If your company needs or wants to do a better job of investing in your workplace to attract the best young talent, the 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report that the networking and communications giant released today is required reading.

An important global study of over 2,800 respondents who are college students as well as professionals in their 20s, Cisco found that the "new workplace currency" -- that by the way matters as much as or even more than salary -- includes:

• Open work environments,
• Accommodates and encourages social media usage,
• Communications and mobile device freedom, and
• Remote work options that both fit their lifestyle and foster innovation.

In light of this new research, I thought it would be helpful to pull together employee engagement strategies we've previously shared here that align with the "new workplace currency" productive workplace practice areas above that Cisco's report highlights.  So here goes:

• Open environments: Five CEOs Who Eschew Offices to Work Alongside Employees, and Why
• Social media in the workplace: Businesses Need to Apply Lessons from Alcohol Prohibition to Social Media Usage
• Device freedom: 4 Tips for Securing Your Mobile Workforce from Kroll Fraud Solutions
• Remote work arrangements: 10 Best Practices: Transitioning to Work at Home

Under these four areas, what best practices or lessons learned would you add?

Christopher Wallace is Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Amsterdam Printing, a leading provider of personalized promotional pens and other personalized items such as imprinted apparel and mugs and customized calendars. In the following guest post, he details how you can show appreciation as part of your employee engagement best practices to strengthen your workplace culture and improve business results.

Think back to the worst job you've ever had. Whether it involved greasy food, dirty hands, or unclogging sewage, chances are, you didn't feel worthwhile. There's a common denominator when it comes to feeling unsatisfied with your job, and it has everything to do with morale.

Even the grossest, seemingly unpleasant jobs can be alright when you feel appreciated for doing them.

Gratitude starts at the top. If you're the owner, manager, or supervisor, it's important to let your employees know when they've excelled at their job. A culture of 'thank you' will take a company much farther than one where employees harbor quiet resentment and distrust. If you're looking for genuine ways to thank your employees, consider these suggestions:

1. Give Them Something They Really Want

   Gifts don't have to be just for the holidays, and sometimes a thoughtful item can be more effective from a management standpoint than even a small bonus on a paycheck. Do you have a salesperson who is always excited about the office March Madness basketball pool? The next time he closes a deal, get him a pair of tickets to his team's next home game. Is everyone always raving about one employee's homemade lunches in the break room? Surprise your foodie employee with a gift card to that buzzed-about new restaurant.

   Gifts can be more than just a generic, obligatory thank you. Personalize your gratitude. Which brings us to tip two:

2. Get to Know Your Employees

   Years ago, on my second or third day of a new job, the company owner appeared at my desk and handed me two tickets to a new night club's grand opening. He said he'd be there and hoped I could come. Of course I made the effort, enjoying an open bar and free dinner, not to mention getting to know my new boss in a comfortable atmosphere.

   In the three years that I worked there, we also went fishing together and played golf. When the company took a downturn and a large chunk of the staff, including myself, had to be laid off, I knew it was an agonizing decision for him. Although we weren't 'friends' like I am with my college buddies, we understood each other and I knew he cared about helping me find a new job.

   It's important to know the people you work with. If you don't even know an employee's name, how can they believe it when you say 'thank you?' Learn the basics. Ask about their family and their hobbies. When a person knows you care about them, they'll work harder because they know you appreciate it.

3. Have Contests, but Don't Discriminate

   An employee of the month program can be a great motivator, but chances are, one or two 'teacher's pets' will end up always being the stand-outs. Have a 'once a year' policy for the winners if you go this route.

   For sales teams, goals and rewards are a great way to motivate. If your entire staff has a motivator beyond their usual commission to sell the most product in a period of time, you'll undoubtedly see higher sales figures than you would without the additional incentive.

4. Take Them Out On the Town

   Food is a universal currency. It's amazing how a treat in the break room can change your employees' day. Donuts and muffins are the easy go-to items in the morning, but consider being a little more thoughtful. Did a new BBQ restaurant just open down the street? Surprise everyone on Friday with a catered lunch. Did you have a particularly strong quarter? After-work happy hour (with the boss picking up the tab) is a huge morale booster, and it brings your staff closer together.

5. Set the Mood

   We can't get every employee a corner office with wall-to-wall windows, but a few small items can improve the aura of any workplace. First on the priority list? Plants. The simple presence of our living green counterparts seems to sooth the soul, especially in otherwise sterile, fluorescent-lit environments. If space allows, create a break room with comfortable seating and space to congregate. Finally, consider letting employees be casual in their dress. If clients don't come by the office, letting them know it's okay to take their shoes off at their desk can add to comfort levels. Casual Friday is always a plus. Taking any sort of initiative to increase worker comfort shows that you're thinking about their best interest and grateful for their hard work.

Everyone wants to feel appreciated, and a good business leader will recognize the value of happy employees. Let your staff know you're thankful for all they do, and the rewards will come back tenfold.

Related: To see these tips and others in use at an Ohio-based communications firm, click here.

Did you catch this rare bit of good news about the economy this week?  Reuters reported that based on increased consumer spending, U.S. gross domestic product grew at a 2.5% annual rate in the third quarter, up from a 1.3% in the second quarter.

If a strong or even stronger fourth quarter follows, will companies dip into their historic profits to hire in a manner that will be meaningful in terms of making a dent in the high unemployment rate in early 2012?  That's anyone's guess at this point, but what is known is that eventually -- as the recovery comes or continues to happen, depending on your perspective -- recruiting efforts will need to pick back up.

And, as leadership educator, executive coach, and speaker John Baldoni argues in his new column on BNET this week, companies need to cope presently with a workforce that, in large part, is and has been doing more with less.

He cites a new People Metrics report in making the case that employee engagement best practices matter because they enable workers to feel positive about their organization (the fact that their firm is still in business being a contributing factor in their engagement level).

What's more, as hiring picks up in tandem with an improving economy, it may make an even bigger impact on your current workforce.  Baldoni notes that in this scenario, employees know that their options have expanded, so the extent to which their employer's people practices make them feel integral to the team and chart a tangible path for their growth and development within the organization become "a critical factor in whether an employee stays or leaves."

As Winning Workplaces advised in an editorial on our website in July 2009 -- ironically at the same time that many economists later said we were out of the "Great Recession" -- businesses would do well for their long-term prospects if they purposefully shared the rewards of recovery with their workers as both an acknowledgement of their taking the hard journey with leadership, and as a means of encouraging continued commitment and camaraderie to maintain a productive workplace culture.

Next Step: Whether you are in a hiring mode now or waiting to do so based on how your sales forecast plays out and how the economy as a whole continues to perform, this guest post on our blog provides great tips to motivate your workers, including many that are cost effective.

Some of our past posts have stressed that it's a good idea for you to improve employee engagement and other people practices in your organization by adding a formal social media policy.  Reasons for taking this step include enhancing your ability to engage both existing and potential customers as well as promoting better cross-generational communication among your workforce and avoiding employee litigation.

But what does a comprehensive and effective social media policy look like?  Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton of Eaton International Consulting shed a lot of light on this last week in a post for Social Media Today.  Based on her review of over 150 such policies for a wide range of firms, including both for- and not-for-profits, she shared 16 dimensions in a "lessons learned" context.

What I find especially noteworthy about a number of Eaton's policy considerations is how they align with the building blocks of a Winning Workplace.  For instance:

• "Encourage honesty and transparency" and "Respect others" promote Trust, Respect and Fairness
• "Encourage a conversational tone" and "Seek permission and ask for help" promote Open Communications and Learning and Development
• "Discourage disputes" promotes Teamwork and Involvement
• "Time allocation" promotes Work/Life Balance

As our research and that of others who study highly productive workplace cultures show, to the extent that companies can reinforce great-workplace characteristics in their policies and procedures, they tend to enjoy better business results as they inform, enrich, and empower their people.  Eaton's social media policy framework is one example of this phenomenon in action.

Related: We recently shared this video by social media marketing expert Laura Roeder on our Facebook page, in which she argues that you will best engage existing and potential customers (and convert that engagement to sales) by turning to current employees.  This approach, of course, hinges on having in place a useful social media policy.

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• They do a wide array of things ranging from leadership and supervision, to performance management and employee development, to compensation and benefits to maximize staff retention.
• To both retain as well as attract top quality talent, they also embrace flexible work arrangements and recognition programs in a big way.
• Notably, they rank ahead of 14% of the world's richest countries in paid annual leave (with the big benefits to companies being workers who are far less likely to be burned out, and thus are more productive and less prone to leaving).

• From 42 U.S. states and territories.
• Represent more than 27 industries.
• Range in age from 3 to 99 years old – 50% are 10 years old or younger.
• Have 4 to 443 employees – 73% have 100 or fewer employees.
• They're also small when it comes to annual revenue: in 2010 they ranged from $200,000 to $404 million – though 96% of them had revenue under $100 million.
• This point I think is especially important when considering Lowrey's claim that the bulk of small businesses aren't growing: our 2011 award applicants increased headcounts 22% from 2009 to 2010, going from 74 to 90 employees on average.

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• There's Strength in (Offbeat) Numbers

1. One of our 50 winners, TRX (health industry, based in California, 132 employees), shared with us in their award application that, to use people practices to improve organizational performance, they sent their Director of Education to several, week-long athletic training mentorships to learn best practices in running athletic education courses.  At these workshops she gained a better understanding of running an incubated business, management and team development, and industry standard benchmarks.  As a result of this investment TRX's Education business has thrived, especially internationally.
2. I also found a noteworthy account from one of our applicants, Starmount Life Insurance Company (insurance industry, based in Louisiana, 176 employees), that they submitted in answer to our question on employee leadership development training for new and existing managers and supervisors.  Starmount says a key priority is at their Team Leader level, the first level supervisory role in their organization.  Not only are they typically new to a leadership role, but they may encounter challenges shifting from a peer to supervisory relationship.  Team Leaders participate in a "Management Incubator" program which utilizes competency-based leadership assessments, experiential learning, leadership coaching, and development planning.  This program appears to have had a big impact on Starmount's success post Katrina and Rita: their relocation-related initial turnover quickly stabilized, in 2009 they broke ground on a new headquarters in Baton Rouge, and in 2010 they launched two new major product lines.

A key building block of a Winning Workplace is people practices supporting a focus on Teamwork & Involvement (more about the other 5 building blocks we believe in, and have seen in practice among the great small firms we've studied and recognized, here).

This involves team building strategies, of course, but it also relates to the extent that an organization acts as a means to empower its employees to improve the communities in which they live, and supports them during crises.  Our recent Success Story on Van Meter Industrial, a 2010 winner of our Top Small Company Workplace award, addressed this in detail related to the historic flood that hit its headquarters city – Cedar Rapids, Iowa – in 2008.

We've just weathered an even larger-scale natural disaster – Hurricane Irene, which devastated many East Coast states this past weekend.  True to form, many of the small businesses we've honored with both of our awards are offering assistance to individuals and businesses that were affected by it.  Here's a snapshot of what they're doing:

1-800-GOT-JUNK? (2005 Best Boss - Brian Scudamore)
As their business is based on junk removal, they're doing what they do best and clearing out flooded basements and storm debris.  Their call center and website have been slammed, and their northeastern U.S. franchise partners tell them that their schedules are packed.  Luckily, they work directly with insurance companies, so it takes some stress out of the process of mopping up after such a destructive storm.

Bersin & Associates (2011 Top Small Company Workplace)
Since many of their employees work remotely from the East Coast – they're based in California – they've helped them out in several ways: 1. Paying for one employee's monthly rent increase while they move into a new neighborhood 2. IT staff is helping people get their computers back up and running 3. Offered to help each employee financially with power outage issues.

Dealer.com (2010 Top Small Company Workplace)
This Burlington, Vermont-based firm shared on their Facebook page (which as over 2,200 fans) that much of Southern and Central Vermont has been hit hard and is in desperate need of help.  They also shared a link to a blog that's been set up to help Vermonters assist their fellow citizens.

Dyn Inc. (2011 Top Small Company Workplace)
Tom Daly, President and CTO of this Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company, provided a checklist on their blog to help ensure that company data centers are prepared for major weather events.  They then shared this on their Facebook page, which has over 4,700 fans.

Firespring (2011 Top Small Company Workplace)
Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Firespring, a comprehensive marketing solutions provider, instituted a policy allowing any client to essentially "freeze" their account and suspend payments until they were able to get back to business as usual.  Yet, by their own admission, they failed to recognize that many clients were utilizing their online file transfer and job submission utilities that automatically purged old data.  Since many of their clients went without power for several months, they lost valuable data when Firespring's system did its job.  When Hurricane Irene hit last week, it affected hundreds of their clients.  For the past several days, they have been closely analyzing data to ensure that all of them are still able to access their files and are actively engaged using their other web tools.  They were prepared this time.  Their support staff is also reaching out to clients to see if there is anything else they can do to help them.

Northeast Delta Dental (2005 Best Boss - Tom Raffio)
This dental insurance provider has invited employees and their families without electricity to use their facilities, and they are prepared to initiate fundraisers through their Helping Hands program as they learn about employees whose homes were damaged.  They have also activated their ListServ capabilities for their board members, resulting in an exchange of offers to help one another within the tri-states, which has proven immeasurable for their colleagues in Vermont who experienced extremely high flood waters and washed out roadways eliminating access to even basic services.

One Call Now (2011 Top Small Company Workplace)
This Ohio-based enterprise, which delivers automated phone messages to improve communication between and among organizations, has emailed their customers in the states affected by the hurricane. They offered them free upgrades to their existing service, ranging from free texting for 30 days free weather alerts until November 1, when hurricane season is over.  In addition, organizations who coordinate relief for the affected areas can get free call credits added to their accounts to help with their work.

Seventh Generation (2006 Best Boss - Jeffrey Hollender)
The marketer of environmentally responsible household products is donating some of them to make 1200 green cleaning kits for hurricane victims.  They've partnered with the Vermont Foodbank to build and deliver the kits to communities most in need. And they shared news of this on their Facebook page, which has over 260,000 fans.

Next Step: Review the above examples – is there anything you can do or adapt from them to provide better value to your employees, customers, or local communities/states?  (Or get set to do for a future disaster affecting your area?)  And how can employee engagement be a catalyst, or improved, through these efforts?

The two videos below provide about as stark a contrast as you could imagine between what constitutes a poor workplace culture in the carwash industry, and one that relies on the Winning Workplaces-approved notions of strong team building and investing in your workplace to boost customers and their satisfaction for a healthier bottom line.

First, here's the "bad" example.  I found this in a Huffington Post article published this week highlighting extreme practices in play in a number of car washes in the Los Angeles area.  Warning: at times the video is graphic in its depictions of how workers are treated.

Substandard – even inexcusable – people practices mentioned include:

• Beatings
• Sexual harassment
• Manager threats
• Pay at half the minimum wage, or less

Now here's what a workplace looks like in the same industry with the polar opposite approach to employee engagement.  This is our interview with Jerry Dahm, Executive VP of Mike's Carwash.  Based in Indianapolis, Mike's is a 2009 winner of our Top Small Workplace award.

Here's what Jerry mentions as features of how they treat their workforce, which includes over 200 full-time employees at more than 30 locations:

• When new hires emerge from their rigorous hiring process, their on-boarding includes 40 hours of job training
• Grooming leaders from within; while they invest $3,500 per person, per year, on tuition reimbursement, they see a great ROI since about 50% of job openings are filled from within
• Open book management with financial literacy training to help workers see how their efforts influence the bottom line – and improve their pay, since they also have profit sharing

Also, while Jerry doesn't mention this in the interview, I think it's noteworthy to point out the further contrast involving wages.  When Mike's Carwash filled out their application for our award in 2008, only 8% of employees were earning $20,000 per year or less, and none of them were (or are today) getting below the minimum wage.

Thinking about the "bad" example above, I find it not only sad that some carwash owners and leaders are fostering such poor workplaces, but counterproductive to their financial best interests!  The Huffington Post article notes that the car washing services industry today is a $23 billion enterprise, and new research released this month shows it's a rare one that, over the next 5 years, is actually set to experience healthy growth of about 19%.  So doesn't it make sense that those who run these operations would want to adequately pay and fairly treat their workers to in turn deliver the best service, to earn the biggest piece of that pie?

Related: Read our Success Story on Mike's Carwash to learn even more about how the company creates a competitive culture of ownership which translates to better business results.

I love LinkedIn.  I've blogged before about its value, especially considering it's free except for your time (though there are fees if you want to post jobs there).  In the past I've used the business-themed social networking site to gather opinions on Zappos' "leaving bonus," and I referenced its Group feature as a lead-driving tool.

One of the best ways to use LinkedIn is to ask and answer questions.  I particularly enjoy going to the Small Business and Organizational Development sections and seeing what company leaders, managers, and other employees are talking about – and occasionally offering my opinion.  I did so last month in response to organizational culture consultant and speaker Marcella Bremer's question asking why building a productive workplace culture is often not on the agenda of CEOs, company board members, and other top executives.

My response sparked an email conversation in which Marcella and I compared notes on our respective firms devoted to leveraging employee engagement and team building strategies to improve companies' bottom-line results.  The enterprise she co-owns, OCAI online, is based in the Netherlands (people practices advancement is truly a small world!).

When I went to her site I learned what OCAI stand for: Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument.  Developed by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn, the OCAI operates based on what's known as the Competing Values Framework.  Here's what this looks like:

As you can see, as you go up on this graph you transition from core values supporting stability and control (some would say, command and control) to flexibility and discretion.  From left to right, the focus changes from internal and integration to external and differentiation.  Where a company lands on this graph determines its balance among four Organizational Culture Types: clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, and market.

What I find amazing is that when I go to OCAI's page explaining these culture types in greater detail, I find that, generally speaking, Winning Workplaces' Top Small Company Workplace award honorees fall within the area of the graph I highlighted below:

That is, they have:

• workforces who say they feel like a family;
• leaders who see themselves, and are seen by their people, as mentors;
• strong emphasis on teamwork, participation, and consensus; and
• employees who take risks, within a culture that promotes individual initiative and freedom.

However, I think our honorees are also a hybrid – they might have cultures which generally fall within the area of the graph I indicated, but when you read their applications for our award, they have succeeded in using staff engagement activities representative of a clan or an adhocracy to propel their business squarely in the market sector of the graph.  This is another way of saying, they don't just treat their people well because it's the right thing to do – they integrate these practices into the "vaue drivers" OCAI talks about of increasing market share, goal achievement, and profitability.  I discussed this a bit more in posts in January and June.

So...where does your company's culture fall on OCAI's graph?  I think leaders would find it an insightful and useful exercise to survey their management teams and other employees on what they think, and see how it compares to their own assessment.

Did you hear?  Yesterday Winning Workplaces and our media partner, Inc. Magazine, announced the winners of our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award.  Inc. has several feature articles on the winners in its current, June issue, which you can read here on their website.

The 2011 TSCW landing page on their website also has a fun feature where you can click on a company photo to get a snapshot of it, and see where it is currently ranked in terms of popularity among the 50 winners by Facebook users.  And if you visit our website, you can also see a list of our 31 finalists this year, including their location, industry, and 2010 employee count.

Winning Workplaces' May IDEAS newsletter, which will be available to our subscribers tomorrow, will have even more on several of the winners, in terms of their team building and employee engagement best practices, and their impact on the bottom line.  If you don't currently get our newsletter, sign up for it here (it's free!).

These firms are small; none have more than 330 employees.  But don't let their size fool you – they are doing great things and competing with much larger peers in their marketplace.  Here's a snapshot of what some of our 50 winning firms for 2011 are accomplishing based largely on the success of their leadership approach and people practices:

First and foremost in the minds of the nearly 14 million unemployed - they're hiring!

• Wall Street Journal on Akraya
• Tweet from Firespring CEO/Founder Jay Wilkinson

Winning contracts and other project bids:

• Kitware Wins NASA contract
• Symmes Maini & McKee Associates selected as architect for largest manufacturing facility for human cells in the world

Growing and expanding:

• Box.net sees record quarter (1Q 2011)
• Dyn adds a record number of new clients (1Q 2011) 
• One Call Now announces its seventh acquisition, and third in a year
• California-based The FruitGuys to expand in Arizona

Receiving company awards and honors for executives:

• ImageSoft earns AIIM award
• Linhart Public Relations wins three PRSA Gold Pick awards
• rbb Public Relations gets fifth PRSA Silver Anvil nomination in a row
• Skullcandy President Jeremy Andrus named to SportsOneSource's 40 Under 40 list

Congratulations to our 2011 award winners and finalists!  A number of them are set to attend our joint Leadership Conference with Inc. next month in Dallas.  Go here for more info on this event.

Two weeks ago I mentioned that The Five Dysfunctions of a Team author and management consultant Patrick Lencioni will be expanding on the lessons of his bestselling business book and providing valuable leadership advice at Winning Workplaces' upcoming joint Leadership Conference with Inc. Magazine.  The event will be held in Dallas, Texas, on June 15-17.

As more of our joint program has come together since then, I wanted to highlight a few more reasons you should carve out time to join us in the Big D:

• A core question when it comes to attracting and retaining top performers is: What are the trigger keys to build excitement and loyalty with the organization?  Corporate strategist Stan Slap will answer this, helping you create emotional commitment in your managers, reduce turnover and manage change.
• Many organizational studies show that younger job seekers are looking for opportunities to improve their communities and the world as well as a paycheck – so is the future of leadership social entrepreneurship?  Larry Rosenstock, CEO of High Tech High, a unique charter school in California, will speak to this.
• Learn about the behind-the-scenes action at a small business that has gotten a lot of high-profile attention in the past year: our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace The New York Jets.  Senior Vice President Matt Higgins will update us how they've addressed their various challenges since winning our award last June.

Check out our full event agenda and you'll see that opportunities to both learn the latest and best tips for investing in your workplace for maximum benefit from your team building and employee engagement practices and to network with a group of highly successful entrepreneurs are plentiful.

I mentioned five reasons to attend in the title for this post...the last one is that, through this Friday, May 13, you can save $300 by registering at the early bird rate.  Register now by going here.

See you in Dallas!

Patrick Lencioni's book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team was published nearly a decade ago, and yet it has proven so invaluable to entrepreneurs that it continues to show up on all-time best leadership book lists such as this recent one.

Why?  Because Lencioni shows how investing in your workplace to build exemplary team building strategies is not just good for business, it creates perhaps the ultimate competitive advantage.  The author and president of management consuntancy The Table Group argues that when your employees are all "rowing in the same direction," your company can dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.

A powerful statement, no?  It's one Lencioni himself will speak to in Dallas on June 16 at our joint Leadership Conference with Inc. Magazine.  (I booked my hotel and flight for the event this week and am especially excited for this session.)

Winning Workplaces has employee engagement research that supports Lencioni's claim.  In the application for our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award, we asked the essay question Please share 1-2 examples of how your investment in people has improved the performance and results of the organization.  I put the responses of the winners (which have been selected but won't be revealed until the June issue of Inc. comes out; click here for our 2011 award timeline) and those of the other applicants into Wordle to create tag clouds to see how prominent "team" was for both groups.  Here's what I found:

As you can see, among the winners teams are as important as the company.  That's profound by itself, but even more so when I show you evidence that their team-oriented people practices are having a tangible, measurable impact.  Also from our 2011 award applications, here are data on key organizational metrics by applicant group:

If a greater focus on teamwork can yield these results as a means to achieving industry and marketplace dominance – as we see with our 2011 workplace award winners – why not join me in learning the how-to's from one of the prominent thought leaders on this topic?  Click here for more info on our conference; if you register by May 6 you can save $300!

One reason why many business leaders who don't subscribe to egalitarian workplace people practices have stuck to their autocratic (or other) employee engagement systems is because they think it will slow down decison making and action, and thus impede revenue growth.

Yet, as WorldBlu CEO Traci Fenton aptly notes on her website, workplace democracy isn't about being slow – it's about knowing when to be fast and when to be slow.  This distinction can work in tandem for great results.

The 52 companies on WorldBlu's 2011 List of the Most Democratic Workplaces support this: as Donna Fenn notes in her interview with Fenton this week on BNET, from 2007 to 2011, the companies on their list have grown revenues 400%, from $3 to $15 billion.

Of course, that's with the Great Recession factored in.  Score a big one for the ROI of investing in your workplace culture!

WorldBlu's page listing their 2011 companies notes that they have some pretty large organizations, with up to 80,000 employees.  Their list includes private as well as public and non-profit firms from North America and six countries in Europe and Asia.

By comparison, Winning Workplaces' Top Small Company Workplaces – our award program which is also in its fifth year (for 4 years previously we did the Best Bosses award) – has sought and evaluated organizations from North America exclusively, with no more than 750 employees, whose growth has relied on many of the same principles as WorldBlu's honorees.  This includes for-profits and non-profits, but not public companies.

Given this much smaller demographic, have we also found strong 5-year revenue growth?  Yes, we have: from 2007 to 2011*, our winners' combined total revenue has grown from $484 million to $1.25 billion.

Think about that: In an era in which the SBA says about half of all new firms fail, and in recent years in which it has been difficult for small businesses to maintain access to credit or be approved for new credit lines at favorable rates, our honorees have not only stayed in the black and kept their doors open – their revenue now vs. 5 years ago is as if they opened another company and a half, on average (their overall revenue growth is 160%).

This growth is cause for celebration, and is most certainly a catalyst for study by business leaders who would like to emulate it.  There is an opportunity for the latter coming up in June, when Winning Workplaces will team up with Inc. Magazine to once again host our joint Leadership Conference, this time in Dallas, Texas.  So far, two leaders of our honored firms will be speaking: Mike Faith, CEO of Headsets.com, and Matt Higgins, SVP of the New York Jets.  Stay tuned to our conference agenda for updates.

Related: Read this new article on our site for egalitarian employee practices that have helped 10 applicants for our award grow their bottom line.  What can you use or adapt for your company?

*Our 2011 award winners have been selected but won't be revealed until June 2011.  Look for coverage of them in the June issue of Inc.

I am continually amazed by the huge increase in workplace team building, camaraderie, productivity, and ultimately profits that business leaders can enjoy by doing small, workplace culture-specific things for their employees. 

In an industry with historically among the highest turnover rates – hospitality – Winning Workplaces has reported on several restaurants that have grown competitive advantage largely by following this approach.  These include Emmett's Tavern & Brewing Co. in Illinois and Union Square Hospitality Group in New York.

Without a doubt, Zingerman's Community of Businesses in Michigan fits this bill (pun not intended even though we're talking about restaurants).  From when we wrote our Profile of Success on the collective enterprise back in 2003, to 2010, CEO Ari Weinzweig managed to grow his seven Ann Arbor-based businesses 185%.  (Paula Gardner details their milestones and notes their revenue last year of $37 million on AnnArbor.com.)

As we covered here on our blog, Inc. Magazine included some of the employee engagement best practices Weinzweig uses as part of its recommended "ultimate business tune-up" tips list in an early 2009 issue.  As is the case with the other above-mentioned firms, at the end of the day practices like these are effective not just because they show leadership respects employees' commitment, but because they're inclusive and indicative of a well-thought-out, strategic company vision.

As it happens, Weinzweig will be speaking on how creating a vision of the company you want makes good business sense as part of our Leadership Conference with Inc. in Dallas, Texas, June 15-17, 2011.  Attendees will find value in learning about, and adapting for their organizations, his step-by-step guide to imagining – and then creating – success.

Go here to see the current and evolving agenda for this event.  Register at the early bird rate through May 6.

As part of a comprehensive set of people practices that encourage maximum employee engagement within a productive workplace culture, we have often discussed the importance of hiring for fit.  In the following guest post, LimeRed Studio's Emily Lonigro is back to share her process that resulted in a hire that has allowed her to move her business – which provides branding creative for small businesses and nonprofits – forward in a big way.  Enjoy:

I hired my first full-time employee last year and worked out this process to get through a huge number of applications quickly and effectively.  I'm a small business owner and knew that if I didn't think about it first, the hiring process could quickly add piles and piles of work to my already full plate.

The Idea

This new hire would be working with me in a relatively small studio space and be my right-hand person.  She would be doing most of the design work to free me up to find bigger and better projects.  She would need to be: curious and organized, creative and smart, a fast learner and able to work with others.  I was looking for a type of personality, not a portfolio or a name – someone who fit in our office environment.

Here's what I did and how to do it.  Trust me, this will save you loads of time:

The Process

I placed one ad on two creative job boards (behance.net and creativehotlist.com) that described who I was looking for and asked for the following items:

1. A freelance hourly rate
2. Two references and their phone numbers
3. A well-written cover letter that's not copy/pasted
4. A portfolio, be that a PDF or online

I received hundreds of applications and I started by looking for all four pieces without looking at their work, no matter how tempting.  If any one piece was missing, I threw out the app.  My employees need to be able to follow directions.

Then, I read cover letters.  Any letter with spelling mistakes, that sounded like a template, or had any other craziness was o-u-t.

Only after that did I start looking at work.  I looked for flexibility, web experience and knowledge of basic design skills: composition, balance and contrast.  Also, I looked for the ability to edit a portfolio.  This is skill crucial in a creative job: to be able to self-edit and throw out the less-than-great work.

After all of this, I narrowed the applications down to five.  I interviewed four of them and hired one.  The decision was easy.

Here's the original job post if you're interested:

Related: Read Emily's past posts for us:

• Demystifying the Creative Process, One Brief at a Time
• Professionals vs. Friends (or Friends of Friends) As Your Vendors
• A Small Business Owner on Finding and Retaining the Best Clients

Barry Moltz, author of the well received, customer service-oriented book BAM!, has a new post on The Small Business Blog in which he offers up his list of the 20 most important words in small business.

While one of his words – Empowerment – is directly attributed to employee engagement performance, Moltz frames the other 19 squarely in a customer satisfaction context.  That serves his readers well, particularly those who have a primarily customer-facing role.

However, many of them can also be applied to internal people practices for a more productive workplace culture.  In addition to Empowerment, I found four other words in Moltz's list that small businesses in our network are using to get better results from their employees, with consequential and favorable financial impact:

Empowerment: Winning Workplaces' weekly, bottom line-improving tip for Sept. 15, 2010 was all about this word, used by our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award finalist LoadSpring Solutions.  Here's what the company told us in their award application, which we shared with our email subscribers: "Our employees are empowered to make decisions that make their jobs easier and more effective with the net result being that in 2009 we successfully supported customer growth of 500% over 2006 numbers while decreasing tech ops personnel expense as a percentage of revenue for the same period."

Feedback: From our profile of success on Kahunaville Management: Feedback from surveys and informal meetings have ... helped [Director of HR Joy] Macon understand what motivates cast members.  "We found that more than half of our employees thought respect, fairness and openness were their top motivating factors," says Macon.  "So we knew that if we were motivating by incentives that just pass out dollars, we'd miss more than half of our employees."

Happy: I wrote a post back in December 2009 on the OPEN Small Business Forum's coverage of our 2009 Top Small Workplace Bailard Inc.  "OPEN's VP of Brand Management, Marcy Shinder, shows how Bailard's communications team building practices result in tangible business outcomes," I said then, including multi-year client retention of 98% and best-in-class (among our award winners that year) average employee tenure of 13 years.

Mistake: Sharing a management takeaway I have heard him say several times since we wrote our profile of success on his 2007 Top Small Workplace award-winning firm Gentle Giant Moving Company, their CEO and Founder Larry O'Toole advised, "I think a big part of [problem solving] is allowing people to make mistakes.  You want people to be able to learn from that without feeling they'll be castigated."

Voice Mail Jail: Graham Weston, our 2006 Best Boss who serves as Chairman of Rackspace Hosting, delivered probably the biggest "wow" moment at our 2009 annual conference when he demonstrated by having an attendee place a call to his company the revenue-enhancing impact of making the bold choice to eliminate a voicemail system, and have all calls be answered by a real person within a few rings.  I recounted this in this post.

Related: See this post for a video featuring Moltz's take on how entrepreneurs can get back on track (or stay on track) in a down economy.

If your firm has considered entering our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award competition, one thought that may be holding you back is, "Well, if I've done one award application, I've done them all."

Not so.  We tend not to toot our own horn in an informercial-type way, but as our technology advisor for the online application for our award since we started offering Internet access to it in 2007, I can say unequivocally that it is better than those of almost all of our competitors out there.

Every year I'm charged with taking the prior-cycle applicants' feedback for improvements, working with our vendor (the highly recommended team at Nova Libra) to make the most needed of them, and then leading a small team of staff members as well as outside folks to test it to ensure that on day one of access for our actual applicants, they can just get in, get out, and get on with their work lives.  (Who knew we'd have something in common with a large restaurant chain?)

This time and investment has proven to be really worthwhile for our applicant firms.  Given that in 2010, 49% of applicants had 50 or fewer employees, most often it's the CEO or another senior leader who completes the online form.  Therefore it's vitally important that we make the experience as low of a time-drain as possible, so they can return to the important work of leading their organizations.  Along this line, we heard great feedback from our applicants in 2010:

• "I was impressed with the functionality of the form.  I've worked with several other online applications and this was one of the more user-friendly." (General manager, retail firm)
• "I especially enjoyed the feature that allowed you to save information and return later.  This is not present in all award applications." (Director, employment services provider)
• "Thanks for the print feature.  I’ve entered plenty of online recognition programs where I had to manually save the information in my own file prior to entering.  I did that this time, too, but I had many edits and even did some editing on the online form itself, so having a final document available to print is very helpful." (CEO, construction firm)

I was especially excited to lead the application improvements that resulted in the current version for 2011, as we made a bigger effort than in past years to improve the look and feel of it.  Check out these screen captures of the before and after (click on them to view larger versions):

Before (2010):

After (2011):

We're not all the way through the application cycle yet for 2011 – the deadline to apply is this Friday, January 14 – and already we've gotten a lot of feedback that current applicants, especially those who have submitted in the past, are finding the experience easier to fit it in with the million other things they need and want to do.  In fact, the VP of an engineering firm wrote me this morning saying:

I liked the succinct nature of this year's form.  We are a smaller firm and the work we do does not lend itself to the hiring of English majors to prepare our submission.  We are at a disadvantage there, which is mitigated by the way the form was laid out.

So what have you got to lose?  Experience an industry-best online application form that will keep your time involved in reporting your bottom line-enhancing, workplace team building and employee engagement best practices to a bare minimum – and enter for the prize of being featured in Inc. Magazine this June, even as you get insights for building a more productive workplace culture.  Click here to see if your firm qualifies for our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award.