Best Practices In Employee Engagement

We just got an email from Ryan Falvey with Gentle Giant Moving Company, which we named a Top Small Workplace in 2007. Ryan was ecstatic that the company's unanimous decision for everyone to share the pain of this economic downturn by either taking pay cuts or month-long furloughs, to avoid layoffs, got the attention of the The Boston Globe.

This past weekend the Globe did a story on this trend covering Gentle Giant and a few other Boston-area employers (including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which I mentioned here last week). It describes how their employees are taking a comprehensive, work and life approach to frugality to keep their jobs, not lose any of their coworkers, keep up with the cost of living, and ultimately setting up the company so that when conditions improve, they will be best positioned to deliver great service to both current and new customers.

In other words, they won't be forced to turn all their attention at that time on hiring, like many firms that have turned to layoffs first in this recession, will need to do.

Here's a video from the Globe that features a few GG employees:

And here's what Ryan said in his email to us about their short-term outlook:

We’ve managed through Q1 with some reasonable success (good control of costs, reasonable revenue performance) and are very eager to see how the coming warm months pan out re: business. Q1 is always quiet, and a slow surge builds into the summer months. We are keeping our fingers crossed that the surge will be there this year!

Gentle Giant looks well poised to do just what Ryan and his coworkers are hoping for, based in part on their approach to workplace team building and employee engagement and a culture that requires sacrifice during tough times, but also appropriately rewards workers when times are good.

Are the employee engagement best practices in your organization conducive to making the kinds of across-the-board moves that GG has taken? Why or why not?