Building Trust In The Workplace

This week, once again, my e-mail inbox contained the disappointing results of a Gallup study that indicated that the Work Environment Index dropped to a new low in February. 

The Work Environment Index measures job satisfaction, the ability to use one's strengths at work, trust, and openness in the workplace, and how one's supervisor treats him or her.  The Work Environment score was 51.6 in February 2008; 48.7 in February 2009; and is now at 48.0 in February 2010. 

Why are these results so concerning?  Among other things, these scores say two things:

1. Quality of life is negatively impacted, and
2. Workforce effectiveness and workplace productivity aren't nearly where they could be. 

As a leader, do you want to make sure that these numbers don't apply to you?  Do you want a productive workplace with highly engaged employees and a culture of ownership?  If so, consider these actions: 

1. Take a hard look at your organization's culture.  What's the level of employee engagement?  Do your managers know how to manage and lead?  Do you sense a positive energetic organization or one that reflects fear and/or boredom? 
2. If you think there is an opportunity for improvement, get serious about it.  Start with doing an employee survey to better understand where you are doing things right and where you could improve.  If you are going to be serious about improving your workplace culture, don't guess.  Get the facts – directly from your team.
3. Once you have the facts, do something about them.  This is where the work gets hard.  Changing a culture, which means changing the way people behave, isn't easy.  Get outside help if you have to.  Be clear about your "end goal"; if you do this work successfully, what will your workplace culture look like in a couple years?  Develop a plan to get from where you are today to your end goal.  What are the key steps?  How will you measure your success?  How will you engage employees along the way?  How will you build trust, a foundational component of a great workplace? 

The workplace studies are yielding consistent results: there is a growing problem with job satisfaction and, in turn, productivity.  As a leader, do you want to be part of the solution or part of the problem?

In my last post I mentioned the employee satisfaction level (45%) recently reported by The Conference Board and concluded by asking "whose fault is this anyway?"

When I've asked similar questions, I get a range of answers.  Some are adamant that it is the leader's fault.  Some say the employee should switch jobs if they are so dissatisfied.  Others can't come up with an answer.

Here's the answer: It is the leader's fault and the employee's fault.  In organizations with an effective workplace culture, all parties have a sense of ownership. 

In creating a culture of ownership and in turn a productive workplace, we often write about what leaders should do.  I'm going to look at the flip side of the coin and point out what leaders shouldn't do if they want to contribute to a culture of trust, employee engagement, or team building.

1. As your organization's leader, DON'T be so intensely focused on results that you forget people are your most important means of getting to those results.  A quick story: Years ago, during the first six months of becoming a CEO, I learned this the hard way.   I overused the phrase "I expect" and the majority of my interactions with my team were about what they were doing to deliver the numbers.  Thank goodness a combination of my own experience, an executive coach, and feedback from a couple people on my team helped me realize that the intense focus on results was backfiring.  Clearly, a productive workforce requires building engaged employees. 
2. DON'T ask for input and then ignore it.  This approach squashes open communication in the workplace.  This approach says "I don't care about your ideas or expertise."  Without communication and caring, building trust is unlikely. Guess what?  Poor communication + minimal trust = less than optimal results.
3. DON'T decide that you are going to launch an initiative (large or small) to improve employee engagement unless you plan to follow through.  Not surprisingly, this reinforces a perception that you as the leader really don't care about employees and you can't be counted upon to do what you say you will do.  And that goes back to one of my beginning points: In a great workplace, the culture of ownership contributes to results. 

This list of "don'ts" is endless.  Have you been on the receiving end of a don't?  As a leader, have you learned a valuable lesson from a don't?  Those of us at Winning Workplaces would love to hear your story.

I'm all for outsourcing when it makes sense for a business leader.  In fact, this week I retweeted Adam Toren's suggestion that busy executives can save time by outsourcing some of their more tedious household responsibilities.

But I think that if employee engagement or the workplace culture could suffer, then don't do it.  Building trust in the workplace, IMO, should always be the top item on any CEO's to-do list.

So therefore I can't endorse Douglas R. Palmer's pitch on the Small Business CEO blog to outsource your finance department.  I have two thoughts here as to why (in addition to the line in the sand I laid out above):

• First, while Palmer's list of the pros of doing this does make business sense, one associated risk is the loss or accidental distribution of sensitive information.  Even if you've thoroughly researched your options and chosen a winning partner, that can still happen.  Would you take that chance with your company's balance sheet and salary info?
• Second and more importantly from a productivity standpoint, keeping this function in-house is one more piece of the intellectual capital pie that can benefit from leadership, if not team, involvement.  One of the themes of our Top Small Workplaces over the years has been their ability to anticipate marketplace changes, which especially helps them navigate tough times like these, in large part because their leaders engage employees by sharing financial information with them and teach them what it means, which spurs actionable ideas on creating efficiencies and optimizing revenue sources.  If they outsourced their financial component, this outcome would be difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Where do you stand here?

One of the comments we hear from small business leaders is that they often feel isolated – that they have to work hard to find peer validation for their efforts, and that they wonder how much impact they have outside their organization's walls.

As Management-Issues alluded to today, they have a HUGE impact, and therefore shouldn't feel so alone.  While The Conference Board's recent survey of 5,000 U.S. households revealed that over half of employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, Management-Issues points to their poll of 200 CEOs around the same timeframe which actually shows that company leaders are "increasingly upbeat."

As Nic Paton writes,

While excellence in execution and consistent execution of strategy by top management remained the top-ranking challenge overall for CEOs, more growth-oriented challenges such as sustained and steady top-line growth, customer loyalty/retention and profit growth were all now getting higher ratings as "greatest concerns".

This shift presents business leaders with an opportunity to make inroads on two significant fronts: employee engagement to boost productivity (good for the company, and for the country), and to better satisfy their people at the same time.  The latter outcome is good in that it would likely reduce the currently high share of folks who are ready to jump as the economy improves – but, again, this benefits companies because less of their top talent would turnover, which reduces their recruiting and training costs.

So while CEOs may feel siloed in what they do in building trust in the workplace – especially compared with more tangible tasks related to managing product/service delivery and the numbers side – they should take comfort in the fact that their contributions to ensure progressive people practices for a more productive workplace bring real returns, for their business and for our economy's return to growth.

If you run a business, how optimistic are you for 2010 performance vs. 2009?

I'm excited because I just tweeted with Mark Hirschfeld, the co-author of the new book Re-Engage: How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort Through Extraordinary Engagement, and we're getting a copy that I'll review for you in an upcoming issue of our IDEAS newsletter.

I learned about Hirschfeld's book through his blog, Engaged Employees, Remarkable Results!  His latest post contrasts "dirty, rotten scoundrel"-type leaders – if you close your eyes, I'm sure you can picture at least one that qualifies – with those at the opposite end of the spectrum who leave highly engaged employees in their wake.

He says these leaders are similar in that they:

1. Use their personal power to engage and are committed to creating a great workplace,
2. Inspire confidence in their decisions and direction,
3. Build trust through their honesty and integrity,
4. Practice open, two-way communication,
5. Shun the temptations of executive greed and strive to pay fairly,
6. Genuinely value employees as people, and
7. Lead with respect, not coercion, control, fear, or intimidation.

This list sounds a lot like our building blocks for creating a Winning Workplace, doesn't it?  That's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to digging into this book when it arrives....

Related: Check out the key business results our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award applicants have seen by embracing the leadership traits Hirschfeld writes about and ramping up their team building in the workplace.

One of the more fun (because it's obvious) examples of the payoff of employee engagement is the number and scope of business awards a company can apply for – and win! – on the foundation of a productive workplace.  Just look at the homepage of Top Small Workplace Gentle Giant Moving Co.'s new website.

Yesterday PrintingForLess.com (PFL), the Montana-based, online printing services firm of our Best Boss Andrew Field, announced that they won four 2010 Marketing Plus Awards from the National Association of Printing Leadership.  PFL took home the gold for sales/lead generation and direct mail marketing, and also the silver and a merit award for direct mail marketing.

Even though building trust in the workplace is a journey, PFL is crossing the finish line of a race that started with working on improving how managers interact with employees, and soliciting and acting on everyone's feedback for creating efficiencies in service delivery.  Field outlined his leadership approach that is paying dividends now in the form of these awards, which help with both employee and customer retention, at our annual conference back in 2006.

Congrats to PFL on their milestone here in their continuing quest to use progressive employee engagement practices to remain the #1 online commercial printing company!

For more on PFL, go here on our website and here on this blog.

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?

Late last year I shared a grid that shows the nine most common employee development initiatives used by our 2009 Top Small Workplaces.  One of these employee development strategies is a mentoring or coaching program.

Over 80% of these winning organizations use this practice to spur greater innovation and productivity among their management team, and over 70% do the same for all their salaried employees.

But what shape do these programs take?  In response to this question by a journalist this week, we answered as follows:

Broadly defined, we see two different kinds of mentoring programs.  The first is the mentoring of a brand new employee – they might refer to this as onboarding.  Companies that have great people practices make sure that new employees are "indoctrinated" right away.  Because their workplace culture is so important to them, they don’t want to risk the wrong acclimation.  Instead, they purposefully and proactively assign the new person to one or two leaders in the company.  The majority of the time, the leader/CEO is involved in some way because it is so much about the "tone at the top." 

The second kind of mentoring we see is the more traditional approach of connecting a senior person with a junior person for the purposes of helping the junior person be more successful.  Though we don’t see it in all our finalists and winners, it isn’t unusual.  This setup is the perfect example of what smaller companies can do without spending a lot of money.

Some pitfalls to consider:

• Not having clear goals for the mentor/mentee relationship.
• Not choosing partners who have the right chemistry.
• Not building the groundwork necessary for a productive relationship (building trust and rapport so they can really work well together).
• Not providing true organizational support to set up the partnership for success.  In other words, not treating the relationship as a priority including letting too many other priorities override the time that was set aside for the relationship.

What's the state of mentoring in your organization?  How does it improve your bottom line?

In Denise O'Berry's post on Small Business Trends, "Protect Your Cash or Lose Your Business," the author of Small Business Cash Flow shares six employee engagement strategies for protecting this resource that owners are guarding like their life depends on it (and often in this economy, theirs and those of their workers do).

Among O'Berry's recommendations are:

• Hiring properly
• Fostering open communication
• Helping employees strike a balance between work and life by requiring they take vacation time (resistors could be a red flag of fraud)
• Building trust in the workplace

These tips on O'Berry's list are reflective of our building blocks for creating a Winning Workplace in general – not just when it comes to generating and increasing your positive cash flow and profitability, but also reducing inefficiencies and satisfying employees so they stay longer (reducing turnover) and provide steadily better service to the customer.

Related: Check out these two guest posts, which together highlight 7 ways to work with your banker in good times and bad to stay on great financial footing to run your business.

I really enjoy SmartBrief on Leadership to get a good daily dose of small business news.  In fact, I've mentioned them in no less than four past blog posts.

But they disappointed me slightly when they linked to this article by Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.  Here's SmartBrief's summary of the Kellogg article:

When your service reps need to keep a customer waiting, it's best for everyone if they're vague about the likely delay, according to new research.  Telling customers only that a delay is likely to be "short" or "long" allows them to make an informed decision about whether to stick around -- but helps retain customers who might have left if they'd been given a more precise estimate, researchers found.  "The firm should always try to retain some level of ... ambiguity about the real state of the system," says the study's co-author.

The research here might back this conclusion, but in the real world I just don't buy it.  As a client of several vendors in my work at Winning Workplaces, I have been burned at times when they were vague with me.

Yes, in those instances a little more short-term income was made billing us for work done when we didn't know the whole picture of what was going on.  But by not being clear with us with where they stood, some of them shot themselves in the foot when it came time to renew the annual contract, and they could no longer count on us as a long-term relationship – and as a long-term revenue source.

So I think that, as with employee engagement practices for building trust in the workplace, in customer relations, honesty and detail make for the best policy.  And vague should not be in vogue.

What do you think?

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?

Employee engagement is typically thought of as an offensive strategy – a way to get out ahead of the pack through greater morale and communication that results in increased innovation and productivity, including more customer issues resolved at the first point of contact.

But, as I infer from this post on the Small Business CEO blog, building trust in the workplace can be a defensive strategy to keep your computer network secure.  Calling disgruntled employees one of four top network security threats for midsized businesses, computer systems engineer Adam Oliver says

[A]n unhappy employee can cause huge issues for a business’s IT network and infrastructure while he is there or if he builds a ‘back door’ into the system to access in the event he is fired.  Because they have intimate awareness of and access to your code, they also have the ability to maliciously introduce problems into your network system, causing your network to cease functioning and putting your valuable data in jeopardy.  Unfortunately, the possibilities are numerous and hazardous.

I think Oliver is absolutely right.  And while powerful and numerous people practices can never be a 100% effective deterrent against a breach of your IT infrastructure, the fact that employees are used to a workplace culture with many open communication channels and the possibility for more all the time can make any would-be violators wary of acting out.

Related Posts:

• Although Theft More Rampant at Large Employers, Small Firms Should be on Their Guard, Focus on Employee Engagement
• MakingStories.net's 10 Strategies for Managing Mobile Workers Heavy on Employee Engagement

The only useful lists are of big companies.  There is not enough data to compare small companies on a national basis.

These are the words of Brazen Careerist author Penelope Trunk, from just yesterday on her blog.  I've praised Trunk in the past for her insights into employee engagement and building trust in the workplace.  But I feel the need to offer a rebuttal to this statement, which appears in a comment to her own post on the assumptions behind "top company" lists.

At the end of the day, top small company lists are even more valuable than top large company lists because, according to the SBA, small organizations have generated almost two-thirds of the net new jobs over the last 15 years, and they represent over 99% of all employer firms.  Thus, because of small biz's role in our economic recovery, it's imperative we understand how the top-performing firms keep employees engaged to spur greater innovation and productivity while keeping turnover low.

This brings me to the second part of Trunk's remark: There is not enough data to compare small companies on a national basis.  To this I say, did you receive our email we sent you about our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition with Inc. Magazine?  2010 marks the fourth year of this national research/recognition project.  Over the last three years Winning Workplaces has honored 45 small enterprises from 25 states; 60 more firms were evaluated and named as finalists for this award.  In total over the last three years more than 1,200 organizations have applied from every state.

But to truly push back on Trunk's point, I can't just mention our award program.  We weren't the first to the small biz research space and we certainly won't be the last.  Here are some other prominent small and midsized business recognition programs:

• Best Small & Medium Companies to Work for in America (Great Place to Work Institute)
• Fast 50 (Fast Company Magazine)
• Best Places to Work by State/Industry (Best Companies Group)
• Best Employers for Workers Over 50 (AARP)
• Top 50 Companies fo Diversity (DiversityInc Magazine)

Readers, what small biz and/or workplace awards have you applied for that are not listed above?

When I have written before about telecommuting, it has been from the perspective of employee engagement and satisfaction, as well as a productive workplace when it comes to more peak-performance hours worked and lower turnover.

But embracing this core component of helping workers achieve work/life balance has another benefit.  I'll let one of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces applicants explain it, who shared this feedback after completing his company's official application last week:

All of our competitors still rely on brick and mortar operations, and by paying our staff top dollar and allowing them to be at home, I as the CEO feel good that we really do take care of our staff.  When all you hear on the news is that corporations are bad and business is taking advantage of workers, I at least can sleep at night knowing we do good by our staff.  And the application really made me realize that.

This, of course, raises another question: Is CEO health linked to employee satisfaction?  I'm guessing there's a correlation here, although I'm not aware of any studies that would prove it.

If you think your practices for building trust in the workplace are not only beneficial to your employees in a tough economy, but are having a powerful, lasting impact on your bottom line and competitiveness, you should apply today to be named a Top Small Company Workplace in Inc. Magazine in 2010.

As he often does, Marc Tracy at Slate's BizBox site pointed me to some compelling small business research.  In this case, CNNMoney's report of a decline in lending by TARP recipients to small firms by more than $10 billion since April.

These big banks have branches in large- to medium-size cities.  But what about small cities and towns?  What's the credit situation like for businesses there?

It's arguably better.  While, as small town and rural business expert Becky McCray told us as part of an interview we did with her last year, companies based in those areas have fewer options for access to credit, those communities tend to be off cycle from what the national economy is doing.

I think a trend that underscores what McCray alluded to is that smaller community banks generally have a better sense of their customer needs and keep a clearer head for long-term growth than do larger banks.  In another article Winning Workplaces ran, with two of our Top Small Workplace honorees that are community banks in smaller cities, they told us they're in a better position to lend today because they eschewed the trends big banks jumped on – relaxing credit standards and taking on high leverage – in the run-up to the financial meltdown last fall.

And having a pulse on customer needs to avoid being swayed by potentially disastrous market trends starts with having a pulse on staff needs through employee engagement practices for building trust in the workplace.  Read all about this and get takeaways for your industry/business in our Success Stories on the two community banks I mentioned above: Phelps County Bank and Paducah Bank & Trust.

If you run a business in a small city or town, how has access to credit been for you over the past year?

Image credit: Gridley Marketplace

In Winning Workplaces' latest check-in with the over 100 small organizations that we've honored for their innovative people practices for building trust in the workplace, we shared a lot of qualitative feedback directly from their leaders on what they're doing to remain competitive in a tough economy.

With this qualitative focus, our October newsletter article largely eschewed quantitative data.  But that doesn't mean we didn't gather it.  Check out the charts below to get more of a sense of how these firms are doing in Q4 2009 compared to Q2.

Changes in sales has your company has experienced in the last six months:

While about 5% more companies experienced a more moderate decrease in sales in Q4 than in Q2, about half as many dealt with a major decrease of 30% more in Q4 than did in Q2.

Actions your business has taken in response to the tough economy:

The key difference from six months ago is that more firms have implemented salary cuts for employees – 30% in Q4 versus 17% in Q2.

Changes in profitability you expect to see in the next 12 months:

The biggest changes in expectations from Q2 to Q4 were:

• 20% drop in the number that expect a decrease in profitability of 5-10%
• Whereas in Q2 no respondents expected an increase of 5-10%, in Q4 close to 22% expect this outcome

How does your business compare to the aggregate data shown here?  What role has employee engagement played in shaping your performance?

Celebrating the company's 10th anniversary, SouthWest Horse Trader ran a nice article last week on SmartPak, the Massachusetts-based provider of horse and small animal supplements whose CEO, Paal Gisholt, Winning Workplaces named a Best Boss in 2006.

Here are some of the impressive milestones the trade publication points to that underscore the return on investment (ROI) of SmartPak's employee activities:

• Over 150 million products (nutritional supplements) served
• 300 employees (the company had fewer than 70 when we honored Gisholt)
• In addition to their core product, they've added a fully licensed pharmacy as well as tack and riding apparel

What's more, according to Paal, who co-hosted a webinar for us last summer on building trust in the workplace, SmartPak has enjoyed revenue growth at 10 times the industry rate!

How do the company's team building strategies contribute to greater market share and steady revenue and employee growth?  These past posts on the firm provide a blueprint:

• Don't Be Afraid to Expand Employee Training to Include General Career Advancement Skills
• Two Ways to Reinforce Employee Behavior
• Friday Nugget: Work SMARTER, Not Harder

You can find even more info on SmartPak on our website.  Just click here and enter "smartpak" into the Search box on the upper right.

Here's to many more years of continued success for this inspiring small business and – given our current economy – for their employees and their families and communities.

Image credit: Zazzle

Is it just me or does Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, sound of late like the leader of a Top Small Workplace?

SmartBrief today referenced a recent New York Times interview with Blankfein, whose current leadership stance they summarize as follows:

It's not enough for employees to show up on time and do their jobs well...  Workers need to have broad views of their responsibilities, so that everyone is watching out for everyone else.  Creating that kind of environment starts with the leader, he notes, because workers are more likely to accept responsibility for each other when their boss has empowered them to take risks.

Broad views of responsibilities, taking risks – loyal readers of this blog have heard these steps for greater workforce effectiveness before from our Top Small Workplaces.

Mostly privately held, these honored small firms value long-term brand integrity before the shorter-term goals of publicly held firms, such as steady returns for their shareholders.  Which makes Blankfein's assessment last week that Wall Street bonuses are out of control all the more interesting.

Yesterday Daily Finance charted Goldman Sachs' "amazing rebound" after the financial system nearly ground to a halt a year ago.  James Cullen wrote that while the company initially looked like it had the most to lose from the panic, it restored itself through two building blocks common among Winning Workplaces:

• Trust, Respect & Fairness for the customer: Like (on a much smaller scale) Paducah Bank and Phelps County Bank, Goldman Sachs avoided many of the bad mortgage assets that its competitors embraced.
• Open Communication: Cullen says that while mum was the word from other investment firm management teams last September – other than to say that all was well on a ship that was clearly sinking – Goldman Sachs had the fortitude to reach out to investor Warren Buffett and give him "attractive terms" on his preferred stock investment.

Do you think there's some truth to my thoughts on this, or am I off base?  Also, I did some digging but couldn't find much in the way of how employee engagement best practices have helped Goldman Sachs recover.  I welcome your findings on this in the Comments section.

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure, since it's one of my favorite shows, to attend a taping of the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory.  If you're not familiar this show features four unlikely protagonists: two physicist roommates, Sheldon and Leonard, and their two friends who are fellow scientists at Caltech, Howard and Rajesh.

Unlikely is also the word I would use to describe this venue in the context of building trust in the workplace.  Yet there were many related lessons on display during the taping at Warner Bros.:

• Trust that audience members would be properly screened by the outsourced security team before being allowed onto the soundstage (and we were – twice).
• Trust between the guy responsible for ensuring we're all excited, take after take of each scene, and the audience.  I didn't catch the gentleman's name whose job this was, but he skirted the line between courteousness and firmness wonderfully.  There were only two outburts from the crowd in appreciation for Jim Parsons, who is up for an Emmy for his portrayal of Sheldon.
• Trust that what is in effect a small business, the production team, would complete their work in a timely fashion.  In this context, stakeholders whose time is valuable include both the actors and the audience.
• Trust by the production team that even with expensive HD cameras rolling, the actors can take the time needed to find their comfort zone.  Several actors needed to reread what appeared to be brand new dialogue and quickly internalize it.  Not an easy feat given the smart-sounding words they're given for this particular cast of characters.
• Trust that the audience won't go blabbing plot points before they've aired (my lips are sealed).

My point is, employee engagement – again, if you think of the Warner Bros. production team for this show as a business – was palpable.  People weren't in their own silos; they were communicating to bring out the best in everyone around them.  The goal was to get the episode in the can and get people to their cars at a reasonable time.  In my view, they succeeded.

What are some unlikely places you've drawn inspiration or guidance from when it comes to your workplace trust building activities?

Remember when blogs – or "weblogs" as they were called when they first emerged on WordPress and Movable Type – were as near and dear to the C-suite as an ethics scandal?  In 2006 Debbie Weil wrote The Corporate Blogging Book and since that time they've become all the rage for organizations and the executives at many of them.

If you're not yet on the blogging bandwagon, you just got two big pushes to get on:

1. Microsoft's Bing is a new, major player in the search engine space, joining Google, Yahoo, Ask, and others.  Since blogs are inherently search engine-friendly, your firm stands to gain from the extra traffic this "first-ever decision engine" will send you.

Oh, and it will send it to you.  Bing wasn't even on the map in terms of referral sites for our blog in May, and in July it was the #3 referral site – contributing to a whopping 85% increase in visitors!  (Thanks, Bill Gates.)

2. Then there's HubSpot's latest research on the substantial boost in several webmaster-friendly metrics that blogs deliver.  Picking up on it, Small Business Search Marketing wrote yesterday that companies with a blog have:

• 55% more visitors
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more indexed pages

These stats translate to not only more people perusing your website but, even better, more new people.  It's like you just opened a new location outside a train station.

Related: Last year I shared a tip that combines the business need to blog with your imperative for building trust in the workplace across all generations of workers.  Check it out, put it to use, and evaluate the impact on your team building and employee engagement.