You have probably heard of these employee engagement themed stories by now: Both former JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater and a woman named Jenny are being called workplace heroes on the Internet for the spectacular ways they departed their employers in the face of on-the-job adversity.

They both tapped into the frustration felt by at least 55% of the workforce who are unsatisfied with their current jobs, many of whom no doubt fantasize about doing exactly what these two ex-employees did.  (However, hat tip to executive coach Scott Eblin for noticing that the experience of "Jenny" turned out to be a hoax.)

Yet, there's a lesson in these two stories for employers, as Lauren Moak at the Delaware Employment Law Blog – one of my recommended small business/entrepreneurship blogs – explains fabulously:

While these stories are endlessly entertaining to the on-line community, no employer wants to be on the receiving end of this type of publicity.  So treat your employees well, and minimize the incentive for them to quit with a flourish.

So, how best to use team building to keep employees engaged to avoid one or more high-profile exits?  Here's a selected list of our webinars – featuring CEOs of small businesses that excel at this – to point you in the right direction:

• Engaging Fresh, Young Talent in the Workplace
• Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy
• Fostering Trust Within the Workplace
• Growing Leaders from Within

Longtime readers will recall that I wrote the following in June:

Trust building activities may register high on the radar screens of the organizations Winning Workplaces [has honored], but on the whole among the roughly 27 million small businesses across the U.S., they do not.  These and other human capital strategies are considered by many leaders to be "soft," and therefore, in a down economy, not worth leadership's time and energy compared with other areas of the business.

Maybe the results of Deloitte's latest Ethics & Workplace Survey will change some minds regarding the ROI of building trust in the workplace.  Surveying more than 700 employed Americans in April, Deloitte found that close to half have lost trust in their employer since the start of the recession; this has propelled more than a third of respondents to look for a new job as the economy picks up.

Certainly, some leaders are hip to and worried about these trends; those who run our Top Small Company Workplaces are among them.  As Management-Issues notes today, the same survey from Deloitte found that

Two-thirds of Fortune 1000 executives who are concerned employees will be job hunting in the coming months acknowledge that trust will be a factor in any increase in voluntary turnover....

The results of this survey make me wonder how much lower the percentage of employees looking to bolt would be if more companies had tried to share the pain in the midst of the worst of this recession, instead of pulling the layoff trigger first.  I also wonder – and maybe future studies will put some quantifiable data behind this – how much more revenue small and other businesses that did not view worker trust as a priority during the apex of the crisis might have right now.  The answer to this question has larger implications, including on our current GDP level and jobless rate.

Related: In April I profiled six small businesses in our network that turned to employee furloughs and pay cuts instead of layoffs to weather tough times, and came out stronger for their decision.  Read their stories here.

I enjoyed this post by Susan Fronk on the America's Best Business Practices blog.  In it she argues that the one thing that can most positively impact your small business – over and above measures to grow revenue, cut costs, and deliver excellent customer service – is finding and keeping great employees.

She provides more value later in her article by sharing three ways small businesses can build a more productive workplace culture by attracting and retaining great employees:

• Do a good job of recruiting and hiring,
• Create a great working environment, and
• Build relationships with your employees and foster relationships among employees.

I thought I would expand upon Fronk's informative post by sharing with you some specific ways that Winning Workplaces' 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award winners find and keep great employees:

1. Hire slow.  It's not uncommon for job candidates to go through as many as 8 interviews before a hiring decision is made.
2. Hire for cultural fit.  This includes not just when a position is open, but generally when someone looks like a good fit for the organization; a number of firms prefer to keep their feelers out and plug someone in when they come across that person.
3. Grab top talent from competing firms.  Top talent is top talent, and our winning small companies are unabashed about leveraging a bad economy that has forced competing firms to shed staff to their advantage.
4. Systematize the orientation/onboarding process.  Many companies do a good job during the middle period of an employee's tenure, but few are exceptional at the beginning, a critical time for new hires.  Our Top Small Company Workplaces really excel here by doing things like mentoring and scheduling meetings with the CEO to ramp up the new employee's understanding of and commitment to the organization.
5. Managers have frequent contact with their subordinates.  For many small companies, managers only interact one on one with employees, to review performance and also their top concerns/hurdles, every three months.  Our award-winning firms typically do this every two weeks to a month.  This helps better engage employees for greater commitment, and also helps firms react to emerging issues sooner.
6. Invest in employee leadership development.  The Top Small Company Workplaces share a belief that they are best served when their top talent stays to fill and create roles of increasing responsibility, and they have seen results from their action on it including process improvement, product innovation, and better customer service – not to mention mid- and top-level employees who stay longer, keeping recruiting and training costs down.  As far as their specific leadership development strategies, see this post.
7. Give employees a voice in the decision making.  Lots of companies have an open door policy, but this no longer cuts it if you want to foster two-way communication that results in greater employee engagement and productivity.  Our award winners give their employees a voice by holding daily huddles and frequent (at least once a month) all-hands meetings.  In addition, many of them open up their books and explain the company finances so people gain a crystal clear understanding of how their role affects the top and bottom line.
8. Do employee recognition.  I've blogged before about how recognizing your staff can be meaningful and still inexpensive.  Often times a simple, face-to-face thank you or small gift personalized to the employee can make a powerful impact.
9. Be generous in providing time off.  More employers need to come to the realization that being flexible around employees' personal and family obligations makes for a more committed and productive worker.  Paid time off should be a primary consideration, but if that's not in the budget, being flexible – especially for unanticipated obligations – through measures like cross training will help immensely with retention.
10. Empower workers down to the lowest levels to make good spot decisions.  This involves a lot of trust from leaders and some additional training, but when it works it makes a dramatic impact on business results.  Just think how much happier you've been when you've called a vendor and you didn't need to be transferred up the phone/responsibility chain to have your issue resolved.  The same sense of satisfaction can mean the difference in whether your customers or clients come back to you and refer you to others.

Is there a measure you think should be in this list?  If so, I welcome your comment on it below.

The following is a guest post on workplace team building and employee engagement by Steve Ritter.  Ritter, the Founder and CEO of Team Clock Institute, is the former Director of HR at Leaders Bank, which was named the #1 Best Place to Work in Illinois in 2006, and was a finalist for Winning Workplaces' Top Small Workplaces award in 2008.

Growing up, most of us are taught how to succeed as individuals.  Unfortunately, individual talent and dedication alone are not nearly enough to ensure a team’s success.  Teams are messy.  Conflict is unavoidable. Team dynamics are fluid.  Despite these challenges, working in teams is fundamental to most endeavors.

Twenty-five years ago, I began the quest of understanding the complexities of teams following a happenstance opportunity with the Chicago White Sox.  At the time, a seemingly strong team was underperforming for reasons beyond the grasp of their leadership.  Unexpectedly, a complex situation ended up having a simple solution.  Since then, identifying the recipe for healthy and effective teams has been my passion giving rise to the founding of the Team Clock Institute, a research and training consultancy specializing in breakthrough teams.  Recently, the Team Clock Institute responded to a unique challenge.

The Issue: Early in 2010, I received a call from a FORTUNE 500 company facing the integration of disparate cultures following the acquisition of a prominent player in the industry.  All of the expectable merger/acquisition politics were underway and the leadership team was seeking a simple model to anchor the transition.  What began as a casual conversation on a commuter train grew into an opportunity to assess the integration effort and provide recommendations to enhance successful business outcomes.

The Response: Accordingly, the Team Clock model was introduced to key players on the leadership team. The Team Clock model mirrors the face of a clock where each hour represents a stage along the path of team development.  In a nutshell, strong teams begin with an investment in common norms and direction.  Based on this foundation, team members test trust as they become more cohesive.  This platform supports their efforts to be innovative and take risks.  This activity inevitably leads to change and a repositioning of people and functions.  Healthy teams find a way to refocus following such growth and cycle begins again. 

The Impact: Over the next six months, the Team Clock Institute assessed a series of key business units to determine opportunities for greater effectiveness.  Results were analyzed revealing the strengths, vulnerabilities, areas of congruence and discord on the team.  Debriefing sessions were facilitated to discuss results and targeted actions were identified that would bring measurable change in team engagement and productivity.

Typical examples of diagnostic vulnerabilities included:

• Mired in loss: too depleted to re-invest.
• Inability to manage conflict/differences respectfully.
• Indulgence in the comfort zone: afraid to take risks and explore new ideas.
• Adherence to the status quo: unwilling to accept the consequences of change.

From a strengths perspective, the Team Clock Institute identified key anchors to healthy team interactions based on the diagnostic results for each team.  Goals were established in each of the core areas of vulnerability and business metrics were assigned to determine ROI.  The goal areas included:

• Investment infrastructure

- Consensus philosophy/mission/values/vision

• Trust and interactional dynamics

- Effective management of conflict

• Innovation and team effectiveness

- Measureable productivity/efficiency shifts

• Distancing to leverage change for growth

- Functional repositioning and identification of new opportunities/methodologies

The business case for effective teaming is simple.  Healthy teams are more productive and adaptable.  Anticipating the 4th quarter of the calendar year, the organization is poised to re-assess their team effectiveness metrics mapped to their productivity results.  Pending the quantitative impact, the qualitative result is clear: the emotional journey of a healthy team provides opportunities for positive workplace culture that struggling teams rarely experience.  Where is your team on the Team Clock?

Learn more about all of the resources at the Team Clock Institute at www.team-clock.com.

Last week SmartBrief on Leadership called attention to an article on Business-Strategy-Innovation.com which discussed how some big companies scale their innovation by seeding "independent spinoffs to develop high-risk, high-reward projects."

With their huge employee rosters and advantage in terms of working capital and infrastructure, it makes sense that large companies that believe they can see real returns from this focus are making this practice a priority.  But despite often being at a disadvantage in the factors I just mentioned, small businesses are getting in on this as well.

One of the answers that stood out to the last question in Winning Workplaces' 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award application – What are your key long-term strategic goals for the organization and the workplace? – was this one by winner MAYA Design, a 21-year-old design consultancy and technology research lab based in Pennsylvania:

MAYA grows, and allows employees to grow and stretch, by spinning off complimentary companies.  Employees can present a business plan to the owners and if they think it's viable, and does not compete with MAYA, MAYA provides the infrastructure (HR, finance, clerical and IT support) to help them get started.  This has always been a part of our strategic goals.  We currently have two companies (we call them doppos) incubating, one of which will probably spin off in 2010, the other of which will take a few years to be ready to start.  We are constantly working with the employees to think of ideas for new doppos.  MAYA Design will continue to be around 50 employees, as we believe this is an optimum number for the collaborative work we do, and is well managed.

When well executed, as is the case at MAYA, this practice produces a triple win that comes from a workplace culture foundation of employee engagement:

• Win for Employees: Spearheading or assisting in the formation of a new venture from an existing company – talk about a resume builder!
• Win for the Company: This practice inherently minimizes the risk of launching a new venture, while maximizing the returns for the parent company.  If the venture proves successful, employee-leaders of it and their subsequent staff are built-in evanglists for the parent company, which further helps their recruiting and sales efforts.
• Win for the Greater Community: Startup ventures that are successful are a sorely needed source of employment and tax revenues, which can both help our economy recover faster.

Do you know of any businesses that use a practice similar to MAYA Design's?  If so I encourage you to comment about it below.  I'd especially like to know how it helps with building trust in the workplace.

In April I blogged about what I perceived to be a direct link between progressive workplace culture practices at Netflix, and the payoff of employee engagement the company enjoys from such forward-thinking product innovations as discs for Internet-connected video game systems that allow their customers to stream movies and TV shows.

Today John Jantsch has a new post on his Duct Tape Marketing blog in which, through photos, he shows why a customer referral package he received from Southwest Airlines is effective for the airline.  It comes down to the package being extremely easy for the customer to understand, and to easily and quickly act upon.

This type of referral program should be no surprise coming from a company that is, as their President Emeritus and our past Top Small Company Workplaces award judge Colleen Barrett says, really in the customer service business, but happens to use airline transportation as a means to win that business.  And as Barrett told us in this Q&A with her on our website, unmatched customer service starts with an unparalleled commitment to building trust in the workplace and empowering employees at all levels to make decisions that benefit the customer (obviously a much different leadership approach than that which exists at most other airlines).

So to review, here's how Southwest Airlines' customer referral program is an example of turning what some would call "squishy" people practices to impossible-to-ignore bottom line results:

• Treat employees with trust, respect, and fairness, and encourage and empower them to think and act like owners (at Southwest, all employees are, in fact, owners).
• More highly engaged employees are more apt to create ideas, individually and as part of teams, that will generate more revenue and are more sustainable.
• The customer referral package Jantsch writes about is a tangible example of this, designed to increase that holy grail of profit margins for businesses, especially small ones: repeat business and referrals.
• More repeat business and referrals is better for everyone: customers, the business and their vendors and suppliers, and, of course, employees and their communities. 

Given the rising unemployment and falling budgets for needed social and educational programs in many states due to the economy, that businesses can have a hand in reversing those trends through the cycle described above is an inspiring proposition – and one that, frankly, I wish the leaders of many more organizations were focused upon.

Related: Read my firsthand perspective on how Southwest Airlines' workforce effectiveness made my first flying experience with them a joy.

Photo credit: John Jantsch

Trust building activities may register high on the radar screens of the organizations Winning Workplaces named as 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces in the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, but on the whole among the roughly 27 million small businesses across the U.S., they do not.  These and other human capital strategies are considered by many leaders to be "soft," and therefore, in a down economy, not worth leadership's time and energy compared with other areas of the business.

But as Greg Harris noted on The Science of Work blog yesterday, and as I subsequently tweeted about, Harvard Business Review – long a barometer on where business is and where it's headed – has seemed to focus of late even more on the "fundamentals" of people management.  This means employee engagement strategies to build a more productive workplace culture.

Harris mentioned the May HBR headline "How to Keep Your Star Talent."  Is it a coincidence that this month the AP reported on employment data which show that more employees are jumping ship as the economy improves?

I think not.  Yes, we always see the cycle that in tough economic times, employers don't have to worry as much about retention because people are thankful to have a job, and that in better times they need to pay more attention to it because workers sense a job-seeking advantage and are more apt to leave.  But we are coming out of the Worst Recession Since the Great Depression® – a time when many employers' first reaction was to let go of staff and ask for a great deal of concessions from their remaining workforces.

It's no wonder, then, that employees, feeling beaten down in many cases, are looking for the exits.  This is especially true of top performers, who have a good understanding from their latest performance reviews that they're a strong commodity.

What can keep these folks from leaving?  At a base level, a work environment of trust, respect, and fairness – qualities we point to as one of six building blocks of a winning workplace.

It will be interesting to see how many more leaders and managers put activities designed to maximize trust, such as investment in employee leadership development, at the top of their to-do lists.  And by doing so, moving people practices from the "soft measures" to the "hard measures" column to maintain their competitive advantage.

Your thoughts?

At Winning Workplaces, we sometimes hear from business leaders that while they acknowledge that happier employees are more productive – and that, in turn, affects revenue and profitability – it can be difficult to tie team building strategies such as special employee awards or allowing workers to bring their dogs to work directly to the balance sheet.

It can be hard to pinpoint the payoff of employee engagement.  Even when leaders work off the feedback of a well-executed employee opinion survey to implement more or better engagement activities, getting bottom line returns to match or exceed estimates is not a science.  This is further complicated by down economies like the one we're in now, as well as the fact that almost no employee practice solutions produce overnight returns.

So I appreciated Dr. Anna Erickson's reframing of this issue in her post yesterday on the Good Company Blog.  She asks, "Are Employers Facing a Deficit of Trust?"  This implies that a workplace culture of trust, respect, and fairness is a form of currency.  It also implies that a deficit of this currency is bad for the bottom line, while a surplus of it strengthens the bottom line.

In fact, the data we gather as part of our Top Small Company Workplaces competition verifies this line of thinking.  The 40 winners and finalist organizations for our award this year have better overall trust building activities in place, and as a result they had higher 2009 revenue than the other 457 applicants (average of $42 million vs. $27 million).  In addition, as I explained in this post, a greater share of the winners and finalists were profitable in 2009, and they have longer average employee tenures and lower turnover.

The short of this is that, to the extent you can implement or strengthen staff engagement practices designed to build greater trust in your workforce, the better it will be for your balance sheet in the long run.

Related: This recent post cites evidence from John Jantsch's new book which finds that stronger cultures also tend to increase referrals – a major source of revenue for most businesses.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's resignation this week and lightning-fast replacement by David Cameron illustrates an organizational inevitability, writes executive coach and speaker Scott Eblin on his Next Level Blog.  Namely, that your leadership role will end.

One of the tips Eblin offers for CEOs pondering on and strategizing around this is to "Do as much good as you can while you can."  To me this speaks to succession planning – an arrow in the "quiver" of leadership practices that, in my assessment, is rarely used (or maybe I should say, rarely fully and effectively executed), but which can be incredibly powerful in terms of both employee engagement and building trust in the workplace for the long term.

Winning Workplaces has written on succession planning based on lessons learned by both outgoing and incoming leaders of our small honored firms, and others.  Here are the top five related articles on our website you might want to check out:

1. The Changing Face of Succession Planning
2. A Conversation with Helen Johnson-Leipold of the Johnson Family Companies, Part 1 (see the third question and answer)
3. Tips to Best Utilize Older Workers in Your Workforce (see the fourth paragraph down starting with bold text)
4. Succession as a Values Test
5. Casting a Wider Ownership Net

Related: Leaders of two of our award-winning firms get into more detail of their varying succession planning experiences in one of our most popular webinar recordings.  Access it here.

Image credit: Changing Trends in Human Resource Management

Longtime readers of this blog who remember posts like this one understand that the leadership practices that make up a thriving, productive workplace culture – including employee engagement and team building strategies – greatly increase the likelihood of benefiting from repeat business and referrals.

I was happy to see this connection reiterated in marketing expert John Jantsch's guest post on social media guru Chris Brogan's blog today.  Drawing from his new book The Referral Engine, which is based on his study of "the habits of numerous organizations that generated most of their business by way of referral," Jantsch says common traits of these companies include:

• Building a culture of trust (as in the Winning Workplaces building block of Trust, Respect, and Fairness).
• Employees as customers – just wrote about this aspect here on Tuesday.
• Hiring for attitude and fit over skills.
• Openly communicating the business financials to all employees – Jantsch references ESOPs, but many of our honored small firms go further by practicing open-book management and even doing financial literacy training so employees really understand what's behind the numbers, and how their work impacts them.
• "Give to get mentality" – another way to say, operating by the Golden Rule.

One more trait of successful, "referral engine" businesses, Jantsch says, is offering products or services at a premium price.  As we have written about in conjunction with our small business award winners, they share this tendency to compete on service rather than price.  Rackspace Hosting and Gentle Giant Moving are great examples of this.

Interested in using The Referral Engine to tweak your business practices to improve your results?  Get 55% off your copy at Amazon.

Have you seen this ad on TV?

According to their website, Think Beyond the Label is a partnership of health and human service and employment agencies that have come together to build a uniform, national infrastructure and approach that connects businesses to qualified candidates with disabilities.  It's an effort of Health & Disability Advocates (HDA), a national nonprofit organization based in our hometown of Chicago.

Think Beyond the Label's site contains success stories that demonstrate how employee development strategies and workplace team building around hiring and retaining workers with disabilities has "evolved the workforce for the better" in a number of businesses.  The site also contains a tool to identify job candidates by state and a section that debunks common employer myths related to disabled workers, as compiled by the Department of Labor.

Related: I have blogged several times on why it makes sense, from a bottom line perspective as well as in terms of building trust in the workplace, to seek out qualified disabled job candidates.  Check out our posts on the topic:

• Taking the 'Dis' Out of Disability When It Comes to Recruiting and Employee Engagement
• More Evidence: The Value of Hiring People with Disabilities
• Cost to Accommodate Workers with Disabilities: Less Than 10 Percent of Average Annual Tuition Reimbursement

This new article on the Knowledge@Wharton site caught my eye.  In it Charles "Ed" Haldeman, Jr., Freddie Mac's CEO for close to a year, shares facets of the management style he's using to try to turn around the federal home loan mortgage corporation that, along with Fannie Mae, were propped up by the government in fall 2008 as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis.

If you scroll about halfway down the article, you'll see points from Haldeman's "template" for what he sees as effective management – for any organization.  Note how many Winning Workplaces building blocks it includes:

• Open Communications
• Teamwork & Involvement
• Trust, Respect & Fairness

At least three of our six building blocks are represented.  Digging a bit deeper, Haldeman stresses a number of hallmarks of a productive workplace culture that we often echo, including constantly communicating the mission and making sure employees understand it, empowering people to make decisions at lower levels, and managers practicing MBWA.

Could Freddie Mac join the ranks of our award-winning small businesses?  In some sense, they already have – they've historically offered strong employee benefits, prompting Working Mother magazine to name it among the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers in 2004.

The real trick, I think, will be getting this midsize-to-large company (in 2008 it had over 5,200 employees, according to Wikipedia) to act even more like one of our honored small firms in terms of further breaking down silos and building trust in the workplace as a means to make it more nimble, which will help it keep pace with consumer demands and trends.

Related: We've written Success Stories on more than a dozen real estate businesses, tapping into how they see a payoff of employee engagement.  Check them out here.

We all know NetFlix.  They started out small here in California in 1997, and their domination of the online video rental space in less than 10 years forced longtime market leader Blockbuster into the defensive position of throwing "everything but the kitchen sink" at the company.

I've been a NetFlix customer off and on since the early 2000s.  I'm currently with them, and plan to stay with them because they recently came out with an extremely cool value-add for owners of the Nintendo Wii like me: they have available, free of charge, a Wii disc that allows NetFlix customers to instantly stream both new and older movies to your TV.  This is a great feature for customers who also subscribe to cable TV services that charge extra for on-demand movies, as many of them can be viewed through the Wii under the same, basic $10-per-month NetFlix membership fee.

Customer-centric innovations like this come about in part because of the productive workplace culture NetFlix has built and sustained.  Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CEO of successful software company HubSpot, shared on his OnStartups blog yesterday 23 insights from NetFlix's workplace culture deck.  These include such Winning Workplaces-approved tenets as:

• Values defined by who gets rewarded and who is asked to leave.
• Treating people with trust, respect, and fairness.
• Creating mechanisms to solicit and act upon employees' best ideas.
• "Fast failure": recognize mistakes and quickly move on.
• Emphasis on building teams in the workplace.
• Employee leadership development to encourage people at all levels to "behave like an owner."
• Flat hierarchy in which titles don't matter as much.
• Employees in charge of their career development.

A commenter to Shah's post, Matt, shared the link to the slides of NetFlix's culture deck, which I pass along here.  Enjoy!

Citing several studies which show that, at least in Australia, working men use little if any paternity leave after their child is born, Management Line's Leon Gettler asked today if we even need paternity leave.

When it comes to employee engagement and team building activities to build a more productive workplace, I must offer a counterpoint view and say, Yes.  Here's why:

1. It lowers turnover among male employees, as has been the case at our Success Story firm Tom's of Maine.
2. It empowers employees, increasing their respect for and commitment to the company.  See our Success Story on Stellar Solutions.
3. It helps companies walk the talk of their dedication to the greater community.  Read how this works in our Success Story on Healthwise.

I think the takeaway here is that, while some studies may show that paternity leave is an underused benefit, its inclusion in a company's employee benefits package shows both new and current employees that their employer takes their work/life balance as seriously as they do.  This show (and investment) of good will has a ROI regardless of the practice's actual usage in the form of greater employee trust and commitment, which leads to lower turnover and longer tenures.

This, in turn, helps keep recruiting costs down and the knowledge base intact to maintain high service levels for customers.  And as we know, top-notch service that leaves more customers highly satisfied results in more repeat business and referrals – primary revenue drivers.

Related: Another organization in our network, Top Small Workplace Guerra DeBerry Coody (GDC), has benefited handsomely from its investment in family-friendly workplace practices including paternity leave.  Learn about GDC's ROI from these practices and tips on implementing or tweaking them in your business by accessing this webinar their CEO co-hosted for Winning Workplaces.

Photo credit: PregnancyRights.com

In the wake of high profile investigations into the likes of Toyota for its hybrid vehicle brakes issue, and more recently Massey Energy for its safety violations that may have contributed to the deaths of 29 of its employees from a mine explosion on April 5, I thought it would be relevant to review one of the questions Winning Workplaces asks in our Top Small Company Workplace award application:

Has the company or organization been the subject of any investigation by a government body or a civil or criminal complaint?

We include this question to assist in the rigorous due diligence process we undertake to help us determine our group of finalists for the award.  Our final panel of judges also take this into consideration when determining the winners (the winners for 2010 will be announced in Inc. Magazine in June).

What we see this year, consistent with previous years, is that a very low percentage of the organizations that apply answer "Yes" to this question.  Only 25 (5%) of our 497 award applicants this year said they had ever been the subject of a complaint or investigation.  This is all the more significant since the majority (58%) of applicant organizations were founded before 2000 – the oldest having begun in 1900 – which means long timeframes for complaints or investigations to arise, on average.

The low risk for complaints or investigations among these organizations should not be a surprise to longtime readers of this blog.  As with threats to cash flow and IT infrastructure, legal or potentially legal issues brought forth by customers, governmental authorities, or other parties can be curbed substantially when leaders engage employees in trust building activities and take a Golden Rule approach to all stakeholders in their business.

Related: One of the threats small business owners worry about most is a legal one by current or former workers.  In this article on our website, Workplace Fairness' Paula Brantner shares tips to help prevent employee lawsuits.

Like anyone, entrepreneurs can lie – to their friends and family, and certainly to their employees.  But Harvard Business Review asked last week, is it in business leaders' best interest to twist or outright ignore the truth when it comes to employee engagement for a most productive workplace?

"I don't have the right answers," Babson College management professor Daniel J. Isenberg writes on the HBR website, "but I do know that entrepreneurial lying (whether we call it marketing or raising capital or negotiating or selling the vision) is more prevalent than we care to admit."

Not only do I think Isenberg is right, but I would argue that the weakened economy over the past few years has been a major contributing factor here.  However, not every entrepreneur is guilty of lying to his or her employees.  Valuing the Winning Workplace building blocks of Trust, Respect & Fairness and Open Communications, on the whole leaders of our award-winning small organizations opt for the truth when presented between that choice and being misleading.

In the majority of these firms, the practice of open-book management (OBM) goes hand in hand with truth telling, since by nature it involves showing employees what the numbers look like (except salaries, in most cases).  OBM helped our Best Boss David Pierce be brutally honest about where his firm, ENA, was and what he needed his people to do to overcome a potentially devastating obstacle shortly after he assumed leadership of it in 2002.  You can read more about how truth telling helped ENA rebound in our Success Story on the company.

But with the right workplace culture in place, any firm – OBM or not – can benefit from a leader who tells his or her people the truth, in both good and especially in tough times.  Our 2007 Top Small Workplace Corporate Ink bears this out.  We explained in our Success Story on the business, which does not use OBM, how Founder and President Amy Bermar was able to see a substantial ROI – nothing less than the survival of her PR firm – after she was truthful with her employees that they either had to let someone go or take a collective pay cut.  The team chose the latter, and it was the right decision because when business improved a short time later, Bermar had her talent in place to tap for new client engagements.

Where do you stand on business leaders lying to their employees?  Do you think a gray area of truth-bending is OK?  And what effect do you think this has on workforce effectiveness?

Our Top Small Workplace honorees Radio Flyer and Tasty Catering have been named as 2010 Best Places to Work in Chicago by Crain's Chicago Business.

You can read their profile of Radio Flyer here, and of Tasty Catering here.  While you're on the Crain's site, their related editorial that being the "best" doesn't always mean spending the most on employee engagement strategies is also worth a read.

If there were one beef I have with this year's list, it would be including branch offices of very large companies (Microsoft, Deloitte) in place of other small firms that, like Radio Flyer and Tasty Catering, excel in building trust in the workplace as a means to grow revenues and jobs and stay below the industry on metrics like turnover.  If I were on Crain's staff I would have advocated for:

• 2008 Top Small Workplace Integrated Project Management Company (IPM)
• 2008 Top Small Workplace JA Frate
• 2009 Top Small Workplace Steppenwolf Theatre Company
• 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces Finalist PortionPac Chemical Corporation

If you view the comments on each Crain's profile page of their 2010 honorees, you'll see some pretty strong opnions, both for and against the companies that made their list.  What are your thoughts on it?

Last week's blog asked you the important question: How is your decision-making style impacting your organization's results?  I asked you to think about your style and how it affects employee engagement, team building, and open communication in the workplace.  As many of you know, these things have a direct impact on your business results.

Last time I reviewed two of the four main decision-making styles: Autocratic and Democratic.  Participative and Consensus are next.

The participative style of decision making is when the leader involves the other members of the organization in the process.  Participative decision making is a way of building engagement making people feel good about their involvement.  This style can foster open communication and positively impact the culture.  This style won't improve the culture of ownership; that is because it still leaves the final decision in the hands of the leader.  How do you think this style would impact YOUR business results?  Do you see both right and wrong situations to engage this style?

The last decision-making style is consensus.  Here the leader gives up complete control of the decision; the full group is totally involved in the decision.  While this style would certainly help build a sense of ownership, I have to tell you that this is my least favorite style.  Not because I have a problem giving up control but, rather, because of the incredible amount of time it takes and secondarily the fact that many people may not have the knowledge or experience to "vote" on the decision.

Having said that, there are situations where a consensus approach makes sense.  The benefits can include building trust in the workplace, team building, increased employee engagement, and a more productive workplace because people feel so much ownership for the decision.

Clearly, no one style is right for all the situations leaders face in the workplace.  Have I gotten you thinking, though?  Are you wondering how your decision-making style is impacting your people?  Your business results?  I'd love to hear some of your stories.

I often hear from leaders and managers who ask – especially with their sales and marketing staff in mind – What's the payoff of employee engagement with regard to social media tools like blogs and Twitter?

Here's one answer based on a process I do most days: You can use your blog feed and your Twitter account to quickly go from listening to building your reputation.

Here's what I mean and the steps that are involved:

1. First, you should be "listening" to people and topics that are relevant to your business.  There are a number of ways to do this using technology, but I turn most often to my blog feed, which is just a web-based tool that pulls new posts from the blogs you subscribe to in one place – so they come to you, as opposed to you needing take more time to go out to them to see what's new.

I use Google Reader for my blog feed, but you can use whatever tool you like.  A list of 10 top feed readers (for Windows) is on About.com.

2. Once you have your blog feed reader in place, start subscribing to blogs whose content is relevant to your business.  You should be on the lookout for both those by experts in your field and/or which cover topics that are important to you (such as products or services), as well as those of your competitors, to really get a sense of what's going on in your marketplace.

When you find a blog you want to add to your feed reader, follow the process listed here to subscribe to it.

3. Here's where things get interesting.  You're going to find that as many as 80% of the blogs you follow are also on Twitter.  Today – through a blog I already follow in Google Reader – I found Scott Eblin's Next Level Blog and subscribed to it.  Here's what the Twitter link looks like on Eblin's blog:

I clicked it to reach his Twitter page.

4. Next, in your Twitter account, you'll need to do another, very short process to create your own Twitter list, if you don't already have one.  jens explains how to do this here.  I called the list I created "Blogs I Follow".

5. Finally, once you have a Twitter list going, go back to the Twitter profile of the blogger you want to add to your list.  Once you have at least one Twitter list going, you will see an option in the middle-right of a person's Twitter page with a down arrow called "Lists."  Here's what this looks like on Eblin's Twitter page:

Click it once to show your Twitter list with a checkbox next to it.  Simply click the box, and the person will be added to your list.

This may seem like a long process, but it's only longer at the beginning when you're setting up your blog feed reader and creating your Twitter list.  After that you're looking at only a few minutes per blogger added to your Twitter list.

OK, and now the big question: How does all this help your business?  It does so in several ways:

• It promotes people you add to your Twitter list.  Social media is built on reciprocity, so at some point your "listee" will notice that they're on your list.  Often, they will list you on their list, which broadens your exposure.  For example, counting Eblin I've added 60 bloggers to my Blogs I Follow list, and the 37 Twitter lists that I now show up on include some of my listees.
• You increase your reputation and follower reach by adding one or more lists.  While currently I have 1485 followers of my main Twitter feed, my Blogs I Follow list has an additional 3 followers.  That's not a lot, but it will go up over time as I add more of the bloggers I subscribe to in my blog feed to my Twitter list.
• Marketing potential of your Twitter list followers.  You really have to be careful here, because social media followers are especially averse to spam and even thinly veiled marketing, but if you have a strong enough value proposition and it's presented in the right way, your new Twitter list can serve as an engaged community with which to communicate about your business.  They'll certainly be more highly engaged than the whole of your website visitors on any given day.

Related: Speaking of lists, if you want expert advice on engagement activities for building trust in the workplace, follow these 10 folks on Twitter.

Photo credit: Cookee Corporation

According to Facebook, the ubiquitous social networking platform now has over 400 million active users.  The sheer size of this audience has led over 1.5 million local businesses to create active pages on the site (we're one of them!), and Inc. Magazine (our Top Small Company Workplaces media partner) reports this week that companies' paid ads on the site will add $2 billion to Mark Zuckerberg's bottom line.

With that kind of customer growth and profitability, would Facebook hurt its business advertisers by starting to charge users of the site – which has been free since it launched in 2004 – a small monthly fee starting in June or July?

While over 100 pages have been created on Facebook in protest of this user access fee, which has been rumored to range from $3.99 to $4.99 per month, the answer is no.  As Spywared.com reported in January, Facebook reps "have repeatedly declared that the network is not going to charge a basic fee for the main services."

It turns out that many of the Facebook pages protesting this fee direct folks who become their "fans" to "external websites that are capable of installing malware."  (So as an aside, you might want to engage employees and tell them to steer clear of these pages.  It's a small way to reinforce your Winning Workplace building block of trust and respect.)

Related: It's been reported that older folks join Facebook at a faster rate than other segments of the population.  This post explains why this is good for your workplace team building and business results.