Supporting the thesis our Chairman, Ken Lehman, laid out in his recent editorial on "sharing the pain," Susan Heathfield on About.com's HR site blogged this weekend about new research from Harris Interactive which finds that employers who act on their advantage in this recession and mistreat their employees could face a talent deficit when the economy picks up.

Here are some key findings Heathfield cites that support this conclusion:

• 54% of employed Americans say they're likely to seek new employment once the economy improves.
• This figure jumps to 71% among the younger, 18-29 set.
• Perhaps most telling, over half of the employees who are willing to accept a pay cut to keep their job would agree to a decrease in salary of 10% or more.

This last point speaks to the employee concessions our chairman addressed in his editorial I mentioned above that employers, especially small organizations, should consider as part of their strategies for improving employee retention.

The question small business owners and leaders should be asking themselves is, Is it better to see lower expenses now, or find ways to keep our people, whatever it takes, and save on recruiting and training costs later?  Judging by our recent article on the results of a survey on how our small business honorees are weathering the downturn and a separate poll of our website visitors, the folks in our network have opted overwhelmingly to take an all-in approach with the hopes of keeping their knowledge base intact when conditions improve.

Have your people practices for a productive workplace changed in this recession to focus on retention at all costs?

Photo credit: Mother in Chief

At Winning Workplaces, our tagline is "Better for people, better for business."  It's one of the things we look for in selecting and naming our Top Small Workplaces each year, and we sometimes refer to it as a "win-win."

What we mean by this is the use of workplace team building and engagement activities to create more satisfied employees – who are better parents, citizens, and volunteers in their communities (that's the people part) – and who are more committed to the success of their employers' missions and goals (that's the business part).  Our Founder and Chairman, Ken Lehman, explains this in greater detail in a video on our website.

Sometimes we're fortunate to honor small firms that provide another win for a triple win.  Such is the case with 2008 Top Small Workplace the Rainforest Alliance.  My coworker Jason, an ardent environmentalist, sent me this link from the New York City-based nonprofit's Facebook page.  It talks about how much larger companies/brands, such as Chiquita, Kraft, Nike, and even Wal-Mart, are increasing their enviro-cred with the help of the Rainforest Alliance's responsible business partnership and certification programs.

So here's a breakdown of how the Rainforest Alliance produces a triple win:

• For their employees: Many innovative employee engagement team development strategies, some of which we covered in our Success Story on the nonprofit.
• For the organization: The employee engagement strategies alluded to above contribute directly to its bottom line, especially in annual revenue growth (36%), annual turnover (lower than the industry average of 21%), and average employee tenure (3.5 years).
• For their business partners: a better CSR reputation and positive buzz, both of which lead to greater identification among target audiences and ultimately sales.

For a lot more on the people practices that make the Rainforest Alliance a productive workplace, check out our report on them and their fellow 2008 Top Small Workplace winners.

Here is another guest post by MKB and Anchor Advisors.  Save the date for their seminar on this topic in Chicago on June 30, which should serve to monetize your team building and employee engagement practices.

Marketing isn't always a high priority for some business owners because they can feel intimidated, even defeated by it.  They understand sales – but marketing?  What's it for?  Why do you do it?  And when you only turn to marketing to pull you out of a slump and then it doesn't deliver, we can see how you could feel like that.

But marketing is just like any other part of your business – it requires strategy and then the tactics to implement the strategy.  What often happens is that business owners come up with the tactics, but not the strategy.  And therein lies the problem! 

Marketing and selling smart is imperative in a tight economy. 

Are you getting the most out of your sales and marketing efforts?  How do you optimize your operations for today in preparation for an upturn in the future?  How do you derive maximum return for your spend? 

When marketing and sales teams are on the same wavelength so many good things can happen.  We more quickly find the pitches and offers that work for our ideal clients; we close more sales faster and everyone wins.

Want to explore this topic further?  Come see Brad Farris and Suzanne Voce speak on "How to Leverage your Brand, Optimize Marketing and Improve your Sales Closing Ratio in a Recession Economy" on Tuesday, June 30, from 7:30 to 9:30 am. 

Click here for more info.
 
Brad Farris works with business owners to help them to clarify their purpose, identify better people, develop repeatable processes and track key performance measures that help them to grow their business.  Find out more here.

Suzanne Voce and the team from MKB help organizations perform better and reach growth goals faster.  We help position companies for top-line growth, translate vision, value and engage actionable results by devising smart strategies and tactics.  Suzanne will also be sharing insight from global CMO's and illustrating effective solutions through case study success stories.

Almost a year ago my colleague Jason Ticus wrote what I consider now to be a prescient post on how part of how you can tell if a Top Small Workplaces applicant is truly a Winning Workplace is if front-line employees refer to their relationship with leadership using the word "us" instead of "them."

Why prescient?  Because, as Management-Issues writes about today, the recession and the layoffs and slashed hours for employees it has produced has had somewhat of an unintended consequence.  In many businesses it has turned whatever might have existed as "us and them" resentment to a culture of increase employee engagement and workplace team building.

At least, this is happening in the U.K., where Management-Issues is based.  The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) reports that "the recession is creating more engagement and bringing employers and managers closer together."  According to the CBI and recruitment firm Harvey Nash, this is resulting in such "share the pain" initiatives as:

• pay freezes
• keep staff training and invest in better targeting
• reduce hours/offer flex hours

We know this is happening in the U.S., too.  Recently promoted head of global marketing at Hyatt Hotels, John Wallis, talked about it as part of their strategy in a Q&A this month in Advertising Age.  And I think it's no coincidence that the issue of leadership maintaining a strong focus on employees' livelihoods and work/life balance was a theme of our recent webinars on strategies to develop and retain technical talent, and on succession planning.

The leaders of exemplary organizations understand, in short, that we're all in this together.

Speaking of an all-in attitude, stay tuned to our July newsletter for an addendum to our editorial on sharing the pain that will advise on employee engagement practices to share the recovery as well.

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.

This article on TheRecord.com, a news site for the Toronto, Canada, area, raises an interesting question: In a worldwide credit crunch that is leading to budget and revenue issues for both businesses and municipalities, is a taxpayer investment in workplace team building justified?

TheRecord reports that half of Waterloo, Ontario's 600 city employees recently attended a staff appreciation day which included a catered lunch and dinner.  The cost to Waterloo's citizen's was $12,000.

Waterloo's mayor certainly thought the investment was worth it.  "Our biggest investment is our employees.  It's about staff development and good team building," Mayor Brenda Halloran is quoted as saying.

One of the event organizers, Karen Scian, agreed:

It's important that our employees are motivated, work well together and know things about our city.  They are ambassadors to our community when they interact with the public.

I agree with the mayor and the organizer.  Even though we typically associate employee engagement activities with private organizations, public entities have just as much to gain from an investment in them.  The associated benefits typically include:

• Improved employee engagement and communication
• Longer employee tenures
• Lower turnover
• Lower absenteeism
• Greater productivity

In an economic climate in which services and the workers that make them possible in many cities are stretched to the breaking point, we need people who are more committed than ever to the mission (providing excellent service to citizens) and who work well with their coworkers to make that happen.

What do you think about taxpayer investment in team building activities for those who work for your city or town?

One of the most common questions we get here at Winning Workplaces is, How do I measure the ROI of my workplace team building and employee engagement activities?

This is an excellent question.  To answer it, we point to the strong business metrics of the Top Small Workplaces we recognize annually with The Wall Street Journal.  I've outlined six of these below:

1. Low annual turnover.  Benchmark: 1-2% (ATA Engineering).
2. Multi-year revenue growth, especially in a declining industry.  Benchmark: 15% annually (King Arthur Flour Company).
3. Strong revenue per employee.  Benchmark: $233,700 (avg. all 2008 winners).
4. Better-than-industry-average employee tenure.  Benchmark: 5 years (King Arthur Flour, New Belgium Brewing).
5. Long CEO tenure.  Benchmark: 17 years (avg. all 2008 winners).
6. Good portion of open positions filled from within.  Benchmark: 25% (avg. all 2008 winners).

For a lot more takeaways on the ROI of a great workplace, don't miss our conference on this topic in October in Chicago, where around 300 small business thought leaders will gather to network and share ideas.  Note that you can get our Benchmarking Report on the 2008 Top Small Workplaces for 40% off with your conference admission.

I've written that one of the qualities of our Top Small Workplaces is a desire to hire for "fit" and "attitude" and train for skills.  But how do companies actually do this when it gets down to the nitty-gritty?

Some examples emerged in our webinar today with the CEO of one of last year's Top Small Workplaces Finalists, Robert Pasin of Radio Flyer.  In explaining how the 92-year-old, Chicago-based toy manufacturer embarked on a quest to modernize its physical work environment and profit from a change in focus, he talked about the need to "deselect" employees who were not the best fit for the company's culture.

On the other side, Pasin also said Radio Flyer had to get used to waiting to fill open positions, sometimes for more than a year, until the right person came along who would be a motivational and innovative force for the organization.

The CEO also spent some time explaining how they use 360-degree feedback surveys in several capacities for firm-wide improvement.  He said that at Radio Flyer these surveys have actually prompted employees to deselect themselves from the business.  At the other extreme, they have helped reveal employees who are ready and eager for more skills challenges and growth opportunities.

One other piece – but by no means the last or least important one – that helps here is Radio Flyer's set of core values:

• INTEGRITY in all we do.
• ACCOUNTABILITY to ourselves and others.
• Passion for EXCELLENCE.
• "Can Do" ATTITUDE.
• Fast, friendly and effective SERVICE.
• Having FUN, spreading smiles.

How do these values compare to the ones your organization promotes as essential to good team building and employee engagement?

Photo credit: Radio Flyer

On the Three Star Leadership Blog yesterday, Wally Bock pointed to a Chicago Tribune story that talked about how two software firms sent senior consultants to each other's workplace.  The five-day exchange is known as a Craftsman Swap.

Wally explained more about this emerging trend:

A Craftsman Swap is part of a larger movement called Software Craftsmanship.  It stands for quality software development using agile methodologies and (I love this part) an Apprenticeship Approach to training software developers.

He says this practice is akin to what organizations in the technology sector and others are already doing when it comes to going to trade shows and talking to suppliers and customers – learning from outside to spur "big, revolutionary ideas" that are hard to generate from internal workplace team building alone.

I like the Tribune article Wally points to and his analysis because it's another example of small is beautiful.

Related: Our 2008 Top Small Workplaces Benchmarking Report shows the frequency of job swapping and eight other employee engagement activities among salaried, hourly, and part-time employees in use at last year's winners to boost employee development and innovation.

Photo credit: freshbaked Communications

With recent advances in technology that enable anyone to become a whistle-blower of substandard or illegal company practices, and a media culture that increasingly looks to its audience for news tips, leadership at many companies are understandably worried that today's internal misstep will be tomorrow's front-page headline.

But according to new research, four out of five whistle-blower complaints stop with management.  As Janet Near, chair of the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, told Newswise,

The stereotype is that whistle-blowers always start out going to the media and try to go for the maximum publicity.  They don't.  If I'm a manager, and I find out that whistle-blowers typically don't do that, then it behooves me to set up procedures so they can blow the whistle internally and minimize the damage to the organization externally.

This provides even more justification for making sure manager team building is alive and well within your organization, something I blogged about last month.

Near and two of her colleagues – one from Georgetown University – advise in the current Journal of Business Ethics that employers can make the most of the above statistic by doing one or more of the following:

• Create and communicate codes of ethics and anti-retaliation policies
• Conduct serious training for managers and employees alike in how to handle concerns without retaliation in the workplace
• Support these efforts with channels for reporting wrongdoing
• Provide employer financial incentives for whistle-blowers

How has whistle-blowing factored into your workplace team building and employee engagement best practices?

Jessica Lee wrote a compelling piece on Fistful of Talent today using the analogy of kindergarten to argue that employee engagement programs to develop workers are most effective when they're driven by the organization:

The ideal process is somewhere in the middle: Employees identify their passions, managers help them understand their strengths and weaknesses (and give them a little push every now and then), and organizations provide development opportunities that align passions with needs.

For a majority of businesses, both small and large, I think Lee is correct.  However, some small firms, such as our Top Small Workplaces, have made employee-driven development not only work, but have fine-tuned both processes and the workplace's cultural identity so it is the norm rather than the exception.

Putting the cultural component to the side – because that is unique to each workplace – here are some of the practices these companies are using to engage employees to drive their own intra-company career development:

• Hiring for "attitude" and "fit" provides a better starting place for individual-driven development that is in line with the organization's mission, values, and goals.
• Focus on growing leaders from within vs. hiring from outside – same outcome as above.
• Willingness to allow people to turn their talents to other areas of the business than those for which they were originally hired to assist.  This is even more acute in a down economy, when businesses choose this as an alternative to layoffs to avoid greater recruiting and training costs.
• Driven-down decision making – also known as empowering front-line employees – is often the norm when it comes to customer service, and this quality extends to employee development.  2008 Top Small Workplace Integrated Project Management is a great example of this.
• Mentorship of new hires by current employees is a big component.  This is a form of employee-driven development, and it is a good indicator for managers to know which mentors could handle leadership roles in the future.

Which side of the fence do you stand on here?  How do your workplace team building and employee engagement activities drive people development?

Photo credit: Lacuna

We usually think of (and I usually write about) workplace team building as something that business owners, leaders, and managers need to think about and address.  But other times it needs to start from the bottom and trickle up to make the workplace culture more cohesive.

Workplace coach Marie G. McIntyre addressed this aspect of employee engagement last weekend in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  In response to a reader's question about a boss who micromanages too much and plays favorites, McIntyre advised this employee, whose industry is "dying," to "reduce your daily stress by learning to 'manage up' more effectively."

She says this involves:

• lowering expectations for the boss
• building a better relationship with the boss, in this case starting with a fact the employee has identified – that compliments get his attention

When factoring in a tough economy and a risky industry, McIntyre ultimately advises laying low.  This, of course, provides the added protection of a paycheck while the employee considers training in a new field so he or she can make a move if it still isn't clicking with the boss after some time in his or her new communication approach with the boss.

Related: Our webinar with the CEOs of two 2007 Top Small Workplaces on designing strategy from the bottom up.

As Newswise explained yesterday based on a recent University of Iowa study, something as seemingly insignificant as a break room poster can help improve employee engagement.  The trick is to have it be one of many outward signs of a commitment to engaging employees by a company's leadership.

The above-mentioned article extrapolates from a study UI Tippie College of Business Associate Professor Kenneth Brown conducted to show that motivational displays or practices can have an impact, albeit a mixed one.  In a training setting, Brown found, employees who are "naturally upbeat and positive" tend to react positively to the employee engagement strategies meant to motivate them.  However, "those who were not naturally positive actually reacted negatively."

My two cents: The commitment of leadership and of middle managers is the big variable here.  We have seen that workplaces that were formed based on a mission and values that are all about getting employees engaged, whose hiring practices encourage hiring for fit and training for skills, have a much greater success rate with adding displays or practices that actually increase team building (that aren't automatically viewed with skepticism or resentment by employees).

Do you think break room posters can have any real impact in motivating workers?  Why or why not?

How much do I love LinkedIn?  A small organization like ours, which has modest success getting votes on our web polls through our own efforts, can greatly increase participation – for free! – by posting it as a question in the Q&A area of LinkedIn.

This is what I did four days ago in regards to this poll I created last month on salary reductions vs. layoffs as best for small businesses.  The answers have poured in!  Here are a few people's votes either way, and why they answered as they did:

• Leonid Lastovkin, software engineer: neither - recommends hours cut to part-time (20 hrs/week) for some employees
• Jack Speranza, company principal/managing director: neither - recommends partnering with another company to share one or more employees
• Greg Cramer, company owner: salary reductions, via shortened work weeks
• Natalia K Bilash, executive search consultant: salary reductions, via shortened work weeks (agrees with Greg)
• Peter Johnson, regional HR director: layoffs - his company did wage reductions and "lost a lot of high performers"
• Jim Yeoh, company president: layoffs - the remaining employees "will be motivated to work harder, this is not a threat, this is economic reality"
• Maddela Phani, company head of business development: layoffs - "all lean companies are doing good in recession"
• Russ Hartman, general plant manager: layoffs - "Its better to have 3 people working next year then 8 people working until next year. And its far easier to grow then to keep adjusting to less and less."
• Jason Kiesau, "Chief Realization Officer": start with salary reductions - layoffs "can't be good for the culture"

This question will be open for another three days on LinkedIn if you'd like to add your own answer.

Our new web poll for June is a follow-up question of sorts that also addresses workplace team building and employee engagement: Has your firm cut hours or salaries due to the recession?  Please vote Yes or No now.

Two upcoming sessions that address employee engagement, one about attracting and retaining top talent and another about holding onto them using means other than raises and bonuses, appeared on my radar screen today.  Although they will be held in opposite order of applying the steps involved, you should check them out nonetheless.  Here they are:

Topic: How to Keep Your Best People When Raises & Bonuses Aren't an Option
When: June 25, 2 pm CT
Duration: 60 minutes
Presenter: The Great Game of Business
Format: Webinar
Fee: $99
More information

Topic: 2009 Recruiting: Feed Your Talent Pipeline Using Twitter, Facebook, and Other Social Media
When: July 16, 10 am CT
Duration: 90 minutes
Presenter: Employment law attorney Molly DiBianca
Format: Interactive audio conference
Fee: $237
More information

These are both quality presenters (disclaimer: they're not paying me to say this, I'm just a fan of their work) and the information provided will no doubt help you in your efforts to use employee engagement training to solidify bottom-line results and grow your business.

More on how to improve employee engagement from our own library of Executive Learning Series Webinar recordings:

• Develop and retain top technical talent
• Maintain a stable workplace in an unstable economy
• Business practices of the 2008 Top Small Workplaces
• Maintain community in a virtual workplace
• Design strategy from the bottom up
• Develop a fantastic customer service culture
• Grow leaders from within

I read with interest this guest post on the Small Business Blog by Jean Van Rensselar, owner of Chicago-based Smart PR Communications.  She cites the recent finding that close to two-thirds of Twitter users abandon the service after the first month and her experience with clients to argue that social networking sites should not be part of the B2B marketing equation.

The ROI does not measure up to the hype around them, she says.

Other marketing experts disagree, making the case that Van Rensselar says is bogus – that adding your firm's presence to one or more key social networking platforms, while requiring a time commitment as part of an integrated marketing strategy with clear goals, can deliver ROI in the form of getting on the radar screen of many more like-minded folks.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing (a great example of B2B social media marketing done right) expresses this view often.  His latest blog post from today is all about this.  He says that some of the same naysayers of the value of social media are those who dismissed websites as sales tools when they first became popular, and later blogs.

I tend to side with Jantsch, as well as other social media marketing visionaries including Becky McCray of Small Biz Survival, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, and Chris Brogan of New Marketing Labs.

Why?  Because I've seen the power of these sites on our visibility and sales firsthand.  Winning Workplaces is very small – we only have six full-time staff members – and so to compete with our peers we need to be present where people are meeting up and talking about things that we care about, such as workplace team building and employee engagement best practices.

I'm the lone, on-staff marketing person and I probably devote 10 hours per week to our five social networking platforms:

• Blogs (you are here)
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube

That sounds like a lot of time and it is, when you factor in writing multiple daily blog posts here, starting and responding to discussions on all platforms, and doing ongoing strategy work to identify and pursue best practices and address weaknesses.

But, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I've seen the promised land.  Our traffic growth last year on our platforms ranged from 133% (blogs) to 693% (Twitter).  We're doing even better across the board this year, and I'm now able to see which platforms are having the most impact for the moment when we draw a participatory line in the sand based on our answer to the question, "Where does it make the most sense for us to spend our time?"

This time and effort in the social media space has had a real impact on our website traffic – key to our growth since a pillar of our offerings has always been a free clearinghouse of workplace best practices for small businesses.  Traffic from the blogs alone has boosted visits to our site overall by 8%, and some key pages by as much as 40%.  Naturally, this has prompted more one-on-one contact with people we want to reach than ever before, and a better read on how what we offer is helping owners, leaders and HR folks to implement stronger team building and employee engagement activities that result in lower turnover and greater productivity and profitability.

So I really think that small firms, especially, stand to benefit by getting involved in, or strategically increasing their efforts in, B2B social media marketing.

What's your position?

In my interview with Diane Hessan that I recently referenced, which will be coming out in our IDEAS newsletter next week, the Communispace CEO expanded on a point that got cut from the forthcoming article due to length.  So I wanted to present it here.

I asked her about the specifics of the keynote address on lessons she's learned in building an enterprise that she'll deliver at our upcoming conference.  She said one of the things she will likely discuss that may be less obvious to small business owners and leaders – especially of startups – is that "business plans are totally overrated."

Listen to this clip from my interview to hear why:

mp3 - 1.5 MB - 1:41

When even venture capitalists understand that the nature of a business will change drastically in a short period of time, you realize just how critical team building and employee engagement activities are to keeping firms nimble and on top of changing marketplace and customer demands.

Register now for the ROI of Great Workplaces Conference to meet Diane and get takeaways for your business from her and other great thought leaders we're assembling.

I love robots.  As soon as I can splurge for it I'd love to pick up a Roomba from our workplace honoree iRobot.  I'm also a fan of nanotechnology and can't wait to see what impact it has on everything from ending hunger to curing disease.

But I do think artificial intelligence has its limitations, especially when it comes to employee engagement and, as this press release from yesterday for I Love Rewards discusses, "combating the brain drain problem currently being faced by Google."

As the release notes, The Wall Street Journal (our media partner for our Top Small Workplaces recognition project) garnered a lot of buzz in leadership and HR circles last month when it reported that Google is using a new algorithm that calculates which of their employees are most likely to quit.

The Journal article talks about how it has already been used to identify employees who feel underused, and that is certainly a boon for a company with more than 20,000 employees.  No doubt leadership and HR there are strapped keeping track of everyone's needs and trying to satisfy them.

But in smaller firms – the companies we study and honor each year for their exemplary workplace team building and employee engagement best practices top out at 500 employees, for instance – leadership and HR are better equipped to know not only if people are not satisfied, but if they're going to bail.  CEOs at many of the Top Small Workplaces check in with employees at the interview stage and regularly once they're hired, once a month or once a quarter.

We hear a lot of stories of enterprises reallocating talent to different areas of the business and thus retaining them (and saving money that would need to be used to recruit and train new talent) when employees tell them, as part of this ongoing dialogue with leadership, that they're unsatisfied.

So while I think the math and technology Google is now using for itself – and could license and profit from if it wanted to go into that as a new business model – could be a value-add for large firms, I think that small and midsize businesses can save money and have a pulse on their workplace cultures by continuing the proven, decidedly 20th century practices of MBWA (managing by walking around), having an open door policy, and continually seeking ways to solicit and benefit from employee feedback.

What say you?

I'm working on an article for our next IDEAS newsletter reporting the results of this survey that I conducted last month.  While most of the questions in it were quantitative, I had one open-ended question:

Can you share any anecdotes that support how employee engagement has helped you maintain or increase sales?

Here's a sample of the answers I received:

"Our staff wanted to know how our market share was doing, so we dispatched drivers to our competitors, and they counted their delivery vans, then followed them to see how many stops they did.  We compared the results to ours and knew we held a commanding lead.  Two of the staff suggested we explore buying a weakened competitor.  We sent out a message through vendors that we were looking for acquisitions.  A competitor called, and we closed within 40 days.  Now, as the economy is stabilizing, we have organic and strategic sales growth leading into market share growth."
– Leader, hospitality firm with fewer than 100 employees

"Our employees are given a bonus/recognition for any new idea they come up with that brings in more business."
– Manager, construction firm with fewer than 100 employees

"One of our employees has developed a great visual aid to help us track our successes.  It charts both our revenue increases and our expense reductions.  It uses symbolism specific to our industry, humor and play on words."
– Leader, travel industry firm with fewer than 50 employees

"We are asking our employees to help productize and package our services based on what they are seeing in the market.  These new products turned out to be an easier "sell" than our original product goals for the year."
– Manager, professional services firm with fewer than 50 employees

This feedback shows that getting employees engaged can have a real bottom-line impact for your organization.

Subscribe to our newsletter to see the full article, with more tips and strategies, when it comes out next week.  It's free.

Image credit: The Auto Writer

You know the saying about too many cooks in the kitchen?  Well, when it comes to team building activities, too few cooks – ie, just the CEO – can spoil the camaraderie broth.

Employment/HR attorney Joelle Ryssemus Sullivan made this clear in a recent column answering a reader's question on Examiner.com.  Sullivan told "Catherine in Montara," who lamented that her boss's quarterly team building activity excludes some employees because it's sports-based, that she has several options.  These include:

1. Explain the situation to your boss
2. Encourage your boss [sic] to get feedback from the entire team
3. Come up with alternative team building activities
4. If you can’t get you boss off the “sports” theme, look for alternative activities besides game participation
5. Take the issue to your human resources department

These are all great suggestions, falling squarely into our building blocks for creating a Winning Workplace.  Specifically:

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

Owners and leaders of small businesses should keep this story in mind when they set out to plan employee engagement activities meant to bring everyone together.  And employees should heed Sullivan's advice if they find themselves in a similar situation.

Related post: 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies