Best Practices In Employee Engagement

Yesterday I blogged about our announcement of our finalist organizations for the 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award, showing where these businesses are located across the U.S.

You may be wondering, OK, so what made these 39 firms stand out among the almost 500 that applied?

Our finalists stand out when it comes to their use of effective, progressive employee engagement best practices to drive improved business outcomes.

The two tables below spell this out in detail.  Here are some key best practices/benefits where the finalists stood head and shoulders above all applicants, on average...

...which helped them produce the following outcomes:

Metric/Outcome	2010 TSCW Applicants	2010 TSCW Finalists	Finalist Improvement
Percent profitable in 2009	91%	95%	4%
Average years in business	16 years	28 years	75%
Average employee turnover	19%	8%	138%
Average % open positions filled from within in 2009	22%	28%	27%
Average employee tenure	4 years	7 years	75%

So, yet another employee engagement research sample that shows the payoff of winning workplace engagement strategies.

Help a blogger out: Have you seen any new workplace research showing that better people practices bring better business results?  Let me know by commenting below.

Today Winning Workplaces is formally announcing our partnership with a new, Chicago-based startup called Tix4Cause.

The brainchild of consumer products industry veteran Kevin Nemetz, Tix4Cause is the realization of Kevin's very cool idea: benefit charities of people's choosing with the up to 60% of season tickets that go unused, while at the same time getting those tickets to folks at fair market prices and providing ticket donors with a tax deduction.

Why is Winning Workplaces joining other charities on Tix4Cause's roster such as Heritage YMCA Group and Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana?  Because we're a nonprofit and our mission to equip small and midsize businesses with proven, practical, and affordable team building and employee engagement activities is as needed as ever, as our president explained on her blog last week.

So let's connect the dots here:

• Your donation and/or purchase of event tickets through Tix4Cause...
• Helps support our fundraising efforts, which go toward...
• Three primary initiatives designed to help small organizations create a more productive workplace: our consulting and training services, our Top Small Company Workplaces recognition project, and our free employee engagement best practices information for company leaders and employees.

Here's our affiliate link to register (free) on Tix4Cause, after which you can donate your unwanted or unused tickets to our cause and purchase tickets for ours or other causes.  Thank you in advance for any help you can offer!

Last month in The New York Times, Peter S. Goodman wrote about "the new poor" – a growing segment of the U.S. population slipping out of the middle class due to falling or nonexistent unemployment benefits at the same time that sluggish economic growth is keeping companies from adding jobs for which they could apply.

Goodman warns that this phenomenon may be a factor for years.  Yet, the Hitachi Foundation is following the old life-lemons adage and taking this opportunity to provide assistance to young entrepreneurs whose missions align with helping this very population.

Triple Pundit, a site that writes on the triple bottom line of "people, planet, profit," shared the details of Hitachi's Yoshiyama Award.  It's for entrepreneurs aged 18-29 – the demographic of the Upstarts that Donna Fenn writes about.  Hitachi is offering six winners up to $50,000 over two years to help support their work.

If you know someone in that age range who runs a business aimed at helping America's poor, tell them about it by using the Share button at the bottom of this post.  And tell them to hurry if they want to apply for 2010: the deadline is March 22.

Related: All social entrepreneurs should get in the habit of doing a "social audit."  There's a story in today's Wall Street Journal on this topic which profiles The Redwoods Group, a specialty insurance provider that Winning Workplaces honored in 2008 for their incredible team building and employee engagement best practices.

I was thinking about the title of this post this morning.  We've been hearing since at least late 2008 about rising unemployment, and even though it's leveled off, we're still not at a stage of job growth.  We're just not losing as many (relatively speaking) jobs per month.

Two other employment trends have been making headlines lately.  There's underemployment, where because of hour and pay cuts by employers so they can keep their doors open, people aren't making as much as they did before the recession.  Compounding this issue is the fact that often their employers are demanding more from them, leaving these folks with less time to look for a new job that would provide more pay.

Then, there's the tendency of businesses, especially small ones, to replace laid off full-time employees with temp workers.  The benefit for organizations is that they can manage current and even emerging job functions (as markets improve and they see the need) by paying someone less than they paid a FTE, and with less of a commitment if it turns out a temporary hire is suddenly not needed.

My fear is that if, as many econmists are predicting, economic/job growth is extremely slow for the next year or two, these three employment factors – unemployment, underemployment, and the rise of temp workers – will impede the adoption and cultivation of the qualities of a productive workplace.  These qualities, or hallmarks, include many of the workplace team building and employee engagement best practices we talk about on this blog.

You may ask, what's the harm over the next few years if this scenario does, in fact, play out?  For one thing, less cohesive workplace cultures – those that, for instance, don't rein in toxic managers – very often increase supervised employees' stress levels.  On a macro level, studies have shown this hurts our GDP to the tune of $300 billion annually.

This, of course, doesn't even begin to address costs such as absenteeism, turnover, and recruiting/training that could become even less manageable under this scenario.

Do you agree or disagree with my assessment?  If you agree – how do you think should firms, especially small ones, should respond?

I like Dragan Sutevski's comparison on his Entrepreneurship In a Box blog of running a business to being in a dream.  According to Sutevski, there are only a handful of factors keeping this experience from turning into a nightmare.

Number 7 on his top 10 list that he shared this weekend is employees:

Your employees can contribute to your business to be successful, but in the same time they can harm your business.  Employees are the heart and the most important resource.

Sutevski makes the case that although they represent perhaps the most important resource, your employees are still only that – a resource that can be useful or useless depending on how the leadership engages them and acts on their expertise.

In the right leader's hands – and in the context of the right workplace culture – employees can bring a company substantial bottom-line returns at every stage of interaction.

For example:

• Prospective hires, both those that join the workforce and those that are not the best fit: managers' interview questions lead to feedback that can influence product/service development and delivery.
• Once a person in "on the bus," employee engagement best practices such as mentoring, annual opinion surveys, and monthly or quarterly all-hands meetings can promote cross-department learning, as well as improve internal processes and external marketing.
• Promoting from within is particularly useful to building trust in the workplace, and keeps your knowledge base intact and strong.
• Employee exits, especially if they are voluntary, can also produce valuable feedback on improving of your culture and your customer satisfaction.

Go here to read Sutevski's top 10 list of resources to make your business life easier.  How do you rank employees compared to the other resources in terms of potential?

Amidst troubling economic news such as the continuing saga of "Too Big to Fail" and a second straight month of job losses, I found the results of this study by Opinion Research Corporation a much welcome breath of fresh air.

The 2009 Cone Consumer New Media Study, which polled over 1,000 U.S. adults, found that business' reputation is not so tarnished as to preclude consumers from wanting to engage them in a conversation, particularly online. 

The study found that six out of 10 adults believe they can use new media tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube as well as blogs – to influence business decisions.  And eight out of 10 want companies to tell them what's in their products and explain the development process.

To me this, combined with small business' typically stripped-down bureaucracy and ability (due to their small size) to be closer to what their employees are thinking, presents a tremendous opportunity for them to use employee engagement to meet this consumer need and, as I wrote about last year, turn customers into customer evangelists.

The lesson here, which more and more firms seem to be heeding – the economy is most certainly a contributing factor – is that in this age transparency you can never involve customers too much in your ideation and development.

What thoughts do you have on this study's impact on workplace team building and employee engagement best practices?

I enjoyed this BNET article by Silicon Valley marketing and strategy consultant Steve Tobak on the top 10 lies managers tell themselves.  While many of them involve customers and executives above them in the company, Tobak's #5 lie deals with employee engagement best practices.

He says a common misconception is that subordinate employees "love" their managers.  This might be the most destructive falsehood on Tobak's list, as it's widely accepted that while employees don't necessarily quit companies, they definitely quit people.

The other part of the equation, in my mind, is that managers are already incredibly burdened – some would say overburdened – in their workplace role.  They're like a candle being burned at both ends: from below if a company is mediocre to poor on employee retention, which means more training and retraining on their part; and from above with owners and leaders relying on them heavily to execute core activities to keep the business in the black, or to keep growth strong.

Managers owe it to their sanity as well as their and their company's performance to get the best read possible on what their subordinates are thinking.  This includes their treatment of them and how well they seek and act on subordinates' good ideas from the latter's perspective.

This retention quiz Winning Workplaces developed a couple years ago is a good way to get started along this path.   We have other solutions for you, too – ask us about them by giving us a shout out.

So remember, one of the best employee retention tips out there is for managers to engage employees to get a better pulse on what they think about them.

Many of the organizations that Winning Workplaces has named as Top Small Workplaces don't stop there with their accolades.  Working on their team building and employee engagement best practices has enabled them to receive "best of" city as well as state/regional employer awards, not to mention Torch awards from the Better Business Bureau.

You might think that some of these "overachieving and proud of it" firms put a disproportionate amount of effort into applying for the varous awards, but much of it is just showing up.  Mike Michalowicz, the author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, underscores this in his list of four easy steps that any business can use to apply for and win awards:

• Apply For The Darn Thing
• Make It Obvious
• Include What Is Requested
• Follow Up

In the context of this year's Top Small Company Workplace award that we're doing with Inc. Magazine, while we have never provided a "how to apply and win" guide – in part because there are so many variables involved that are judged and our applicant pool is so diverse – I can tell you that Michalowicz's first through third steps, especially, go a long way toward boosting an enterprise's chances of moving forward for further consideration of the award (and in 2010, the prize of being featured in the June issue of Inc. Magazine).

There's still time for you to put your firm into consideration for our 2010 Top Small Workplace award.  Apply here by January 22.

This post is a follow-up to this one I wrote on getting back to basics this year.

Living here in Los Angeles for about five months now, one term I've come to appreciate more and more, because it affects some people I know, is development hell.  As you can imagine, the economy is affecting the entertainment industry by keeping once-greenlighted projects on the shelves.

This makes sense given the raw number of A-, B-, C-, D-, and lower-level professionals trying to get things done at a number of studios, even the smallest of which are big by the standards of organizations we typically serve at Winning Workplaces.  Bigger companies + complex hierarchies = innovation and workload bottleneck.

But small businesses have an inherent advantage to their larger peers when it comes to R&D: the ability to quickly tell whether something is working, and shelve it and move on if it's not.  "Fast failure," as its known and practiced at several of our Top Small Workplaces, is a feature of this approach.

So when you think about your employee engagement best practices to create a productive workplace, keep the emphasis on moving full-speed ahead – individual and group SMART goals can help – to avoid languishing in development hell.

There's a saying my dad got from somewhere, which my brother, Dan, put in the book on networking for young people he wrote a couple years ago when he was in college:

Even the Super Bowl champions the previous year go back to training camp to work on the fundamentals.

Going back to basics also factors prominently in one of my favorite books, Zen Guitar.  (That's my playing on all our Top Small Workplace leader videos.)

As we look back on 2009 and prepare to turn our ideal 2010 into reality, including in the people practices realm, going back to square one bears repeating in business news outlets.  I recommend, for example, you check out this article on the Financial Post.

To help you when it comes to assessing and tweaking your team building and employee engagement best practices, here are a few recommended posts:

• Two Employee Development Strategies from a 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces Applicant Firm
• Six Ways to Shake Up Your Leadership
• Seven Sets of Company Core Values to Adapt for Your Business
• Nine Resources for Becoming an Employer of Choice
• 10 Company-Building Lessons Learned by a Successful Entrepreneur (Plus 2 Bonus Lessons)

Image credit: e-gineer

I read with interest Marisa Keegan's guest post last week on Fistful of Talent, a Workforce Management blog.  Keenan is Culture Maven (what a great title) for Rackspace Hosting, whose chairman Winning Workplaces named a Best Boss, and who has since spoken at our annual conference highlighting employee engagement best practices.

Keegan's post makes the assumption that adding one more HR policy to the mix creates too big a maintenance and oversight headache for small organizations.  I think this misses the point.  The real issue/question is, how are HR policies communicated?

In our ongoing study of the most effective small workplaces in North America – based on such factors as high productivity; profitability; stable growth in revenue, employees, and wages; employee leadership development practices; and low absenteeism and turnover – we see that the companies that rise to the top of our annual ranking do not think about how many HR policies they have to manage, but about how they're collectively communicated to all employees.

At the high level this means a relentless focus on making sure the company's core values are highly visible and understood by everyone.  But at the lower level this often also means weekly, biweekly, or monthly, all-hands meetings to review policy changes and the formation of employee reward programs based on exemplifying or going above and beyond a specific policy.

I have seen anecdotal feedback from a number of employees of firms that have applied for our Top Small Company Workplace award, who serve in an HR role, that policies are adjusted less and less over time as the number of employees who live by them and can recite them increases.  Our staff discussed in a webinar last year just how these enterprises are able to make something as seemingly dry as HR policies come to life for workers, so that they understand why they're in place and how they relate to job satisfaction – which impacts company productivity at the macro level.

When you think about the policies that have helped create your workplace culture, how do you answer the question that's the title of this post?

As the applications continue to come in for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award program with Inc. Magazine, we are hearing from companies that complete the online application that the experience of pulling all the required information together is helping to formalize employee engagement best practices that in many cases have been on leaders' minds and waiting to be put to paper.

The CEO of one applicant firm from our home state of Illinois, for instance, says the application process

confirmed we have a strong culture and employees that collaborate and enjoy working with each other.  This is a significant reason we were able to grow as quickly as we have.  We may begin involving additional employees throughout our hiring process to gain more diverse feedback on candidates.

The owner of another applicant from California says, "It was a great opportunity to review what we offer and how we can make things even better."  And the CEO of a third applicant from Louisiana says

It really did make me focus on some big picture core value stuff.  I have decided to spend my time thinking on vacation on getting my core values down even better and adding to every job description.

The point is, while there's an obvious carrot at the end of the stick for participating in this small business competition – the chance to get priceless exposure in "The Handbook of the American Entrepreneur," Inc. Magazine – there is also nourishment in the journey.

Read more feedback from current applicants on the value of applying when it comes to assessing workplace culture practices here.

Image credit: Lynette Cook

Here's an interesting finding from the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College via WFD Consulting: While 80% of managers' and employees' workloads, and thus stress, have increased over the last year, team engagement activities have helped to keep workloads manageable.

Because workload is linked to stress, this should be a real concern for leaders and managers.  After all, greater workplace stress is linked to higher absenteeism, presenteeism (where employees are at work but aren't fully engaged or productive), and turnover.  All of these three outcomes lead to higher costs for businesses at the end of the day in terms of recruiting and retraining.

Winning Workplaces came to the same conclusion as WFD Consulting when we wrote our Benchmarking & Best Practices Report on the 2008 Top Small Workplaces.  One of the nine themes we identified among winners that year was teamwork, and specifically we wrote that

Team-based operations lead to greater camaraderie and make it easier for managers to balance individual, family and business needs.

One of the 2008 Winners that exemplifies this approach is Jump Associates.  In our Benchmarking Report we reported that at Jump,

Teams are routinely encouraged to take breaks and have fun to recharge.  The firm places a premium on holding retreats, allowing teams the time to step back, reflect on past work, acknowledge the group efforts and plan for the future.

As one employee said, “I thought I had worked on teams before I came to Jump, but they were just a collection of individuals.”

Get our 52-page report on the major themes and employee engagement best practices of the 2008 Top Small Workplaces here for the best price of $24.99 as part of our Year End Special.

On BestManagementArticles.com, Jim Sirbasku, the CEO of Profiles International, an HR management solutions provider, shares three steps to become an employer of choice.  Or, put another way, an employer that can easily recruit and retain top talent.

The steps Sirbasku outlines, which are certainly more easily said than done, are:

1. Create a Recognition Culture
2. Create a Healthy Work Environment
3. Create an Atmosphere of Continual Self-Improvement

It helps that Sirbasku connects the dots, suggesting what needs to be done before a leader, or HR practitioner, can move on to the next step.  To provide even more employee engagement best practices fodder for you as you embark along this path, check out these nine resources culled from Winning Workplaces' website, which fit under each of the three steps listed above:

Create a Recognition Culture

• Effective Recognition: A Conversation with Management Consultant and Author Cindy Ventrice
• Success Story: Greater Chicago Food Depository
• Web Poll: Employee Recognition

Create a Healthy Work Environment

• Ask An Expert: Setting the Right Example
• Healthy Food, Healthier Work Cultures: A Conversation with Law Firm Office Manager Betty S. Hui
• Mather LifeWays Taps into Employees' Health Needs

Create an Atmosphere of Continual Self-Improvement

• Looking Both Ways
• Success Story: Lundberg Family Farms
• Webinar Recording: Fostering Trust Within the Workplace

What are you doing as part of your employee leadership development to become, or remain, an employer of choice?

The word "benchmark" in the context of employee engagement best practices that boost competitive advantage has factored into no less than 38 posts on this blog.  You can see for yourself which ones by typing it into the Search box on the right.

But what does benchmarking really mean?  What is its potential to help small business leaders transform their enterprises into marketplace heavyweights?

"Krish" shed some light on this last week on ayushveda.com's Business & Jobs portal:

Benchmarking is a process of comparing your organization with the best in trade to see where you stand in relation to the best.  When you benchmark, you try to bridge the gap between your organization and the best in trade.  Invariably, a lot of emphasis is made on adhering to Best Practices.  When a new product is designed or a new process is launched, organizations tend to immediately benchmark their processes with the best practices around.

He goes on to discuss the Six Sigma benchmarking "fad," as well as why it's important to proceed with caution when comparing best practices, and also some guidelines for managing change at the tail end of the benchmarking process.

Have you thought systematically about your people practices?  After all, as Catherine Mattice says on the No Workplace Bullies blog, "workplace culture is a business strategy."  You can benchmark the policies and procedures endemic to your culture by applying to our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition.  Heck, your firm just might be featured in Inc. magazine!

Photo credit: Primary Intelligence

Leslie Battiste writes a poignant and convincing editorial in the Tallahassee Democrat this week that takes aim at companies that frown upon hiring and nurturing employees with disabilities because of preconceived notions that they're less productive than workers without disabilities.

Battiste cites six reasons Goodwill Industries International gives as to why hiring someone with a disability makes sense:

1. "Just because someone has a disability doesn't mean he or she is defined by that disability.  People with disabilities have a variety of skills and talents."
2. She points to a A 30-year DuPont study which found that employees with disabilities have above-average job performance, attendance, dependability and safety.
3. It won't affect your insurance premium.
4. Most workers with disabilities need little or no accommodations to perform their jobs, and nearly half of all job accommodations cost nothing to implement.
5. "Technological advances are leading to increases in productivity for all kinds of workers, including those with disabilities."
6. "Workers with disabilities often have distinctive perspectives on life based on their own unique experiences, adding to the diversity and vitality of the workplace."

Providing further evidence that companies can be just as productive, and profitable, with workers with disabilities are two of Winning Workplaces' honored small firms: Clearbrook in Illinois and Pinnacle Services in Minnesota.  You can read about Clearbrook's workplace culture and employee engagement best practices in our Success Story on them.  You can also read about Pinnacle on our website, though author Donna Fenn does a fantastic job profiling the firm's employee development strategies in her book Upstarts!

Does your company employ any persons with a disability?  What are your observations about their performance relative to other employees?

Even though it's commonly accepted that job growth lags behind the stock market – which has been on the rise for several months – with unemployment now above 10%, everyone is asking where the jobs are.  And since the SBA has found that close to 2/3 of the net new jobs for the past 15 years have been created by small businesses, the lens naturally moves to these firms which represent over 99% of all employers.

But the answer to this question varies based on who you ask:

• In-demand entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz says small biz is in a recovery.
• Entrepreneurial researcher Dr. Jeff Cornwall says both jobs and pay are on a downward trend.
• Reuters Small Business says the latest jobs data paints a contradictory picture.

And just to make things more complicated:

• While accounting and consulting firm Blackman Kallick's October 2009 survey of Chicago area small business leaders sees hiring plans and profitability expectations as on the rise...
• ...Winning Workplaces' October 2009 survey of our 100+ small business honorees finds basically stagnant hiring, with those that have implemented salary cuts increasing 76% over the past 6 months.

So I'd like to ask you two questions I think can get some worthwhile discussion going:

1. Which source do you trust most when it comes to jobs trending, and what is it telling you right now?
2. In your own organization, what impact are your workplace team building and employee engagement best practices having on your ability to grow revenues so you can keep hiring (or at least not let anyone go)?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.  I'll compile your responses in an upcoming post.

Have you checked out our new Facebook page?  We have a number of goodies here that highlight best practices in employee engagement:

• Photos from our recent ROI of Great Workplaces Conference in Chicago
• Piped in updates from our Twitter feed, and this blog
• Winning Workplaces news
• Discussion capability with fellow fans

Perhaps the most visceral feature, though, is the Videos tab.  Here's a link to it.

Among the 16 current videos you'll find four starring 2008 Top Small Workplace leaders that you won't find on our YouTube channel:

1. Kevin Trapani, President/CEO of The Redwoods Group, on serving the greater good
2. Nancy Kramer, CEO/President of Resource Interactive, on how an open office environment can improve morale
3. Bill Main, CEO/President of Landscape Forms, on their core principles that keep employees engaged
4. Joe Alger, CEO/President of JA Frate, on how people practices help retain customers

These videos are short but contain some real meat, so become a fan of us on Facebook and check them out today.  Coming soon: video interviews with leaders of the 2009 Top Small Workplaces.

We have often extolled the virtues of MBWA (managing by walking around).  You can read here how the forbearer of Winning Workplaces, auto parts manufacturer Fel-Pro, was innovative at this back before World War II.  And this editorial on our site describes how other successful small firms are continuing to build on this tried-and-true leadership tactic.

When it comes to cost vs. benefit of employee engagement best practices, MBWA can't be beat.  And yet, it can only get you so far.  This recent Fast Company blog post shows an example of a disconnect within a company between what employees will share with leaders and managers openly, and what confidential employee research often reveals.

With this in mind, see below for information on two tools to take an accurate temperature, if you will, of your workplace culture:

1. Retention Quiz
2. Employee Opinion Survey

If you've done a formal or informal employee survey, what surprised you?  (And how did these revelations help improve your bottom line?)

Congratulations to PRIZIM Inc., a 2007 and 2008 Top Small Workplaces Finalist, for being recognized for their exemplary employee engagement best practices by the Alfred P. Sloan Award program earlier this month.

As the press release by the Families and Work Institute, which sponsors the Sloan Awards, states, PRIZIM was deserving of this award because the 13-year-old, Maryland-based management consulting firm

is one of a small cadre of businesses that has been able to not only maintain but increase workplace flexibility in recent months.  Despite the economic recession, PRIZIM has enhanced and enriched the benefits and workplace flexibility options offered to its employees.

I have firsthand knowledge of how PRIZIM increases employee satisfaction and productivity through their flex practices – beyond, of course, the Top Small Workplaces application they've completed all three years we've run the program (they were not a Finalist in 2009).

Gabrielle McDonald, an environmental consultant for PRIZIM, attended our 2009 annual conference at the start of October.  She shared with me that she has taken on more responsibility within the company, branching out into HR.  She is willing to put in more effort because PRIZIM allows her to work out of a home office in Denver.  In fact, a number of the firm's 31 employees work from satellite offices in different parts of the country.

Related: PRIZIM shines in more than just employee engagement practices to create a flexible workplace.  In our post on 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies, check out what they do that promotes health and wellness and also aligns with their mission and service offerings (see #16).