I am always pleased when I find a diamond in the rough among the mostly mundane workplace news items delivered to my inbox each day by Google News.  Such was the case last week when I received this press release announcing "Big Companies = Happy Employees, Study Indicates."

The study in question is a pretty expansive one by Canadian-based The Beacon Group, an HR services firm that tracks employee engagement and satisfaction at hundreds of companies worldwide.  For this study, they surveyed over 30,000 employees from companies in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico over the past five years.

According to their findings, "Companies with more than 1,000 people scored marginally better than smaller corporations in the category of 750 employees or 500 employees or less."  Satisfaction was defined based on four categories: management support and quality, future career development, compensation, and work environment and co-workers.

The key word in the above statement is "marginal."  Companies with over 1,000 employees scored a 2.67 in satisfaction, compared to 2.64 for those with fewer than 1,000 employees.  The PR Web release announcing the survey findings also plays devil's advocate, citing The Beacon Group's Vice-President of Product Planning&Development as saying,

Employees at smaller companies may feel they have greater control over their role in the organization and workplace environment.  This can translate into more critical scores in employee surveys, where employees at larger companies may have become complacent about their ability to shape their workplace environment.

This viewpoint gets at some of the research I've assembled to make the counter-argument – that employees at small and midsize firms are generally happier than their counterparts at larger firms.  Check out these sources that make this case from varying perspectives:

1. "A small company controls its destiny. Each employee's impact is seen, felt, heard. Each action has a direct impact on the company and each of their colleagues." – Zane Safrit, former CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, on SmallBizSurvival
2. "Small companies act in a personal way, treating people the way they'd like to be treated. Small companies act like people; people who work there get respect and autonomy, and so employees are happy." – Job Pundit blog
3. "Letting employees pick when they work is small businesses' blessing." – Jennie L. Phipps, Bankrate.com
4. "The small business advantages already discussed (Connecting people to purpose; Effective communication; Timely decision-making; Customer intimacy) when explained very carefully to all candidates, can provide a great draw to the most talented prospects" – Skip Reardon, Be Excellent blog
5. "Some of the other companies that [Bo] Burlingham examines are small giants because their management teams realize they would be nowhere if not for their dedicated employees. Norm Brodsky, owner and CEO of Brooklyn, New York-based CitiStorage, a records-storage business, brought in grief counselors after the 9/11 attacks and sponsored a companywide basketball tournament to raise employees' spirits. The result is a business in which employees reach out to clients so well that some clients have placed orders intending to raise the workers' "box counts" (the number of stored boxes) to the next level, at which point Brodsky pays out bonuses." – Winning Workplaces Executive Director Mary Corbitt Clark, on the book Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big
6. "Fenn profiles Dayton, Ohio-based upscale grocer Dorothy Lane Market. She notes the unusual practice the company's CEO, Norman Mayne, has undertaken for the past 20 years, based on a suggestion from a 16-year-old cashier: talk to each new hire about Dorothy Lane's company culture, customer retention and competition. Fenn notes that although this training program costs the organization $25,000 annually, it results in a part-time employee turnover rate of 20 to 30 percent – far below the industry average of 100 percent." – Mary Clark again, on a company Donna Fenn covers in her book Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become Leader of the Pack

I could go on, but I'd love to read your take.  When it comes to employee engagement best practices and team building, why are smaller firms better than the big boys?  Or, if you're a fan of research such as the new survey by The Beacon Group, why are larger companies better than smaller ones?

Let's keep this debate going – please comment below.

For generations, when businesses have identified the need for people to work in concert with each other to achieved a collectively desired outcome, the result has been the formation of a team – and workplace team building to keep teams cohesive, motivated, and productive.  Even among the innovative small firms that Winning Workplaces and The Wall Street Journal have honored for successfully using employee engagement to meet strategic and financial goals, the go-to word for this is, still, teamwork.

But as Gervase R. Bushe, professor of management and organization studies in the Segal Graduate School of Business at Canada's Simon Fraser University wrote last week in the Financial Post, more often than not managers have federations of people to work with, which they ideally want to mold into tribes.

To start with, Bushe distinguishes teams from federations and tribes:

Team

Most managerial groups aren't structured that way.  More often, each manager who reports into a senior manager has a sphere of responsibility that is his or her own.  ...  A group like this finds typical team building activities at best, a fun diversion, and at worst, an annoying distraction from their work.

Federation

In a federation, representatives of various groups and interests meet together, usually to try to manage common resources when there is not enough to satisfy everyone.  ...  It's not unusual for federations to be rife with conflict, constant politicking and an inability to achieve consensus.

Tribe

In a tribe, everyone has their own sphere of responsibility, but each role is required for the well-being of the community and each person is attuned to the well-being of the community.  ...  Structurally, people win or lose individually but that's not how people feel about it.  They have emotional ties with the rest of the community that makes them care about how everyone else does as well.

So what's the key to turning federations into tribes?  Bushe says it is cultivating identification within the group, so that employees take group needs into account with their individual needs.  In the most successful tribes, he argues, "people are even willing to sacrifice their own needs for the group's needs."

Where does this happen in nature?  In families, of course.  Is it any wonder, then, that a common anecdote from the due diligence interviews we conduct with employees of each year's Top Small Workplaces Finalists – a step we use to determine from this pool the year's winning firms – is that a person feels like their coworkers and even the organization as a whole is "like family"?  Most of these highly engaged workers go even further, saying they know they come to work each day for their shift, but that it doesn't feel like a job.

We recently reviewed a book on managing tribes called Tribal Leadership that provides even more clarity and definition on this topic using real world organizational examples.  I recommend you check it out.

What does employee engagement at your firm look like in terms of having teams, federations, or tribes?

Although this holiday weekend featured the second annual telecast and awards presentation of CNN's "Heroes," the most heartwarming story of employee engagement and workplace team building was, in my mind, the Associated Press' account of a small Illinois manufacturing company that delivered a surprise to its 230 employees in addition to the annual holiday turkey they have always provided them.

As the AP reported, although the Spungen family recently sold Peer Bearing, their $100 million ball bearings business, to a Swedish company, in addition to the turkeys and informing employees that most of them would retain their jobs as part of the acquisition, they got envelopes with a surprise in September: bonus checks totaling over $6.6 million, with amounts for each employee based on their tenure with the company.

The AP story takes an especially warm tone with interviews of employees and what they plan to do with the money.  For instance,

Jose Rojas, who works in Peer's customer service department, said he plans to save his $10,000 check for his son's college education.

Danny Spungen, grandson of the company founder, said that although building in this unusually large bonus was "a gamble," it stemmed from his family's philosophy of being charitable with employees, which fueled Peer Bearing's growth.  Husband and wife Romanian immigrants, who both work for the company, were quoted as crying most for the fact that Peer Bearing built employee stability into their core values – an endangered currency in these economics times that are looking more and more like a classic (and possibly prolonged) recession.

While most small firms are unable to replicate what Peer Bearing did, giving over 6% of their annual revenue to employees, they can still live the values of trust, respect, and fairness, which has implications for employees and other stakeholders.  Dev Patnaik, Managing Associate at 2008 Top Small Workplace Jump Associates, a business consulting firm based in California, has written a book on this concept called Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy that will be released early next year.

You can go beyond Dev's book and learn how this philosophy can improve your employee engagement activities and team building initiatives by attending our just-announced webinar in February 2009, which will feature Dev and his Communications Lead at Jump, Pete Mortensen.

What stories have you heard from this year or years past of notable or unusual employee engagement best practices when it comes to rewards and recognition?  What has your organization done?  Why does it stand out?

From Newswise on Monday,

Displaced workers with no paychecks or prospects could add a potentially catastrophic drag to a U.S. economy already facing its worst downturn in decades, says Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, the dean of the School of Labor and Employment Relations [at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign].

As part of a series of commentaries the dean is giving on the subject, he is urging employers to "provide a softer landing for both workers and the economy through programs ranging from severance packages to retraining benefits."  Cutcher-Gershenfeld advises that mitigating the harm done to workers through mechanisms that include, in addition to retraining, separation payments, extended health-care benefits, investing in start-up businesses launched by displaced workers, and others can help firms increase the loyalty of remaining workers and give meaning to stated corporate values, ultimately "leaving businesses ... better situated to recover when there is an upturn."

At a macro level, he says, this can mean the difference between a slow, lingering, deeper recession and a faster, less deep recession.

In addressing small and midsize firms in particular, Cutcher-Gershenfeld says they can contribute to the stablization primarily by "creating a regional consortium of companies whose economic fortunes are counter-cyclical that could essentially share a common workforce."  A number of our Top Small Workplaces are using job sharing within their organizations, so I thought applying this model on a peer-to-peer level is an interesting concept.

As we discovered from a recent survey of owners and leaders of our honored small firms, as well as some of our Twitter followers and readers of this blog, many of these organizations are looking beyond the current economic crisis and focusing their employee engagement activities on their long-term growth strategy.  Supporting one of the themes we identified among our 2008 Top Small Workplaces, they are taking the long view of their business.

How so?  By bucking the trend and continuing to invest heavily in their workforces.  As the chart below shows, their most popular strategies to accomplish this are continuing to develop and recruit top talent, and using employee engagement and team building to improve and expand their product and service offerings as well as strengthen relationships with their remaining customers.

Beyond layoffs – if your company has initiated or contemplated these – what is your business doing to control labor costs?  Are you using any of the initiatives mentioned here?  Others?

And do you agree or disagree with Dean Cutcher-Gershenfeld's assessment?

I wrote this post the day after the election theorizing on a possible ideal of work/life balance for employees under First Lady (now First Lady-Elect?) Michelle Obama late into her husband, Barack's, tenure as President.

It went out without much fanfare until I cross-posted it on the Today's Workplace blog last week.  Then did the comments roll in!  It makes sense that many readers of this blog by Workplace Fairness, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that addresses employee engagement tied to workers' rights, would be concerned with what work/life balance transforms into in the years ahead.

To my citation of Mrs. Obama's statement in her own October post on BlogHer.com – "Families shouldn’t be punished because someone gets sick or has an emergency" – Sean played devil's advocate and replaced "Families" with "Employers."  He then asked,

So what is the principle that leads her to conclude that it is somehow more appropriate for the employer to bear the cost of the employee’s personal problem than for the employee to bear that cost?  Is the principle simply that some employees don’t have the money to sustain a few days or weeks off work?  If so, why isn’t the solution to encourage them to save more money for such emergencies?  Or is the real principle simply that because the employer is presumed to have more money, it should pay for employees to not work when they have to deal with their personal problems?

I responded that while I agree with him that employers shouldn't necessarily be forced into situations of bailing out employees who have unforseen cases that result in unexpected leave, on the other hand

they do have an opportunity and even a responsibility to work on creating and sustaining a culture that energizes and nurtures employees so they get sick less often (reducing unexpected absences, and presenteeism, or trying to work through sickness or other ailments).  Why is this so?  Because it has an impact on medical costs incurred as part of the overall health system, and because the higher company productivity that comes with a reduction of these events helps their employees and their communities at the same time, ultimately influencing GDP at the national level.

Following this, Daniel Cardozo of Ethix Merch, a provider of eco-friendly custom-printed merchandise, lent his support to Sean's argument.  The real underlying issue, Daniel wrote, is whether wages keep pace ahead of inflation to a degree that allows employees who don't have access to paid sick days or other paid leave to save for those times when they need to leave work at a moment's notice.  He adds that in the current wage system, where this is largely not the case, employers, in fairness, have an obligation to do what they can to help their employees cope with these unforseen events.  In a twist on what we've been reading lately about government bailouts, Daniel even suggested that the government might step in to help employers here if they are unable to do so and still keep their doors open.

Finally, Morra Aarons-Mele, a regular blogger on BlogHer.com and an expert in work redesign and management training for the flexible workplace, chimed in, taking the dialogue in yet another direction by asking,

How about the UK model, in which employees have the right to request an FWA [flexible work arrangement]?  Do you see something like that ever being implemented as part of an Obama administration?

Morra asks a great question.  I don't know that this would necessarily stem from a government mandate, from Michelle Obama or otherwise.  Given our struggling economy, many of the more progressive small and midsize businesses that we study and have honored have tended to gravitate toward this model naturally.  They do so because they get a twofer out of it: Lower payrolls and more motivated and productive workforces since they get to spend more time at home with their families.

Our 2008 Top Small Workplaces are incredibly hip to this: 13 of the 15 winners offer some form of FWA for their employees.  As our benchmarking and best practices report on these organizations discusses, another reason they build this into their employee engagement best practices is to compete with their larger peers – those that can frequently offer more generous financial packages but may require a more traditional work schedule.

What are your thoughts on employee engagement activities that encourage a healthy work/life balance for employees?  Where do you see the responsibility for oversight and implementation breaking down between the government, employers, and employees themselves?

Does your small business, or another that you know of, have a great workplace characterized by employee engagement and team building practices that make people excited to work there?

If so, I encourage you to nominate that organization as a 2009 Top Small Workplace.  In fact, I'll give you more incentive to do so than the satisfaction of pinging a co-worker or friend/colleague at said company with the good news.

For the next two weeks – from now through December 10 – I invite you to complete as many nominations as you can.  The four people who nominate the most firms for their incredible employee engagement activities will win one of the following business books, which we've reviewed on our website:

• The One-Life Solution: Reclaim Your Personal Life While Achieving Greater Professional Success by Dr. Henry Cloud
• Executricks: or How to Retire While You're Still Working by Stanley Bing
• The Offsite: A Leadership Challenge Fable by Robert H. Thompson
• A Manager's Guide to Coaching: Simple and Effective Ways to Get the BEST Out of Your Employees by Brian Emerson and Anne Loehr

Simple, right?  And free.  Just fill out and and submit this form for as many small firms as you can think of to enter.  Oh, and so we know you came from our blog, don't forget to select "Blog Posting" under "How did you hear about Winning Workplaces?"

Then stay tuned to our blog on Thursday, December 11 to see who the winners are.  Good luck, and thanks in advance for helping us assemble even more nominations in 2009 than we did in 2008 (780).

BBC News ran a rather disturbing article today based on a Swedish study that appears in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine.  The headline?  "Bad bosses may damage your heart."

The agency writes:

A Swedish team found a strong link between poor leadership and the risk of serious heart disease and heart attacks among more than 3,000 employed men.

Digging deeper, it reports that although stress stemming from a supervisor might not lead directly to a heart attack, it increases the likelihood of developing bad habits, including smoking, that greatly increase the risk for heart attacks in men. 

Business leaders and HR managers have known for some time that such stress still directly affects productivity – mostly in the form of lower morale and camaraderie and increased absenteeism and presenteeism.  Not to mention, turnover of the living kind – quitting a manager, and thus the business.

Why is this something that leadership of U.S.-based firms need to heed?  As BBC News notes based on the study, the likelihood of a heart attack, and other negative effects of workplace stress, increase the longer men are employed at a given organization.  This therefore supports the case for leaders and HR folks to be nurturing and highly involved in establishing and revamping employee engagement activities and team building initiatives that make workers feel like part of the family – something much more easily done in small and midsized firms.

This philosophy, combined with a team recognition approach – as opposed to individual performance-based rewards – can go a long way toward not only retaining your talent long term, but keeping them well satisfied.

For more information on specific employee engagement best practices along these lines, check out the teamwork theme and health and wellness initiatives in our 2008 Top Small Workplaces Benchmarking and Best Practices Report, which profiles the employee engagement strategies of this year's Wall Street Journal/Winning Workplaces award-winning firms.

Do you know of someone in your company or another employer that came down with a health condition as a result of stress at work?  What was the resolution?

Last week we received the results of a survey of leaders of small and midsize businesses in the Chicago area from a contact a Blackman Kallick, one of the largest accounting firms in the city.

Conducted in late October with owners, CEOs, and other C-level execs at over 300 companies in the area, most of which employ 250 or fewer employees, Blackman Kallick unearthed some surprising results:

Profits steady or on the rise:

Over half of survey responders are forecasting steady-to-increased profits for their own businesses during the next 12 months.  An explanation of this paradox can be found, perhaps, in their confidence in the strength of the Chicago economy versus that of the overall U.S. economy.

Threat of layoffs is low:

The survey results indicate that more than half of Chicago area businesses are planning to maintain their current head count or expand their work force over the next 12 months.  Those who said they were expecting a reduced head count were predominantly planning to rely on normal attrition, such as not filling open positions. Only 14% say they are considering layoffs.

Capital well not yet bone dry:

More than 75% of responders can be viewed as secure in their belief that their business has adequate sources of debt and capital for at least the next 12 months.

How do the results mesh with these firms' employee engagement best practices and team building programs?  It's difficult to say; while Blackman Kallick gathered more quantitative than qualitative feedback this go-round, they also state that they're planning a follow-up to this survey to help gauge the changing economic mood and trends, which may provide more insights along these lines.

I do have some suspicions, though:

• The housing market has been much more stable here than in places like California and Florida, which impacts work/life balance for leaders and employees and the overall economic stability of the region.
• Organizations here have more options for obtaining credit at local banks and many other smaller institutions, such as credit unions, which have tended to be more insulated than larger banks from problems stemming from the mortgage and credit crises.  This accessibility no doubt helps ensure that businesses that run on credit can continue to do so.
• Sharing a theme with our 2008 Top Small Workplaces, several of the survey metrics – staffing plans over the next year; cash position compared to last year – seem to indicate a focus on the longer term when it comes to employee engagement.  Almost 80% of respondents think the U.S. economy will improve anywhere from 6-18 months from now, and so while some are considering layoffs, most are trying to do more in the shorter term with their current staff, or a staff only slightly larger.  This might point to the leaders' faith in developing or continuing to implement effective employee training and development.

You can view Blackman Kallick's full survey results here.  It's clear they want your feedback to improve it and broaden the results over time; you can share your thoughts with Budd Eichner, their Partner of New Business Development, here.

I also welcome your thoughts below, especially as they concern employee engagement activities and workplace team building initiatives that you think, within the context of your location and industry, transcend micro (your) business results to improve the quality of life and ease of doing business at a macro level in your community, city, or state.

We love that you can subscribe to this blog and get a sense of what we do every day when it comes to researching and writing about employee engagement best practices and team building.  But did you know that Winning Workplaces has several other social media outposts where you can connect with us?

Check them out:

 LinkedIn group (Join and invite your friends and colleagues to join!  We're trying to reach 300 members by year's end and we're at 252 now.)

 Facebook cause

 YouTube videos – ours and our favorites from our Top Small Workplaces and Best Boss award-winning organizations

 Twitter

 Wall Street Journal online community (must be a WSJ subscriber)

I look forward to seeing you on one or more of these sites and getting more great dialogues going around employee engagement activities and workplace team building initiatives to help your small company increase innovation, productivity and, ultimately, profits.

And if you're ever in our neck of the woods – physically – feel free to stop by our Evanston, Illinois headquarters.  We'd appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.

I attended a great webinar yesterday titled "Make Blog Content Work for You."  Sponsored by Compendium Blogware, which hosts our blog, the session featured Chris Baggott, CEO and Co-Founder of Compendium, as well as their VP of Blogging Evangelism, Doug Karr.

Their webinar worked off of an October blog post by Doug on 200 content ideas for company bloggers.  While I expected it to be marketing and somewhat technically focused, I didn't expect it to address employee engagement best practices, workplace team building, or anything else that I usually write about here.

I was surprised, therefore, when one of the tips Chris gave was to engage Generation X and Baby Boomer employees as blog writers if, in your workplace, they tend to hold any gripes toward, or have less camaraderie with, younger employees, who might be more accustomed to blogging.

I had read Debbie Weil's Corporate Blogging Book, and she talks at length about using employees to blog for your company, and how to set that up on the company's blog as well as on their personal blogs, but I don't remember her covering this generationally.

It might sound petty to have this be an employee engagement tool or incentive for older generations in your workforce, but the issue of pleasing them over time, as they see younger workers entering who certainly have a different set of affectations, is nonetheless a real issue on the minds of many small business leaders.  It's part of what Jan Blittersdorf and Ann Jones-Weinstock of 2007 Top Small Workplace NRG Systems spoke about in their session on sustaining cultures in growing businesses at our Top Small Workplaces Conference last month.  And last year we engaged My Plan After 50, an online life and retirement planning and coaching resource, to help outline employee engagement activities you can use to better satisfy these folks.

It can be very beneficial to use your talent to blog, on company time on a company-hosted blog, about the many issues, inside and out, that contribute to the satisfaction of both your employees and your customers or clients.  (One of the biggies in my mind is the ability to control or at least shape the message that's out there about your products or services.)  Why not encourage generational team building by putting people of different ages together to tackle this for your organization?

Do you have any interesting or ROI-reinforcing stories of having done this?  Please share them below.

In the nominations phase of Winning Workplaces' Top Small Workplaces recognition project in collaboration with The Wall Street Journal, there is perhaps no better indicator of why people take the initiative to send in a nomination than their essay.

Now, I type "essay" here and I'm sure you're thinking that we require some long diatribe.  This isn't a college application (no fee is involved, for one thing).  In these essays we're looking for something short – no longer than two or three sentences – attesting to why the organization being nominated stands out in its employee engagement best practices and team building initiatives.

We've got a little more than two months to go in the nominations phase – the deadline is January 30, 2009 – and we've already gotten some great essays.  Check out two below.  (For privacy, I've removed the company name and any other revealing wording.)

Nominee from the advertising industry, based in Massachusetts:

[The company principal] has worked hard to create an environment that cultivates creativity and personal development while delivering an exceptional product to the firm's clients.  With an emphasis on culture and rewards for excellent work, he has attracted and retained top talent while maintaining a first rate client base.  His employees work very hard but are rewarded with happy clients, financial success, a great reputation, industry awards and recognition, repeat business, referrals and a motivated and happy staff.  Work should be fun and in short, [the company's] employees have alot of fun while providing a superior product to their clients.  If [the company] would hire me, I would work there in a second!

Nominee from the hospitality industry, based in Colorado:

For over fifty years, the ... family has provided countless jobs for individuals in our city – individuals like me.  They quietly go about the difficult business of restaurants and food service, teaching people such as me customer service, accounting, payroll, inventory turnover, human resources and what our market system really means.  Those of us who have worked for the [family] and the [company] have an appreciation for independent business people, the effect of taxation and governmental policies on the "small" business operation.  While "community and business leaders" talk, the ... family works and, in so doing, have helped provide for the livelihoods of many of the rest of us.  They never ask for recognition but I appreciate the opportunity to nominate them as a 2009 Top Small Workplace.  Thank you.

The themes to take away from these two nomination essays are overall stakeholder satisfaction (the first one above was written by one of the firm's advisors) and providing an economic base for the greater community – two trends that incidentally helped make up the 9 themes that we identified among the 2008 Top Small Workplaces.

Your essay doesn't have to mimic these in terms of the 9 themes from the 2008 winners.  It just has to show why, in short, the workplace of the enterprise you're nominating rocks.

Consider taking a few minutes to nominate your organization or another you think has employee engagement, workplace team building, and other people practices down pat as means to achieve greater productivity and profitability, as a 2009 Top Small Workplace.  I look forward to reading your essay!

I thought the most telling moment of yesterday's Capitol Hill hearing between chief executives of the "Big Three" U.S. automakers – Richard Wagoner of General Motors, Robert Nardelli of Chrysler and Alan Mulally of Ford – and the House Financial Services Committee occurred when commitee member Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked for a show of hands from the three business leaders indicating they flew commercial to Washington, and planned on selling their private company jets afterward and flying commercial back to their headquarters.

Check out this video to see their reaction (about a minute in).

As The Washington Post's Dana Milbank noted today, this was grandstanding by Sherman and the committee, to be sure.  Yet the incident, along with other recent big business aid requests that have been soured by their own controversial, big-ticket purchases (I'm looking at you, AIG) brings to the fore once again that, at many large firms, the front-line employees take most of the risks when times are bad – reduced or cut pensions, slimmed-down shifts, threat of layoffs – but share in few or none of the rewards, whether times are great or tough.

Due to their size, changing market conditions, and most importantly their leadership philosophy, the small and midsize organizations we've honored over the years for their productive employee engagement and team building strategies tend to operate much differently.  As we discovered as a theme among our 2008 Top Small Workplaces, in trying to build sustainable workplace cultures that will lead to bottom-line sustainability, these enterprises use policies and practices that set their employees up to share in both the risks and the rewards.

What has this meant on the risk side, when the economy and/or their markets have presented challenges?  2008 winner JA Frate, a trucking company in Illinois, and 2007 winner Corporate Ink, a Boston-based PR firm for the tech industry, both faced the loss of key clients in recent years.  In both cases, leadership opened a frank dialogue with employees, the consensus result of which were all staff, including the CEO, taking a temporary pay cut until conditions improved.  Also in both cases, during the darkest days leaders and managers worked closely with employees on cost cutting, improving processes, increasing the satisfaction of their remaining clients, and identifying new clients.

Business eventually improved for both firms, which have emerged stronger for their experiences partly because of the workplace team building that was fostered.  "They really stand behind you," a JA Frate employee who went through their ordeal told us.  "They're not just making a dollar, they're helping the employee."

When times are good, what are some measures that Top Small Workplaces use to reward employees for their contributions?  The most typical performance-based incentives include profit sharing, bonuses, sales commissions, and stock options.

So remember this tip from our 2008 Top Small Workplaces Benchmarking and Best Practices Report when reviewing your employee engagement activities: Giving employees a stake in the outcome provides a focus on key goals and priorities, and it also breeds an employee ownership attitude.

You can take that to Washington, Big Three.

The first of 9 themes that we identified from this year's Top Small Workplaces is that these companies tend to take the long view of their business, which is to say their efforts in building something that will last for a long time shapes their culture as well as their strategy execution.

With many of our current and former honorees continuing to rack up awards for their stellar employee engagement best practices and workplace team building initiatives, I guess you could say, "If the mission ain't broke, don't fix it."

We noticed the following news items in the last couple weeks attesting to the continuing strong financial performance and innovative employee engagement and development of these Winning Workplaces-recognized small organizations:

• Lundberg Family Farms (2008 Top Small Workplace) received the EPA's Green Power Leadership Award for making one of the largest renewable energy commitments by any farming business in the country.  According to The Sacramento Bee, besides purchasing or generating enough kilowatt hours of green power each year to supply more than 100% of its energy needs (enough electricity to power over 500 American homes in a year), the agency recognized Lundberg for its "employee appreciation efforts, employee compensation, executive accessibility and employee tenure."
• Gentle Giant Moving Company (2007 Top Small Workplace), Vitale, Caturano and Company (2006 Best Boss - Richard Caturano), and Communispace Corporation (2005 Best Boss - Diane Hessan) were all recognized November 11 as three of the 100 Top Places to Work in Massachusetts by The Boston Globe.  In a statement, the Globe's publisher, Steve Ainsley, said, "It's clear that (the winning firms) value their employees and make it a priority to create a positive workplace."
• Jeffrey Hollender (2006 Best Boss), President and "Chief Inspired Protagonist" of Seventh Generation, was named 2008 Social Entrepreneur CEO of the Year by Corporate Responsibility Officer (CRO) magazine.  "It's a tremendous honor," Hollender said in a press release.  "But it's one that should be shared by everyone here at Seventh Generation.  We've only been able to achieve all that we've accomplished as a business because there are dozens of extraordinarily dedicated people who come to the office every day and do everything they can to make a positive difference in both our company and our world."
• Finally, also on November 11 the Society of Financial Service Professionals, in partnership with George Mason University, announced that High Performance Technologies, Inc. (2006 Best Boss - Tim Keenan) had won their 2008 National Capital Business Ethics Award.  A big deal for the company, which had been in the running for this award since 2004, a press release notes that HPTi's ethics program stood out because it "ties its core values into essential business practices like performance reviews, promotions, interviews, and client satisfaction.  Employees are encouraged to display the core values and hold their coworkers accountable."

Did you spot the award-winning keywords here?  They include:

• employee appreciation
• access to leadership
• respect and camaraderie
• individual and company value alignment
• employee empowerment
• risk taking

You might think about how these cultural touchstones play a role in your employee engagement activities.  If you keep at it long enough, someone is bound to notice and recognize your efforts, too.

Speaking of recognition, we're entering the last two months of our nomination phase for Top Small Workplaces 2009.  Click here to nominate your small firm or another you think has a fantastic workplace by January 30, 2009.

Today's post is brought to you by our multitalented Special Projects Coordinator, Jason Ticus.  He knows a thing or two about the small firm he writes about below, Decagon Devices, as he interviewed their employees as part of the due diligence we did for Top Small Workplaces 2008 (they're one of the 15 winning firms as named last month in The Wall Street Journal) and he interviewed some of the same folks in writing our November Success Story on them as part of our free newsletter on employee engagement and workplace team building that went out on Monday.  Enjoy!

This month's Success Story allowed us to begin a new round of Top Small Workplace profiles and explore the first of our 2008 winners, Decagon Devices.  The engineers and researchers at this Washington-based company make some of the world's most advanced scientific instruments and sensors, and live very full lives both at work and home.  We're talking about the great minds behind microscopy, electrochemistry and conductivity analyzers on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander getting together routinely for a great game of soccer on their lunch break!

Decagon knows the secret to the kind of success they've found is much more than finding brilliant workers and having an awesome slot-car course on site (which certainly helps).  Impressive management of growth, implementing employee engagement best practices that spur independence and creativity – these all foster innovation and stability even in the hardest of times (see their story and video).

But consider the wellness program enjoyed by the team, combined with their approach to open finances, as a means for stability and livelihood over the long term.  It may have once seemed silly – scientists standing around a slot-car track vying for position on their lunch break, or researchers covered in mud in a post-workday soccer game.  But it means the world to this team of top-notch employees, and it means a lot to their families, too.

Engineer Ben Walden applauds the fun at Decagon in hand with the responsibility and trust he experiences.  He admires the freedom his company gives him to think creatively and put his ideas into practice.  But he also shares with us a very potent insight into what Decagon has created in the process of developing some of the world's finest scientific instruments.

With hopes of having a child in the coming years, Walden and his wife are newly appreciative of the health insurance and open dialogue offered by the company:

We love it.  They sit down and talk about finances with the employees, so we know what is going on.  We're not worried.

With a stable financial footing set in place by a concerned organization, Decagon has given Walden, like his co-workers in Pullman, not just a job, but confidence and peace of mind – gifts that are all too rare gift in today's tough, global economy.

After reading Jason's post and his Success Story on Decagon, do you find kinship in any of the employee engagement activities mentioned as in use by this firm?  I'd love to read where you see synergy in what you're doing where you work.

Our friend Becky McCray over at Small Biz Survival wrote about the state of small town banks a little over a month ago, concluding, based on the informal research of a small town banker, that it's "business as usual" for the vast majority of the local and community banks in the U.S.  This, of course, is a stark contrast to the picture painted by the media of all banks – those on Wall Street and especially those on "ailing" Main Street.

Why are these smaller banks seeing profits and growth consistent with what they've experienced in recent years, or perhaps even better, with the economy in the state that it's in?  We will dig into this largely under-wraps story in our November Ideas newsletter on employee engagement best practices, due out later today.  In doing so, we profile two of our Top Small Workplaces, Phelps County Bank in Missouri (2007 winner) and The Paducah Bank and Trust Company in Paducah, Kentucky (2008 winner).

The Paducah part of our feature article quotes Joe Framptom, CEO of the 60-year-old, independently owned bank, who talks about how the firm's core values, which are their employees and the community, led them to avoid issuing the types of "exotic loans that we don't understand in exotic places" that sent AIG and Wachovia (to name a few) spiraling.

Due to length, we were only able to capture part of Joe's sentiment in our article.  What follows is the rest of what he told us.  It certainly illuminates how their employee engagement activities and team building help the bank maintain their market dominance while at the same time giving back to their community (Paducah and other towns in McCracken County).

Here's Joe, from a phone interview I did with him last week:

The sub-prime issue is a whole different thing than community banks. That involves complicated packaged loans.  In community banks, we have plenty to do with other types of loans.  Our mission, market and products are different than Wachovia's.

One of the measures we look at is how many assets we've loaned back to the community.  Right now we're at 70%, the same as most of our peers.  This tells me we're doing a good job of deploying our resources back into the community, where our people live and work.  Therefore, they don't have to go seek employment in California or other hard-hit places.

All of our people live in this county or the adjacent county.  Our depositors live in this region.  So we feel the need to give back to support this community by volunteering and being charitable.

I'm proud of the fact that we just completed our 13th annual United Way campaign, and this year 100 percent of our employees [140 total] were involved.  We raised $56,000 for the United Way, a record year for us – 10% more than last year.

The mainstream press, when they talk about banks being in trouble, are talking about the largest 25% of banks in the country.  The other 8,500 or so local and community banks are doing quite well, thank you.

They are also talking about the housing crisis as a national problem.  In fact, grossly inflated home values have really only affected six states: California, Nevada, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Michigan.  The other 46 states are doing OK when it comes to home values and people meeting their mortgage requirements.

In The New York Times just the other day, there was a story with the headline, "Vermont Bank Thrives While Others Cut Back."  This is the same story with other "Main Street" banks like ours and like Phelps in Missouri, which I've watched and admired for a while.

This whole thing with the bailout – look who’s getting bailed out.  Nobody's going to bail out Main Street.  Nobody's going to bail out taxpayers.

What are your thoughts on Joe's remarks?  Do you agree or disagree with him?  I welcome your comments below.

I just looked back and it's been almost three months to the day since I published a "Friday Nugget" post.  I can't believe it's been that long.  Time flies when you're having fun – or writing about workplace team building and employee engagement, as the case may be.

I believe I have a good one for you today, though.  Long-time readers might remember the post I did in August on 30 blogs that you should check out and consider adding to your feed reader that cover pressing issues for small businesses and entrepreneurs.  Well, over the last three months I've compiled another baker's dozen (plus two) worth more blogs in the same vein.

Check them out if you haven't already:

1. Bob Sutton - While I disagreed with the premise of one of his recent posts, I still subscribe to his Work Matters blog because he has a lot of good experience to draw upon and he frames workplace issues in new, thought-provoking ways, both on this blog and in his books.
2. Brazen Careerist - Their "About" page says this site is "a community of top Gen Y thought leaders, forward-thinking organizations and everyone else who realizes that the way we define ourselves in both work and in life needs to change."  And you thought Millennials were lazy.
3. Cheezhead - Get on the bandwagon with the rest of the HR community and read this wide-ranging blog.
4. Delaware Employment Law Blog - Attorney Molly DiBianca and company provide the other 49 states with perhaps the best model of how to dissect legislation in a way that is reader friendly.
5. Doing Well by Doing Good: Organizational Learning and Social Responsibility - Here's another example of a blog that boils down an academic topic (cognition as a factor in designing new business practices and improving performance) in a way that's highly digestible.
6. Dr. Beyster’s Blog - If you work in science or technology and want to know more about employee ownership, this blog by the chairman of the California-based Foundation for Enterprise Development is your bag, baby.
7. Employee Free Choice: Laboring Away at the Institute - No matter where you stand on the pending Employee Free Choice Act legislation, it's good to get all the facts from all sides.  This blog assumes it will pass and is writing to help companies with the transition.
8. Evil HR Lady - "And now for something completely different" (or at least modestly different): An anonymous HR professional at a Fortune 500 company responds to her readers' questions about employee engagement best practices and other worplace issues with actionable tips and advice.
9. HR Daily Advisor - Self explanatory; from the team at the busy Business and Legal Reports.
10. HR Web Café - Like Cheezhead, this is a widely read HR blog.  Sponsored by ESI Employee Assistance Group, whose goal is to improve productivity and reduce on-the-job issues.
11. Inside Human Resources Blog - Discusses HR issues from both a U.S. and international perspective.
12. The One-Stop ESOP Blog - CPA Aaron Juckett of ESOP Insourcing strives to put all information of value related to ESOPs and employee ownership in general on one place on the Web.  It looks like he's succeeding.
13. Today’s Workplace - I've mentioned this blog, by our friend Paula Brantner of DC-based Workplace Fairness, before, but with an ever-expanding roster of writers that bring different flavors to the topic of labor relations (including, in full disclosure, yours truly), it's worth another plug.
14. The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur Blog - I'm convinced that Mike Michalowicz, the author of this blog and new book by the same name, is the King Midas of his generation when it comes to creating golden opportunities for startups and other ventures.  Note his UPS whiteboard approach in the frequent videos he posts here.
15. YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog - If you're a Gen Yer and you liked Brazen Careerist, above, you'll probably like this blog, too, which primarily tackles business strategy and technology issues.

There you have it.  Do you already follow any of the above blogs?  If so, how have they helped shaped your employee engagement activities and team building efforts?  Which blogs would you add to the list?

As Kiplinger's Personal Finance writes in its December issue, incorporating health and wellness initiatives into your employee engagement best practices is a win-win: They help workers take a preventative approach to health and fitness, and they're good for the company because they have been shown in several recent studies to lower healthcare costs for businesses in the longer term.

But while the latter goal has been held up in many media sources here in the U.S. of late – and it is certainly a worthy one – I noticed that our Top Small Workplace winners for 2008 have more in common with UK-based firms as far as why they choose to implement these programs.

According to Health Insurance and Protection magazine, vis-à-vis HR and benefit consulting firm Buck Consultants, reducing healthcare costs is not the main motivation for British companies to introduce workplace wellness programs.  Instead, Buck finds in its second annual global survey on workplace wellness strategies (which gathered data on 600 organizations in 25 countries), UK-based employers are "more likely to do so in order to cut absence and improve employee engagement and productivity."

This is the same end that our 15 winners use their various means to get to, in a long-term approach that engenders their overall employee engagement activities.  According to our 2008 Top Small Workplaces Benchmarking and Best Practices Report,

Eleven of the 15 winners offer some kind of wellness program for their employees.  Providing this is one more way they show they care about their employees as a whole people, not just the work they produce.

So these top small firms come at it from a place of respect for their people and a desire to keep them engaged, motivated, and productive.  And while they would fall in line with other U.S.-based small and midsized firms in citing reduced healthcare premiums as a helpful byproduct of successfully implemented wellness initiatives, it's not necessarily their first priority.

By the way, the report I mentioned above contains a comprehensive list of our winners' specific wellness activities, broken down by whether they're internally or externally sponsored, as well as whether they involve a nutrition component or free or discounted health services.  You can read a summary of this report here.

What is your company doing in terms of wellness initiatives?  What is leadership's number-one goal in offering them?

As if employees didn't have enough to worry about, what with massive layoffs making headlines pretty much daily.  Now a researcher at the University of New Hampshire is warning workers to watch their backs to avoid being unfairly tagged "it" in a blame game.

With the economic downturn as the catalyst, says Paul Harvey, assistant professor of management at UNH's Whittemore School of Business and Economics, employees may be more prone to blame someone else for problems they've caused.  He says this is bad when it occurs among employees, but when it stems from a supervisor or manager who wants to avoid blame, it takes on a new dimension that can ultimately hurt the business via things like:

• emotional stress and strain on employees
• reduced performance levels
• potential for increased turnover

So how can small and midsize organizations refocus their employee engagement best practices to avoid this outcome?  One tactic that our consulting and training director, Diane Stoneman, suggested in a webinar we held today that reviewed some of the exemplary business practices of our 2008 Top Small Workplaces is to devote a bigger piece of your training and development pie to ensuring that front-line managers, especially, are living the company values and, most importantly, treating those they supervise with respect.  Whether it's good behavior that should be reinforced, or bad behavior that should be avoided, she said front-line managers are often key to making or breaking a firm's morale and productivity.

In fact, one of the 9 themes that we identified among our 15 winning firms this year that made them stand out among the over 400 applicants was that they have created and systematized processes that call for, if not depend on, employee engagement to help run the business.

You can see how this theme was laid out in our webinar today by accessing the links below.  The first one is the slides that fit this theme; the second is audio featuring Diane giving examples from two of the winning businesses, and our Executive Director, Mary Corbitt Clark, discussing more about these firms' employee engagement activities, including her answer to the question, "Why do it?"

Webinar slides (ppt) - 215 KB

Webinar audio (mp3) - 4.34 MB - 4:44

For more best practices on maintaining strong morale and productivity in tough times, we have an early Christmas present for you in the form of another, upcoming live webinar on this topic on December 10.  It will feature Bill Brett, President of Barclay Water Management, a Massachusetts-based water treatment company that boasts the lowest associate turnover rate among major firms in their industry.

Are your workplace team building initiatives set up to guard against "the blame game"?  How so?

When I wrote my post yesterday profiling the physical workspace at three of our 15 Top Small Workplaces for 2008, I was waiting to hear back from Resource Interactive, the Ohio-based advertising agency that is known chiefly for two things, beyond consistently overperforming for their clients: being female founded, owned and operated; and giving all their employees shares of stock in all publicly traded firms that are part of their client base (a rare benefit indeed).

I knew from their Top Small Workplaces application that they engaged their employees in designing their unique workspace that I discussed yesterday, but I didn't know when that took place.  I also wanted a little more info on how they designed their headquarters to fit their needs.

Mike called me back yesterday with some details:

• The company, which was founded in 1981, moved into their current space in 1990.
• In 2000, they redesigned the space and called on employees to help make it their own.
• The space included a series of support columns, which employees incorporated into the design of desks that rotate around them to fit a variety of team building functions. The desks can be configured so that people face each other, or they can be offset to huddle around a team leader.
• No one has a traditional office; everyone is exposed to the whole environment.
• Employees got down to the micro level, deciding the texture and color of almost all surfaces.
• "Everything is mobile," Mike says, so that no one needs to box everything up when they move around within the firm or prepare for a client meeting.

I just wanted to share that with you so you can take note for your own employee engagement best practices.

Speaking of employee engagement, I got an answer to a question I posed in a group I belong to on LinkedIn (Networlding).  I asked that group if any members' firms would adopt the practice of the "leaving bonus" that e-tailer Zappos uses, which I blogged about in September.

V. Ryan from Chicago-based consultancy SwiftKick Growth Inc. responded as follows:

This is brilliant!  It takes all the emotion and pressure out of the process and the situation.

When I worked for Michael Alter, who is a brilliant leader and great boss, he did something along the same lines.  He ran a contest for "My Best New Mistake."  He did it once a year, after the busy season.  People self nominated and then the finalists all presented their mistake at a company meeting.  The top 3 finalists all got cash and recognition.

Michael created an environment where it was OK to make mistakes (as long as you learned from them and didn't continually make the same mistake).  The people were more than engaged.  They created a lot of teachable moments.  Michael is a brilliant guy and his results show that.  And, his process kept employees on staff and cost a lot less!

His answer segues from the orientation phase that engenders Zappos' practice to employee development for the long haul.  It reminds me of a common theme among our winning workplaces, as illustrated by Paul Silvis, the Founder and former Head Coach at Pennsylvania-based manufacturer Restek, in a video interview we did with him last year.  He said:

I think innovation is spurred by getting people to take a risk, make a mistake, and learn from that mistake quickly.  I can see that individuals who are afraid to take risks will hamper the growth of the organization.

It might seem counterintuitive to encourage employees to take risks and make mistakes, especially given our economy right now and the credit crunch that is having a devastating effect on R&D budgets of firms of all sizes.  Yet, we are seeing more and more that this leadership trait, when used in tandem with other smart practices, is a boon for small firms when it comes to meeting and exceeding market demands, establishing new markets, and satisfying all stakeholders.

Do you have any thoughts on either of these issues, or anything else I've blogged about recently?  Let me know by commenting below.

In a new article on Human Resource Executive magazine's website, David Shadovitz digs into a revealing study by California-based global design and consulting firm Gensler.  According to Shadovitz, their 2008 Workplace Survey – which includes data from 900 respondents in the U.S. – finds that

companies with workplaces that promote collaboration, learning and socialization were more likely to have more engaged employees and higher profits than those that focus on "heads-down" work.

How much higher on the profit side?  Fourteen percent.  Not too shabby.

The employee engagement and team building that ensue from a workspace that fits employee needs and the overarching culture improve productivity and innovation, which in turn beget higher profits.  Shadovitz writes that employees at companies in the study at the high end of workplace effectiveness – those in the 91st or higher percentile – consider collaboration as critical to their job success.  And they walk the talk here, spending almost a quarter (23%) more time collaborating as compared with the "average" companies in the study.

Gensler's findings mirror what we're seeing among the winners of our 2008 Top Small Workplaces competition.  One of the nine major themes we wrote about in our 2008 Top Small Workplaces Benchmarking and Best Practices Report is that, just as much as employee engagement activities focused on learning and development, workspaces that eliminate communication silos and reinforce desired behaviors contribute to sustained employee and revenue growth, and lower turnover.

What does this mean in terms of actionable best practices?  Consider these common, or soon-to-be-common, workplace configurations in use by our 2008 winners:

• Decagon Devices (design/engineering): Within an environment of workspaces that are grouped together without barriers, their departments and work groups are led on a rotating assignment basis, not by someone with a permanent title in a set office. Key result: greater risk taking.
• Jackson's Hardware (retail trade): In direct contrast to the usual format in both small retail hardware facilities and Big Box retailers – a cramped space in the back, out of sight of customers – at this 44-year-old business all 63 employees, including the president and CEO, have their desks in an open platform. Key result: managers able to instantly give guidance and support for customers' projects.
• Resource Interactive (advertising): Their 261 employees played an integral role in designing their office space in the Arena District of Columbus, Ohio. Collaboration-friendly pod arrangements and the inclusion of elements from home, from dogs to skateboards, were the outcome. Key result: annual turnover that's well below the industry average of 18-22%.

Here's one last example I like from a small firm whose President and Founder, Tim Keenan, we honored in 2006.  In presenting for a webinar we hosted earlier this year on maintaining community in a virtual workplace, Tim talked about a practice he uses for his 300+ employees at Virginia-based HPTi – who work mostly at client sites in an IT capacity – called "hoteling."

The idea is to make employees feel welcome when they return to headquarters by providing them with a two-drawer file cabinet on wheels that handles like rolling luggage.  The receptionist is in charge of assigning them a desk and routing a phone line to them.  The employee then docks their mobile file cabinet into the desk.  Tim said it's had a big impact in making employees "feel like they're not a visitor in their own company."

Is your organization using your workspace to its fullest potential wih one or more of the above practices?  If not, take a page from the firms mentioned here and think about how your physical work environment factors into your employee engagement best practices.