Employee Activities

My fellow Drake University alum Jennie Dorris – a former entrepreneur who founded the Internet-based Knot.magazine – penned a powerful, firsthand account this week for Denver's 5280 magazine on how the recession has "fused" her workaholic tendencies into her definition of self.

Although she speaks from the point of view of a freelance writer, I think even folks who are content working for someone else, and not being in business for themselves, can relate to the symptoms of burnout Jennie describes.

Just as some economists are predicting that we need to get used to the idea of a "new norm" of unemployment at or above 10% and extremely slow GDP growth, I worry that employees and independent contractors, not to mention the newest generation of entrepreneurs, will need to accept the new norm that sacrifices personal/family commitments and involvement and even investment in their communities in the name of work – including, as Jennie says, the overwhelming pressure to say "Yes" to every opportunity.

Ironically, even though – speaking of new norms – the focus in employers both large and small these days is on goal completion and showing bottom line results (fueling management trends such as lean and ROWE), these same employers owe it to themselves, at the end of the day, to encourage a healthy balance with all of their stakeholders.  This includes all three I mentioned above: employees and ICs and, yes, their vendors and suppliers, which lead their own workforces.

The reasons to fight back against the tide of work as redefinition of self are compelling: burned out workers are less productive and are more likely to leave given the opportunity, adding to a company's turnover costs.  At a larger, societal level, their consumption by work takes away from their ability to participate in their communities (including being good consumers, which spurs economic growth), and be effective parents to the next generation of workers and consumers.

What can be done to reverse course here?  Small businesses that actively manage their workplace culture and have a strong pulse on the needs of their employees, like our Top Small Company Workplace award applicants, are building safeguards to prevent burnout into their employee engagement strategies.

For example, 58% of our 2010 applicant firms offer wellness/fitness programs as part of their employee benefits.  And over 80% of them offer flexible work arrangements – I blogged yesterday about some of their top practices.

These employee activities are not going to turn things around overnight, particularly if the economy worsens.  But as BP is saying when it comes to their efforts on the renewable energy front, "It's a start."  I happen to think it's a good start.

Related: Read our editorial on the cost of job stress.

The U.S. has survived and, most often during its 234-year history, thrived under a forward-thinking Bill of Rights.  Much more recently, innovative airline JetBlue has turned its industry on its ear and even inspired action by the White House through its Customer Bill of Rights – which, from a consumer's point of view, is one of the few bright spots amidst a slew of disappointing developments like this one.

If the Bill of Rights concept works, why not apply it to the workplace culture?  After all, research shows that more highly engaged employees result in stronger company earnings, and lead those firms to more resiliency in down economies like the one we're in now.

That – along with fair treatment of, and an adequate living wage for, employees – is the idea behind Workplace Fairness' proposed Workplace Bill of Rights.  The 9 "basic rights [they] believe every worker should be entitled to" that they spell out here are the basis of a petition in partnership with Change.org.  The signatures gathered will be presented to the Obama Administration, through which a best-case scenario would produce widespread adoption of the bill by employers.

The largest hurdle before this initiative is, of course, business owners' uncertainty of the payoff of employee engagement, or of anything beyond what they're already doing in a tough economy.  This is especially true of small businesses, which comprise the vast majority of employers and tend to be under-resourced versus their larger peers.

To help prove the point of my title for this post, and hopefully help overcome this hurdle, I've linked some of the 9 basic employee rights* Workplace Fairness is advocating to bottom line business results that Winning Workplaces has seen in our small business award honorees, and confirmed in workplace research by others – both of which I've blogged about previously:

• Employees should be treated with honesty and respect – Among our 2010 small business award applicants, employee activities designed to foster greater respect helped them grow 2009 revenues 12% over 2008, on average.
• Working full-time should guarantee a basic standard of living – Paying only 5% over the minimum wage saves a business almost $2,200 per employee in turnover costs.
• No working person should be without health insurance – An average increase in employer-paid employee medical premiums of 6.8% of our 2009 small business award finalists, over their 2008 counterparts, led to increases in employee tenure and year-over-year revenue growth, and a decrease in turnover.
• Employees should be able to leave a job with dignity – Our 2008 award winners' universal adoption of retirement plans that match employee contributions at an average rate of 2.8% is linked to double-digit, year-over-year revenue growth and average per-employee revenue of over $200,000.
• There is more to life than work – We pointed to Talent Management's citation of a Corporate Executive Board analysis which shows that strategies to promote work/life balance can raise workplace productivity by 21% and employee tenure by 33%.

The net impact of these business outcomes is stronger sales from a larger, more satisfied customer base, which adds up to job growth and ultimately a more robust economy over time.

If you see benefits for both employees and companies in WF's Workplace Bill of Rights, you can help to advance it by signing their petition here.

*Update: Workplace Fairness Executive Director Paula Brantner informed me that even though their list was promoted as having 9 employee rights, there are actually 10.  See toward the bottom of their petition, as well as the voting/comments page over at Change.org. 

I just posted a poll on LinkedIn.  You can go here to vote on it.  (You have to be on LinkedIn to do so – you can sign up for free here.  Once you do, don't forget to join our group!)

I'm testing a hypothesis: I suspect that most respondents will say that when they catch up on posts for a blog they subscribe to in their feed reader (I use Google Reader), having too many posts to read per day is more annoying than average posts being too long.

Why am I going down this path?  It does have a link back to small business and activities for employee engagement, I promise.

I got to thinking the other day, when I was doing a bit of winter cleaning of my blog subscriptions, that blogs with either one very prolific writer (Chris Brogan comes to mind) or many writers (see Small Business Trends) that pump out a lot of content might turn off some otherwise engaged subscribers based solely on the volume of text they need to read each day to stay informed – even if, as is the case with the two above-mentioned blogs, the content is always first rate.

This is one of the reasons I'm the sole blog writer for Winning Workplaces: one person writing two or three posts-worth per day does not equate to an unwieldy burden for our readers.  (At least, I hope it doesn't.  *wink*)

Now, change blog content to your product/service line, including your marketing efforts, and answer the following questions:

1. In your (understandable) quest to appeal to as many potential customers as possible, and to cater to the ongoing demands of existing customers, has your product/service line become a burden in its size or complexity?
2. Have you ever surveyed customers on this?  Specifically, have you asked them if ease of understanding of your offerings is a point of difference vs. your competitors?
3. Turning inward – inside the workplace – in support of a culture of ownership, have you similarly surveyed your employees about their understanding of what you sell?

You might be surprised by the honest feedback you solicit from all stakeholders through these questions – including your own in response to question #1.

As John Jantsch wrote on his Duct Tape Marketing blog last week, the simplest secret to business growth is finding what works and doing more of it.  By extension, for your organization this could mean ditching what doesn't work, including products/services that are redundant or not easily understood.

Do you know what active disengagement refers to in discussions of employee engagement?  As the Workplace Insiders blog writes this week, citing a landmark 2006 Gallup study, it is the share of workers who are neither engaged, nor unengaged.

According to Workplace Insiders via Gallup, actively disengaged employees "are not only unhappy, but ... daily act out their unhappiness and undermine their co-workers."  Gallup has found that 15% of U.S. employees fall into this category.

How can you better engage employees so this category of worker is reduced or eliminated, so you don't have to suffer lower productivity from it?  Workplace Insiders echoes Winning Workplaces' advice here:

1. Develop a detailed intention to engage employees, and
2. Devote attention to what needs to be done.

This means a commitment by leadership with the understanding that employee engagement activities represent an ongoing journey, not a quick fix.

How does the share of actively disengaged employees in your organization compare to Gallup's national benchmark of 15%?  Have you done the research to know how many of your workers are disengaged?

At Winning Workplaces, we often say that small organizations that rise to the top of our annual Top Small Company Workplaces competition have built unique workplace cultures.  But "unique" can encompass all manner of individual and group dynamics as part of a communications team building environment.

One of these dynamics that has a real appeal for current and prospective employees is being, well, weird.  No less a successful company than Zappos proudly waves their weird flag, as their CEO, Tony Hsieh, shared this weekend in The New York Times.

Companies that are a lot smaller and scrappier than Zappos also find success in recruiting, sales, and a whole host of other business metrics through employee activities designed to maintain an offbeat culture.  One of these is Caturano and Company, the accounting and business services firm of Winning Workplaces Best Boss Richard Caturano.  We profile their outside-the-box approach to their people practices in our Success Story on the Massachusetts-based company.

One more point I would add is, look for this trend to only increase in the coming years.  A driver here is that, as Upstarts! author Donna Fenn shared with us recently, the emerging leadership generation of Millennials are purposely forming businesses that shun the corporate cultures of their parents' employers.

What do you think about the effectiveness of "weird" company cultures in today's marketplace?

As you probably know, if you've read this blog for a while, since August I've worked for Chicago-based Winning Workplaces out of a home office in Los Angeles.  That's right, I'm among the roughly 28% of workers who telecommute.

What you don't know is that I live in a fairly high-traffic area, only blocks from the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  This means that for a good portion of the day, including into the evening, I hear everything you'd expect from people competing to get to their destination on a congested road – near-crash screeches, all manner of honking, and occasional car-to-car shouting.

I've become used to the din.  In fact, when I'm working I tune it out completely by listening to local radio station The Sound on the Internet.  But, like Virginia Madsen's character in Sideways and wine, I sometimes think about the lives and motivations of the folks in the cars and trucks below me.  And I've thought of some lessons that heavy traffic can teach about trying to get ahead in this crazy world we call business:

1. It's not about the packaging, but the aptitude and skill of the person inside.  I've seen stellar driving from Dodge Neons and dreadful turns by Ferraris.  Likewise, in business, someone in a JCPenney suit can present a better business plan than someone clad in Armani.
2. Gunning it and taking it slow and steady can lead to the same outcome.  You know what I'm talking about: a "weaver" in a sporty car or truck thinks he or she owns the road.  Yet, they often end up at the same place at a light as traffic moving at normal speed.  In business, a pushy salesperson might get to the "No" faster than a more unassuming employee, but who's learned more along the way to turn that lead or others around in the future?
3. The rules of the road don't just apply when getting started on it.  When I drive I try to follow traffic regulations every day, not just when I take my driver's test.  Obviously, though, many drivers only think of them when they cause an accident or get pulled over for speeding.  As we have seen especially over the past year on Wall Street, ignoring rules and regulations can cause damage to the business itself, plus a lot of innocent bystanders (read: taxpayers).
4. Road rage is almost never constructive.  The California Driver Handbook says it's much better to take your foot off the gas, breathe, and reassess when things get heated.  When talking about workplace team building and employee engagement, how many front-line workers would perform better if more bosses followed this advice, even flipping the stereotype by looking for things done right instead of wrong?

Thinking about the activities for employee engagement in your company, what traffic analogies come to mind?  (What would you add to this list?)

It can be tough to link employee engagement to greater productivity.  Yes, the research is out there – including ours – but investing in your workplace can still be a tough sell for company owners and leaders.  Wally Bock and readers of his Three Star Leadership Blog get into why this is on one of his more popular posts.

Making the case this week that employee satisfaction contributes directly to not only company productivity but macro economic performance (in the current business climate, recovery) is American Express's OPEN Small Business Forum.  Profiling 2009 Top Small Workplace Bailard Inc., a California-based investment management firm, OPEN's VP of Brand Management, Marcy Shinder, shows how Bailard's communications team building practices result in tangible business outcomes including:

• 98% retention rate of clients over the past 5 years
• Average employee tenure of 13 years – "longer than any other company on the Top Small Workplace list"

I'm happy one of our Top Small Workplaces is getting some great additional exposure beyond their profile in the 2009 winners announcement in The Wall Street Journal.  But more exciting to me is that the link between employee activities and economic recovery is getting far greater visibility.  (The OPEN Forum website gets close to 400,000 unique visitors a month according to Compete.)

Related Post: Bailard Inc. Props Up Investment Management's Rep

Lending, especially to small businesses that make up more than 99% of all employer firms, is a hot topic of conversation these days.  In fact, I addressed it in my last post.

Yet, the always insightful Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends has a different take: more vital to small businesses right now than lending is customers.  The resulting sales, she says, pump sorely needed capital into the economy and fuel (also sorely needed) job growth.

Campbell's post got me thinking: If customers are what small business needs most – and I think she's absolutely right here – how can these firms use employee engagement and team building strategies to attract new customers and keep existing customers enthused enough to keep coming back?

The posts below provide real-world examples of employee activities geared toward improving the customer experience.  Check them out:

1. 'Happy Employees Translate Into Happy Customers'
2. Customer Evangelism Begins with Employees
3. All Employee Recognition Roads Lead to Greater Company Productivity
4. Employee Development ROI: 80 Percent of Revenues from Return Business or Referrals
5. The Golden Rule: Not Typical of B-School Curricula, But Necessary for Successful Small Businesses
6. Rackspace's Graham Weston: 'No Voicemail Jail for You!'
7. 10 Company-Building Lessons Learned by a Successful Entrepreneur (Plus 2 Bonus Lessons)
8. Airline Customer Service: The Difference Employee Engagement Makes
9. What the Luxury Brands Are Doing That You Should, Too
10. The Power of Saying or Showing Thanks

Do you have any tips you'd like to share with your fellow readers?  Please add them in the comments below.

At Winning Workplaces' annual conference this year, Rackspace Hosting Chairman Graham Weston spoke about the necessity for small businesses to create a virtuous cycle of employee engagement to spur higher customer satisfaction, as opposed to a "doom loop" or progressively poorer satisfaction (and exodus) that can occur with inadequate workplace team building.

Commonly used in management circles, the concept of the doom loop can, of course, be applied at a macro level in the context of the productive workplace.  Ominously, The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Sloan Work and Family Research Network (Boston College) have all written recently describing a doom loop that seems to be occurring with respect to employee benefit cuts, worker health, and productivity that directly affects the bottom line.

Here's a diagram that shows how this plays out:

This is pretty unsettling given our sluggish economy.  Still, as the Globe points out, at the individual level – activities that that fuel workplace culture, where the rubber meets the road, so to speak – progress is being made.  As companies in similar and even dissimilar industries learn about what's working for some firms, practices and behaviors change.  Eventually, the doom loop depicted above can be reversed, becoming a virtuous cycle.  (At least, that's my hope – and, I suspect, the hope of other promoters of the payoff of employee engagement.)

One of the companies the Globe identifies as part of the effort to turn this doom loop around is 2007 Top Small Workplace NRG Systems.  Learn more about this company's innovative employee activities here.

One of the cool takeaways from Winning Workplaces' annual conference this year was from the session on Open Brand/Open Business/Open Culture.  This session, which explained the value of transparency and social networking in business relationships, was presented by these two business leaders and moderated by a faculty member from DePaul University's entrepreneurship center.

The takeaway I'm referring to is the book The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World, which attendees of this session received.  A team effort of 2008 Top Small Workplace Resource Interactive (RI), it contains 200 pages of great tips when it comes to leveraging the power of the Internet and social media to create community awareness around your brand and products/services.

I definitely see activities for employee engagement in the strategies RI outlines (I'm reading the book now).  You might, for instance, keep employees engaged in exploring the three tips provided on page 84, which answer the question of how to make consumer "acceptable bias" work in your favor:

1. Enable and foster dialogue about your brand and products without seeming to influence.
2. Give your online, potential customers a forum, a gathering place, a community of their own.  "If such places already exist for sharing product opinions and tips – and it's highly likely they do, tread lightly on their turf and identify your contributions."
3. Organize your reviews by affinity groups so it's easy for consumers to find the insights of others like themselves.  (RI points to this as an example to emulate.)

For more on Resource Interactive and how they're delivering for their clients in part through innovative staff engagement activities, check out these posts:

• Office Space: It's Not the Size That Matters – It's How You Use It
• When It Comes to Work Habits, the Unconventional Can Be the Most Productive
• Let's Hear It for the Ladies!
• It's a Workplace Eat Dog World

Meet Leslie Kahn.  One of the newest members of Winning Workplaces' LinkedIn group, Leslie founded Chicago-based KneadALaugh, which provides "fun and unique on-site stress relief to overworked employees."

These days, with business leaders needing to do more with less, that's pretty much all employees.

So, how are KneadALaugh and services like it received by said leaders?  Leslie offered me a candid assessment via LinkedIn:

In this economic downturn, the typical response to my services is, "In this economy??"  So, instead of trying to make their employees (who are doing at least a job and a half for no extra pay) happy by giving them a 15-minute massage or making them laugh, they don't help them reduce their stress in any way.

This tendency to focus even less on employee activities that provide some value-adds when it comes to health and wellness as the economy has worsened stem from how hard the majority of businesses the in U.S. – small ones – have been hit when it comes to health care premiums.  As Marc Tracy shared today on Slate's BizBox Blog, a study cited by the White House finds that small businesses pay up to 18% more than large firms for the same health insurance policy.

The flip side is that, when businesses engage employees in services such as those courtesy KneadALaugh, workers appreciate the aid and gesture, and become more committed.  This can help tremendously when it comes to maintaining or increasing productivity while keeping absenteeism in check.

Looking for more proof that employee massages fit into a framework of workplace team building that helps the bottom line?  Read about these companies we've covered that offer them:

• American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)
• Interactive Applications Group (iapps)
• Northeast Delta Dental
• Phenomenex

When we were in school, we were told that even though doing our homework is no picnic, it's important to absorbing material that will help us in our lives.

The same holds true in an organizational sense.  Small business leaders, in fact, are quite accustomed to doing their homework: when writing viable business plans, when bringing on investors or otherwise seeking capital, and when building management teams that will complement their skills.

So it makes sense that this process shouldn't stop when it comes to building teams in the workplace.  On The Recruiters Lounge blog last week, Melanie Quinn spelled out why employee engagement research is intrinsically tied to business success:

An employee engagement study can enable Human Resource professionals to have an ongoing “pulse” of their employees’ opinions and attitudes.  Moreover, the research results can provide you with “hard” supporting data that can be utilized in your discussions with management, allowing them to make informed decisions regarding the organization’s success.

She lists three broad best practices to follow and provides supporting tips under each:

1. Brainstorm with senior managers and obtain buy-in
2. Communicate and share
3. Follow up

Much of what The Recruiters Lounge advocates here aligns with what Winning Workplaces counsels small firms to do to convert activities for employee engagement to stronger business performance.

How, and how often, do you do this type of homework at the manager level or below in your company?

Image credit: Discovery Education

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

Recently I cited HR blog Cheezhead and U.S. News & World Report in warning business leaders that they need to take a fresh look at their people practices for improving employee retention to avoid losing their best workers to organizations in other countries.

This past weekend The Huffington Post provided more clear evidence that this focus should be moved from leaders' "rainy day" to-do lists to the top of their agenda.  The site reported that China is quickly moving up the short list of countries that are attractive to U.S.-based workers because its government

1. will create millions of new jobs this year, while at the same time
2. it has reduced the time involved in granting a locally based company permission to hire a foreign worker – 15 days on average, a lot less time than this process takes in other countries

While the HuffPost article notes that it can still be difficult for foreign job seekers looking for work in China to compete with their domestic workforce, the above trends tied to the Chinese government should be cause for concern among U.S.-based CEOs.

Related: A speaker for our conference in Chicago next week, Decagon Devices' Tamsin Jolley, presented a webinar for us earlier this year on retaining technical talent, but many of the employee activities she recommended can be applied to any kind of talent.  Access a recording of this webinar here.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

One of the richest resources for inspiration and learning on employee engagement for both workers and their bosses is closing up virtual shop.

Yesterday Slow Leadership's creator and lead writer, Carmine Coyote, posted the text of a goodbye note he sent to their newsletter subscribers on their website.  There is wisdom in his last word that relates directly to the power of employee activities for greater workforce effectiveness:

[T]he very best leadership, I am convinced, is engaging in as few “managerial” activities as possible [emphasis his].  By this I mean creating plans and budgets, setting strategies, setting up mergers and acquisitions, discussing policies, holding meetings, marketing, branding, analyzing data and the like.  Nearly all such actions get in the way of real business and lie at the heart of most problems that leaders face.  If you must do something, encourage and train your staff, talk with customers, monitor quality and spend as much time as you can with “non-managerial” actions like inventing new products and services and improving old ones.

The vast repository of knowledge Coyote has built up over the last five years will surely live on in some online incarnation.  I encourage you to continue to visit Slow Leadership when you need help getting employees engaged.

This resource has served as the jumping-off point for several posts on this blog.  Check them out below:

• Mark of a Top Small Workplace: Less 'Delusional Optimism'
• Let's Hear It for the Ladies!
• The Three C's of a Thriving Work Culture (Really One C)
• 30 Blogs for Small Business and Entrepreneurship

Check out this snippet of an article that appears on the Business Mirror's Philippines site:

Dr. E. Thomas Garman, who has done over 20 years of research on financial literacy, calculates that the benefit-to-cost ratio to employers of empowering their employees financially through financial education is 3:1.  ...  [T]hese studies and calculations are for US workers....

When asked what would make them financially free, employees would normally say a higher pay.  But both Dr. Garman and I believe that more money is not the answer; better personal financial management is.  ...

Employee financial education is a critical component of employee-wellness programs.  When properly executed, employee financial education will help reduce stress both at the workplace and at home.

This is the opinion of Efren Ll. Cruz, a financial planner with the Registered Financial Planners Institute USA.  When it comes to your workplace team building and employee engagement best practices, he makes the case for including a financial education component to reap the following benefits that make up the $3 gained (in some cases, saved) for every $1 spent on these programs:

• Lower employee stress related to finances - means fewer unscheduled absences, less use of sick leave, and higher productivity
• Enhanced company loyalty
• Better appreciation of and participation in company benefits
• Employee retirement readiness

Related: Our Workplace Perspectives feature on employee finances.

Do your employee activities involve a financial education component?  If yes, what is your related benefit-to-cost ratio?

Photo credit: Benefits and Pensions Monitor

Check out this Google Map I created that shows the U.S. locations of the Top Small Workplaces that we've honored the last two years:

(If you're viewing this post in an RSS reader, you may have to click on the title to see the map.)

Zoom in and click on a marker to see:

• Company name
• Year honored
• Industry
• A link to either their Success Story we've written about them, or their Top Small Workplaces Winner snapshot page (we've still got six 2008 winners to write features on before the 2009 winners are named in The Wall Street Journal in late September).

I hope you enjoy exploring our honored firms geographically and learning about their activities for employee engagement and team building that make for a productive workplace culture.

Have feedback about the map?  Drop me a comment.

We are all about transparency at Winning Workplaces.  Longtime readers of this blog have been privy to information on applicants and honorees of our Top Small Workplaces recognition project with The Wall Street Journal such as:

• Metrics they're using to measure the ROI of employee engagement
• Employee engagement strategies to motivate workers
• Benchmarks for medical insurance premium coverage for employees and their dependents
• Vacation leave best practices
• Elements of a strong employee ownership culture
• Trends of applicants over the last three years when it comes to revenue, revenue growth, and turnover

Today I'm continuing this trend by providing you with leading-edge employee development strategies as used by our 35 finalists for Top Small Workplaces 2009.  Check them out:

1. 30-day orientation for new employees
2. Future leaders groomed with a mix of executive education, developmental assignments, job rotations, mentoring, diagnostic skills testing, and coaching
3. 3x3 performance/potential matrix to tailor development
4. In-house sales coach
5. Open books, share financials, and teach employees how to read financials (note: not for every company)
6. Weekly "storytime sessions" to instill a sense of community and provide a mechanism for open timely communication to paint the big picture
7. Learning across and between teams
8. Tuition assistance – up to $5200 annually per employee
9. Informal mentoring
10. Task forces including exploration of career paths for non-traditional employees, communication of "essence of firm," pairing younger employees with management group, and soliciting feedback
11. Hiring a training coordinator
12. Lunch & learns
13. Leadership training
14. Recruit internally for new positions and leadership roles before seeking outside candidates
15. CEO conducts one-on-one career advancement meetings with those interested in a leadership role
16. Multifaceted development program: outside professional instructors + classroom training + experiential on-the-job learning
17. Outside coaching resources made available to all directors and senior leaders
18. Employees not only encouraged to bring their ideas, but to take the lead in realizing those ideas
19. Extensive cross-training allows employees to be added to on-call staffing list in case of an after-hours emergency
20. Company employees active in local university curriculum (community outreach)
21. Series of educational seminars over a six-month period provided employees with a common vocabulary to discuss work phases and preferences
22. Performance evaluation – review previous performance and establish continuous improvement goals for the coming year
23. "90 percent solution" – employees given 90% ownership in each project
24. All goals set by department heads according to the mantra "How can you be best used?"
25. Ownership classes on topics including making fiscally sound business decisions, incentive plans, key performance indicators, finance for non-financial managers, and the basics on profit and loss
26. Every employee required to attend course in conflict management and dialogue skills
27. Weeks with no travel are set aside each year with a focus on training and development
28. Mentorship program focused on developing younger industry talent in light of approaching talent crunch due to retirement
29. Sales Professional Development Day for all account executives on business skills, knowledge sharing, coaching, mentoring, and software training
30. 10-minute daily stand up meetings in departments

If you find this list of employee leadership development strategies helpful, I invite you to share them with your team using the button below.  Thanks.

For a two-part feature we'll be running in our January and February newsletters, yesterday I spoke with David Spitulnik, Director of Strategic Services for Blackman Kallick, one of the largest accounting firms in Chicago.  We'll be following up with them on their recent survey of Chicago-area business leaders on the topic of the economy, which I blogged about this past fall.

David provided a wealth of information, but I was particularly impressed with the following clip, where he reveals feedback from their clients – mostly privately held, long-running small and midsized firms – on their employee engagement best practices when it comes to open communication:

mp3 - 2 MB - 2:11

David's bottom line?  Even though it can be tough, more and more small firms (at least in Chicago) are actively using employee engagement to leverage their people's ideas to get a leg up at the organizational level and survive this recession.  "If you don't talk about things, what is gossip becomes reality," he said.

This is a small and inexpensive example of "sharing the pain" – a theme our Chairman, Ken Lehman, will comment on in his Workplace Perspectives editorial in our January issue, which will go out to our subscribers early next week.  (If you're not yet a subscriber, click here to join.  It's free.)

What do you think of David's comments?  If your business is to provide services or counsel to other companies, are you getting extra phone calls from your clients right now where the subtext is seeking workplace practice advice?

Image credit: GameSpot

I thought the most telling moment of yesterday's Capitol Hill hearing between chief executives of the "Big Three" U.S. automakers – Richard Wagoner of General Motors, Robert Nardelli of Chrysler and Alan Mulally of Ford – and the House Financial Services Committee occurred when commitee member Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked for a show of hands from the three business leaders indicating they flew commercial to Washington, and planned on selling their private company jets afterward and flying commercial back to their headquarters.

Check out this video to see their reaction (about a minute in).

As The Washington Post's Dana Milbank noted today, this was grandstanding by Sherman and the committee, to be sure.  Yet the incident, along with other recent big business aid requests that have been soured by their own controversial, big-ticket purchases (I'm looking at you, AIG) brings to the fore once again that, at many large firms, the front-line employees take most of the risks when times are bad – reduced or cut pensions, slimmed-down shifts, threat of layoffs – but share in few or none of the rewards, whether times are great or tough.

Due to their size, changing market conditions, and most importantly their leadership philosophy, the small and midsize organizations we've honored over the years for their productive employee engagement and team building strategies tend to operate much differently.  As we discovered as a theme among our 2008 Top Small Workplaces, in trying to build sustainable workplace cultures that will lead to bottom-line sustainability, these enterprises use policies and practices that set their employees up to share in both the risks and the rewards.

What has this meant on the risk side, when the economy and/or their markets have presented challenges?  2008 winner JA Frate, a trucking company in Illinois, and 2007 winner Corporate Ink, a Boston-based PR firm for the tech industry, both faced the loss of key clients in recent years.  In both cases, leadership opened a frank dialogue with employees, the consensus result of which were all staff, including the CEO, taking a temporary pay cut until conditions improved.  Also in both cases, during the darkest days leaders and managers worked closely with employees on cost cutting, improving processes, increasing the satisfaction of their remaining clients, and identifying new clients.

Business eventually improved for both firms, which have emerged stronger for their experiences partly because of the workplace team building that was fostered.  "They really stand behind you," a JA Frate employee who went through their ordeal told us.  "They're not just making a dollar, they're helping the employee."

When times are good, what are some measures that Top Small Workplaces use to reward employees for their contributions?  The most typical performance-based incentives include profit sharing, bonuses, sales commissions, and stock options.

So remember this tip from our 2008 Top Small Workplaces Benchmarking and Best Practices Report when reviewing your employee engagement activities: Giving employees a stake in the outcome provides a focus on key goals and priorities, and it also breeds an employee ownership attitude.

You can take that to Washington, Big Three.