Are you looking for a (new) job? Do you want to work for a company that places as much of a premium on building employee engagement, workplace team building, and employee leadership development as on growing revenue and profits?
Well, spurred by this post on The Talent Buzz (providing links to the job pages of the 2010 Fortune "100 Best Companies to Work For"), I revised the Google Map of Winning Workplaces' 45 Top Small Workplaces I last shared here to include applicable links to the employment pages on their websites. Check it out:
For your convenience, here's a list of the companies we've honored each of the last three years that currently have job openings. You can use the map to zoom in on your state and click on the "Job Openings" link provided to apply to any relevant positions.
2007 TSW Winners Hiring:
Exactech (FL)
Healthwise (ID)
Restek Corporation (PA)
Summit Aviation (DE)
2008 TSW Winners Hiring:
ATA Engineering (CA)
Decagon Devices (WA)
Integrated Project Management Company (IL)
JA Frate (IL)
King Arthur Flour Company (VT)
Lundberg Family Farms (CA)
New Belgium Brewing (CO)
Phenomenex (CA)
Rainforest Alliance (NY)
Resource Interactive (OH)
The Paducah Bank & Trust Company (KY)
2009 TSW Winners Hiring:
Analytical Graphics (PA)
Censeo Consulting Group (DC)
HCSS (TX)
Mike's Carwash (IN)
Radio Flyer (IL)
Root Learning (OH)
Skyline Construction (CA)
Steppenwolf Theatre Company (IL)
Tohono O'odham Nursing Care Authority (AZ)
Woodmeister Master Builders (MA)
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I'm guessing six is the total number on Fortune's 2010 list, or this article would have touted and profiled more firms. A 6% no-layoff (ever!) rate is indeed pretty impressive, especially considering this list encompasses midsize and large companies – which due to factors such as more complex bureaucracies and, in public companies, the need to appease shareholders can be more prone to layoffs.
We have our own no-layoff stats to share among our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award applicants, which I think are equally impressive. One disclaimer before I get into the actual numbers below: our application only assesses involuntary turnover for the last three years (2007-2009), not over all time as Fortune's seems to assess.
Still, here's what we know:
From 2007-2009, 44 (8.9%) of our 497 applicants for 2010 had no layoffs.
In 2009, 87 (17.5%) had no layoffs.
The following chart shows the percentage of applicant firms with 0-10 layoffs in 2009:
If you add up all the percentages here you'll get 74% – meaning that 3 out of 4 organizations had 10 or fewer layoffs in 2009. This data point, I think, shows that employee engagement in terms of recruiting and ongoing employee leadership development can have a huge impact on keeping "A" players at the top of their game, and making more highly engaged employees from "B" and lower-level players.
All of this, of course, increases positive outcomes such as greater productivity and profitability, and also decreases negative outcomes such as having to let someone go, which is no fun for anyone involved, in any economic environment.
Benchmark your company against our 2010 small business award applicants: How many layoffs did you have in 2009? Over the last 3 years?
If you missed Winning Workplaces' annual conference last October in Chicago, you can get a taste of what attendees experienced by watching the video below. Especially noteworthy from an employee engagement research perspective is the section from :37 - 1:48, which describes the nomination, application, and judging process we undertook to select the 15 Top Small Workplaces that were honored at the event.
Check it out (if you can't see the video in your blog feed, click here):
In terms of the payoff of employee engagement activities, I love Bernie Dyme of Perspectives Ltd's definition of the ROI of a great workplace (starting at 5:38):
When people are so engaged in what they're doing and their employer that they want to be there no matter how bad the economy or the situation. They're going to be there even when things are good after they're bad.
When it comes to employee retention tips and other strategies for greater workforce effectiveness, what would you like to see us cover in an event format this year?
One of the more colorful exercises I was privy to at a recent meeting of Winning Workplaces' Board of Directors was the think-outside-the-box practice of encapsulating our organization as a person as well as a car.
While group consensus on both of these is still up in the air as we do some homework on our overall strategy, one thing I remember about the person part of the exercise was that beyond his or her look, we talked about the tone that this person took when giving our elevator speech, or saying anything else. Here we did reach some consensus: the tone is that of a trusted advisor who shares wisdom in a reassuring way – and in a manner that is not overwhelming for the person talking with us.
Since that meeting I've had this tonal quality in the back of my mind and have carried it over to my writing here. I hope someone who is knowledgeable, trusting, caring, and eloquent comes through when you read our posts.
This endeavor got me thinking about how, at least to some extent, our honored small businesses have their own human-like tone – whether or not they're conscious of it. A few examples from my perspective:
2009 Top Small Workplace Radio Flyer – a friend or neighbor who's ready to step in to encourage your child's imagination and ensure their safety.
2007 Top Small Workplace NRG Systems – an excellent math and science student who has grown up to use this knowledge to green their lifestyle, and who's there to help you do the same.
How does this exploration relate to team building and employee engagement activities? Well, defining (or redefining if you've done this before) how your company would speak and come across to others in the world if it were a person is an excellent opportunity to bring your people together and learn from group consensus. In turn, any changes to your tone that come about from this process can inform your workplace culture.
In one sentence, what's your organization's tone? Does it mesh with your mission and products/services?
Here's a quick tip based on real-world experience – mine. If you're on the fence about creating a Facebook page for your business, or keeping one up compared to your time spent promoting your business on other social networking sites, ask yourself two related questions:
How well does my product/service resonate with my target demographic within Facebook (here's a link that shows a breakdown of users by generation, for starters)?
Is even heavily veiled marketing of my product/service via my Facebook page – ie, status updates; new photos or video – going to be perceived as too hard of a sell?
I bring this up because as an Admin for two Facebook pages – the one for Winning Workplaces and a newer one for my wife's recently formed, Los Angeles-based production company, title3 – I've noticed striking differences in such desired metrics as the rate of increase in new fans and the number of interactions, or any time someone comments, likes, or shares a page update or comments on the page's wall.
To see how this tip plays out, consider:
The Winning Workplaces page is about: workplace people practices that create better work environments in small businesses.
The title3 page is about: artistic works that are innovative and provide opportunities for women in the arts.
Here's how many fans each of these pages attracted in their first month. Keep in mind that more work went into the Winning Workplaces page over similar timeframes.
Yes, these pages are in wildly divergent industries and have different target audiences. But it is also true that the title3 page has a more visceral product (staged and filmed works) offered under a mission statement that appeals to more people (a good share of the 5 million women in LA County, at least).
One more thing: Your answers to the questions I posed above have implications for employee engagement training and employee leadership development. It may well be a better use of your and your workers' time in the marketing/sales area to focus less or not at all on reaching Facebook users and converting them to paying customers, and more on reaching them via more traditional channels. Do more of what works best, after all.
I've blogged several times to make the case – because I don't think it can be stressed enough – that using people practices that may seem "squishy," with the goal of producing more highly engaged employees, is in fact a productive long-term business strategy. Here's one recent example of this.
InnovationTools is one of the most recent resources to underscore this case. This quick read on the site by strategy expert Roy Luebke argues that something as simple as management's persistent effort to show their supervisees respect (one of our six building blocks for creating a Winning Workplace) can improve a company's innovation. Greater innovation, of course, fuels customer satisfaction and growth, leading to higher revenues and profitability.
The small organizations that just finished applying for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award bear out this case in the real world. Of the record-setting 496 firms that completed an application this year,
450, or 91%, were profitable in 2009
They had average 2009 revenues of $28.3 million
They grew revenues 12% over 2008 – in a very tough economy!
How do these impressive business results tie back to respectful employee engagement? When I review these applicants' answers to our qualitative questions that run the gamut from unique workplace culture practices to employee leadership development strategies, the word "respect" came up 331 times. That averages out to two-thirds of a reference per company.
So it's obvious that creating a culture of respect is top of mind for these firms, and they actively design their trust building activities to support the attainment of key organizational goals.
What are your thoughts on the relationship between respect in the workplace and achieving desired bottom-line outcomes?
I hadn't thought about the childhood saying "Finders keepers, losers weepers" since, well, childhood. I was reminded of it again today when I came across this post on the Assessment Competency blog by business strategy consultant and leadership speaker Gregory P. Smith.
The expression is an apt one when it comes to companies' efforts to engage employees to increase employee tenures and reduce turnover to boost competitive advantage.
Deftly addressing the trials and tribulations of leading a multi-generational workforce and assigning hard costs to turnover, Smith provides a baker's dozen employee retention tips that your organization should consider adopting ensure the right people are "on the bus":
Hire the best and avoid the rest.
Provide flexible work schedules adapted to the needs of the individual.
Take the temperature of your workforce. (We offer one way to do this here.)
Complete an Individual Retention Plan on your best employees.
Focus on the family.
Identify and weed out poor managers.
*Adopt your employees.
I placed an asterisk (*) next to practices that are particularly innovative and "outside the box." Who knows – they might work best for your workplace.
Are you using any of these engagement activities in your firm? If so, which have delivered the best ROI?
Amidst troubling economic news such as the continuing saga of "Too Big to Fail" and a second straight month of job losses, I found the results of this study by Opinion Research Corporation a much welcome breath of fresh air.
The 2009 Cone Consumer New Media Study, which polled over 1,000 U.S. adults, found that business' reputation is not so tarnished as to preclude consumers from wanting to engage them in a conversation, particularly online.
The study found that six out of 10 adults believe they can use new media tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube as well as blogs – to influence business decisions. And eight out of 10 want companies to tell them what's in their products and explain the development process.
To me this, combined with small business' typically stripped-down bureaucracy and ability (due to their small size) to be closer to what their employees are thinking, presents a tremendous opportunity for them to use employee engagement to meet this consumer need and, as I wrote about last year, turn customers into customer evangelists.
The lesson here, which more and more firms seem to be heeding – the economy is most certainly a contributing factor – is that in this age transparency you can never involve customers too much in your ideation and development.
What thoughts do you have on this study's impact on workplace team building and employee engagement best practices?
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:
Develop a detailed intention to engage employees, and
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?
I enjoyed this BNET article by Silicon Valley marketing and strategy consultant Steve Tobak on the top 10 lies managers tell themselves. While many of them involve customers and executives above them in the company, Tobak's #5 lie deals with employee engagement best practices.
He says a common misconception is that subordinate employees "love" their managers. This might be the most destructive falsehood on Tobak's list, as it's widely accepted that while employees don't necessarily quit companies, they definitely quit people.
The other part of the equation, in my mind, is that managers are already incredibly burdened – some would say overburdened – in their workplace role. They're like a candle being burned at both ends: from below if a company is mediocre to poor on employee retention, which means more training and retraining on their part; and from above with owners and leaders relying on them heavily to execute core activities to keep the business in the black, or to keep growth strong.
Managers owe it to their sanity as well as their and their company's performance to get the best read possible on what their subordinates are thinking. This includes their treatment of them and how well they seek and act on subordinates' good ideas from the latter's perspective.
This retention quiz Winning Workplaces developed a couple years ago is a good way to get started along this path. We have other solutions for you, too – ask us about them by giving us a shout out.
So remember, one of the best employee retention tips out there is for managers to engage employees to get a better pulse on what they think about them.
Last week our friend Paula Brantner, the Executive Director of Workplace Fairness – a nonprofit that provides information, education, and assistance to workers and promotes public policies that advance employee rights – spoke about employee engagement when it comes to their termination on attorney Tony Reeves' show on BlogTalkRadio.
Listen to the broadcast below:
One thing I learned is that, with at-will employment being the norm in all states except Montana – and even that state only has limited protections for workers – employees who find themselves in overly stressful situations with a toxic supervisor need to take charge of their career destiny. They need to determine if they want to stay with the company or leave, and then develop an action plan to make their chosen scenario happen.
Related: Brantner has written two employee engagement articles for Winning Workplaces. Check them out:
It's my impression that the hospitality industry is ahead of the game compared with some others in terms of realizing and acting on the connection between better employee engagement and higher customer satisfaction. Because companies in this space deal with customers face to face more often than others, they were on the leading edge when the economy tanked starting a little over a year ago, and they had to make some changes in how they dealt with them or risk losing them, since they deal in "nice to haves" and not "must haves."
So therefore I was happy to see organizational and workplace culture consultant Gene Ference explain how companies whose leaders adapt to foster greater workplace team building will be more successful this year, on Hospitality Net.
Specific people practices Ference points to include:
Taking more time in hiring to make sure the right people are on board
Seeking and providing more feedback to employees
Create more nuturing environments for employee leadership development
Here's how he describes what ideal employee engagement looks like, and the business benefits that occur as a result:
The key to a peak-performing organizational culture is engaged employees who are invested in their work. As in Star Wars, effective leadership develops cultures in which people « feel the force » rather than merely collect a paycheck. Clarity about the organization’s vision, mission and values allow employees to embrace that spirit and make it their own. ... Put another way, leaders need to make sure employees understand the brand and their roles in helping to build, energize and sustain that brand.
Talented employees who are fully invested in their jobs provide huge payoffs to the bottom line. They increase productivity, reduce turnover and generate higher employee and guest satisfaction, all of which result in more profit for the organization.
Related: Winning Workplaces written Success Stories on three hospitality companies and the practices they use to strengthen their bottom line. Check them out:
Check out this bold post that deals with employee leadership development by Amy Bermar, Founder and President of Corporate Ink, a PR firm for the tech industry based in Massachusetts (and one of our Top Small Workplaces).
Continuing the theme of transparency that is common among winners of Winning Workplaces' small business award, Bermar explains that you won't be able to reach her staff via email on Wednesday afternoons because they've carved out that time specifically for "thinking, learning, and making the creative space to come up with new ideas."
Longtime readers of our content on human capital strategies for small firms know that Corporate Ink is not the first organization to take this type of step. Our board member and Best Boss, Michael Mulqueen, who formerly led the Greater Chicago Food Depository, told us that he actually eliminated internal emails during his tenure there so his workforce would be forced to talk to one another, which spurred greater innovation.
I find it refreshing that in an era – especially post-CES – where technology seems to have fewer and fewer limits by the day, a decidedly non-tech move like this can turn heads and, most importantly, have a real and lasting impact on the bottom line.
In your customer or employee engagement, have you ever consciously shunned technology in pursuit of greater returns than your peers who embraced it?
Winning Workplaces is checking in with people – the majority of them CEOs – from the small firms that are applying for the chance to be named a 2010 Top Small Company Workplace in Inc. Magazine this June. We're asking them how the process of completing our online application has helped them think about and further develop their human capital strategies to enhance their business strategy.
I've provided applicants' verbatim responses to this question in two recentposts. But as an experiment, I wanted to see which words or terms stood out from the collective feedback on this that they've given us. Here's a Wordle-generated tag cloud showing the results:
How does one interpret this? Well, if I were to create an amalgamated answer to the question we posed to applicants based on this tag cloud, I would write it as:
This process helped in our thinking about how we can make our culture and work environment better for our employees.
A number of applicants report that what they learned from applying this year has turned into action steps to improve their employee engagement practices, so 2010 ends on a productive high note. I love reading when this happens, as it's one of the benefits we intended when we worked extensively to improve the 2010 application over the 2009 version.
Want to increase your competitive advantage in your people practices area, too? It's not too late to apply for 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces and reap similar value for your organization. You can do so here.
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?
Continuing the trend of some good news for small business I started here this week, I thought I would share this feel-good article (in my mind, at least) by our friend Ann Meyer at the Chicago Tribune.
Here are some of the good omens Meyer points to when it comes to the payoff of employee engagement in small organizations, which, as she writes, are a leading indicator of economic recovery:
HR consulting firm Vantage Solutions is "seeing more interest in training and other pro-active approaches to human resource development, instead of pay reductions, furloughs and layoffs."
She cites a recent study by the Kauffman Foundation that I wrote about late last year, which finds that firms younger than 5 years old have created about two-thirds of all new jobs as late as 2007.
She quotes a senior researcher at Kauffman, who says despite the recession, "hundreds of thousands" of startups have emerged which will look to add jobs as they grow.
At least in Illinois, according to a state management association, the percentage of companies that plan to reduce their workforce dropped from 66% to 15% over the past year.
SBA loan programs, spurred by the defense appropriations bill that President Obama signed in December, are expected to generate over $4 billion in additional small business lending.
When I think of all the new, small, smart companies out there and their innovative team building and other strategies for greater workforce effectiveness – some of which are already competing to be named a Top Small Workplace in Inc. Magazine this summer – I can't help but smile when I come across an article like Meyer's.
This post is a follow-up to this one I wrote on getting back to basics this year.
Living here in Los Angeles for about five months now, one term I've come to appreciate more and more, because it affects some people I know, is development hell. As you can imagine, the economy is affecting the entertainment industry by keeping once-greenlighted projects on the shelves.
This makes sense given the raw number of A-, B-, C-, D-, and lower-level professionals trying to get things done at a number of studios, even the smallest of which are big by the standards of organizations we typically serve at Winning Workplaces. Bigger companies + complex hierarchies = innovation and workload bottleneck.
But small businesses have an inherent advantage to their larger peers when it comes to R&D: the ability to quickly tell whether something is working, and shelve it and move on if it's not. "Fast failure," as its known and practiced at several of our Top Small Workplaces, is a feature of this approach.
So when you think about your employee engagement best practices to create a productive workplace, keep the emphasis on moving full-speed ahead – individual and group SMART goals can help – to avoid languishing in development hell.
What have your fellow readers found most helpful when it comes to the workplace culture strategies covered here? On the last day of 2009, I can share with you the following posts, in descending order of popularity. Enjoy, and see you in 2010....
There's a saying my dad got from somewhere, which my brother, Dan, put in the book on networking for young people he wrote a couple years ago when he was in college:
Even the Super Bowl champions the previous year go back to training camp to work on the fundamentals.
Going back to basics also factors prominently in one of my favorite books, Zen Guitar. (That's my playing on all our Top Small Workplace leader videos.)
As we look back on 2009 and prepare to turn our ideal 2010 into reality, including in the people practices realm, going back to square one bears repeating in business news outlets. I recommend, for example, you check out this article on the Financial Post.
To help you when it comes to assessing and tweaking your team building and employee engagement best practices, here are a few recommended posts:
(This post was inspired by this article on TheStreet.com)
Since I have often pointed to our small business honorees like Guerra DeBerry Coody and Lundberg Family Farms that play up their family-friendly employee engagement practices, including benefits, one might come to the conclusion that Winning Workplaces favors small companies that put employees with children ahead of those without them.
While we like to see small firms walk the talk when it comes to family-friendly benefits, we also recognize that these firms should be equally mindful of those workers without children. See for instance, this list of benefits that we ask whether companies have in place in our Top Small Company Workplaces award application – benefits that in many cases can be better suited to recruiting childless employees:
Medical insurance
Health savings account (HSA)
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Employee assistance program (EAP)
Life insurance
Long-term disability
Short-term disability
Long-term care insurance
Domestic partner benefits
Employee stock purchase or other shared ownership plan
Retirement plan
Pre-tax spending benefits
Transportation assistance
Paid time off/vacation/holidays/personal time
Sabbaticals
Educational assistance
Employee wellness/fitness program
Digging deeper: I thought you'd find it interesting to see the percentage of applicants* for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition that use each of the above benefits as part of their retention and employee development strategies. Click on the thumbnail below to open a pdf (2.7 MB) showing the breakdown of "Yes" vs. "No" answers to our online questionnaire:
*Among firms that have completed the application as of Dec. 29, 2009. Application window closes Jan. 22, 2010.
How does your organization compare for each of these benefits?
Are you looking for a (new) job? Do you want to work for a company that places as much of a premium on building employee engagement, workplace team building, and employee leadership development as on growing revenue and profits?
One of the more colorful exercises I was privy to at a recent meeting of Winning Workplaces' 
I've blogged several times to make the case – because I don't think it can be stressed enough – that using people practices that may seem "squishy," with the goal of producing more highly engaged employees, is in fact a productive long-term business strategy. Here's one 
I hadn't thought about the childhood saying "Finders keepers, losers weepers" since, well, childhood. I was reminded of it again today when I came across 
Amidst troubling economic news such as the continuing saga of 
Do you know what active disengagement refers to in discussions of employee engagement? As the Workplace Insiders blog 
I enjoyed this 
It's my impression that the hospitality industry is ahead of the game compared with some others in terms of realizing and acting on the connection between better employee engagement and higher customer satisfaction. Because companies in this space deal with customers face to face more often than others, they were on the leading edge when the economy tanked starting a little over a year ago, and they had to make some changes in how they dealt with them or risk losing them, since they deal in "nice to haves" and not "must haves."
Check out this 
Late last year I 
Continuing the trend of some good news for small business I 
This post is a follow-up to 
What have your fellow readers found most helpful when it comes to the workplace culture strategies covered here? On the last day of 2009, I can share with you the following posts, in descending order of popularity. Enjoy, and see you in 2010....
There's a saying my dad got from somewhere, which my brother, Dan, put in the 
(This post was inspired by 
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