junction, is the publication behind that domain, which is why local employers treat the result as a genuine civic honour rather than a generic internet poll.

The facts table below gathers the confirmed details in one place so a nominating business can quote them without hunting across the organizer's promotions.

The dated run: which Best Places to Work editions are confirmed and when the window falls

Two editions of Best Places to Work are confirmed on Grand Junction Media's Second Street account, one in 2024 and one in 2025. The 2025 promotion carried the full programme name and a precise window: voting opened on January 14, 2025 and closed on February 20, 2025. That is roughly five weeks of live balloting in the middle of winter, a schedule that puts the push for workplace votes into January, when staff are back from the holidays and a short daily reminder is easy to build into a shift handover.

The 2024 edition confirms the programme is annual rather than a single experiment. Beyond the two years already named, the organizer has not stated when the programme first began or whether a 2026 round is planned. Grand Junction Media's Second Street hub does carry promotions dated into 2026, including the Best of the West ballot that ran April 3 to June 16, 2026, but none of those is a Best Places to Work edition, and nothing on this page should be read as a promise that the workplace ballot returns next January.

For a nominating employer the working assumption is straightforward: expect a January-to-February window, watch the Daily Sentinel's announcements at the turn of the year, and treat the exact opening day of any future edition as something to verify against the live Second Street page rather than against memory of the 2025 dates.

How a supporter votes today on the Second Street ballot

The mechanic behind Best Places to Work 2025 is a plain public vote on Second Street. A supporter opens the ballot at gjsentinel.secondstreetapp.com/Best-Places-to-Work-2025, moves to the workplace section, selects the Grand Junction employer they wish to honour and submits. No purchase is described anywhere as part of casting a vote, and the ballot type on file is a straight voting ballot rather than a nomination round, so the employer list a voter sees is the one the organizer has placed there.

Two practical notes follow from that shape. First, because the 2025 window ran January 14 through February 20, 2025 and is now closed, the address today shows a finished promotion rather than a live form; support for the programme means waiting for the next edition's own Second Street page. Second, no return-voting rule for this Grand Junction ballot has been printed anywhere the organizer publishes, so the frequency with which the same person may come back during the window is governed by whatever the live form states when an edition is running.

Second Street ballots commonly display a confirmation after submission, and the Grand Junction ballot should be treated the same way: follow the on-screen instructions, answer whatever the form asks, and let the organizer's printed terms settle any question about eligibility or repeat participation instead of a rumour passed around the break room.

Where Best Places to Work sits among Colorado's other reader ballots

Colorado runs a wide spread of best-of ballots, and Best Places to Work is unusual within it because the vertical is employers rather than restaurants, shops or scenery. The nearest neighbours on this site are all consumer-facing: Top of the Town from 5280, Best of Denver from Westword, Best of NOCO, Best of the Springs, Best of Summit County and Best of the Boat from Steamboat. Each answers to a different publisher and market, and a ballot cast on one programme counts nowhere on another.

Inside Grand Junction Media's own house there is a closer cousin. The publisher operates gjsentinel.secondstreetapp.com as a promotions hub holding sweepstakes and ballots alike, including Best of the West 2026, a nomination-and-voting ballot that ran April 3 through June 16, 2026, plus a string of sweepstakes promotions such as the 2026 Q4 $15,000 Sweepstakes running November 2 to December 9, 2026. Best Places to Work is distinct from all of them in subject and in season: a workplace honour with a mid-January opening, whereas Best of the West occupies spring and early summer.

That separation is the reason an employer should never borrow dates or rules from a sibling ballot. The January-to-February window and the workplace-only subject are what make this programme its own contest, and the organizer's own pages are the only authority on both.

Gathering real support for a workplace honour without guessing at the rules

Support that lasts in Best Places to Work comes from people with a genuine stake in the employer. During the open January-to-February window, the effective moves are the direct ones: tell your own staff the ballot is live, hand them the gjsentinel.secondstreetapp.com link exactly as printed, and ask managers to mention it in the channels employees already read. A public-vote ballot rewards reach inside a real workforce far more than any last-minute surge, and the organizer's unpublished return rule means a slow, steady reminder cadence is the only approach that never risks contradicting the printed terms.

For a broader look at building participation in reader ballots, see how to get more votes online, and for the mechanics of award ballots generally, award-vote support outlines the wider landscape. Always give the organizer's live rules the final word on what outside help is acceptable for this particular Grand Junction programme.