Employee Engagement Activities

Yesterday after the Associated Press reported on the results of a San Diego State University study finding that Generation Y (or Millennials) highly value compensation and vacation time, some in the blogosphere asked if, especially in this economic environment, Gen Y needs a wake-up call.

I don't think so – and I'm not saying that because I'm a card-carrying Millennial.  As someone interested in progressive people practices for a more productive workplace, I look at these two sticking points as the carrot at the end of a very lucrative stick for businesses.

Here are my top 5 reasons why I think Gen Y is entitled to its job wants:

1. It's now the most dominant generation in the workforce.  When you rise to that position and make decisions that benefit companies in both front-line and managerial roles, you get to call the shots when it comes to "skin in the game."
2. As Donna Fenn reports from a number of sources in her book Upstarts!, not only are record numbers of Millennials enrolling in entrepreneurship/MBA programs, but a greater share of those students than ever before are coming in with a business already in tow.  IMO, if these young people invest the ridiculous amount of time it takes to create and nurture a thriving business – and help our economy in the process through taxes and job creation – they deserve these two rewards.
3. As Penelope Trunk pointed out in a blog post I cited last year, Gen Y more readily embraces a proven leadership approach known as "fast failure."  Since our employee engagement research shows this can greatly improve innovation and thus productivity and customer satisfaction, again, I think Millennials deserve some just rewards for significantly scaling up a company's revenue and giving them a greater shot at achieving or maintaining profitability.
4. As organizational development guru David Lee argued on ERE.net last month, Gen Y doesn't beat around the bush on satisfaction – if they're not, you won't see them because they'll have left.  The cost-effective flip side of this for businesses is that they're much less likely than other generations to be "what the Gallup Organization calls ROAD Warriors — Retired on Active Duty."
5. Finally, as The CEO of YOU author Marsha Petrie Sue wrote in the California Chronicle, "Gen Y won't retire – they will reinvent."  Aren't greater pay and more time off fair tradeoffs for more productive ideas coming back from breaks and a longer work life spent helping companies improve their sales and bottom line?

Do you agree or disagree with my assessment?  Why?

The comments are coming in fast and furiously to Wally Bock's latest post on his Three Star Leadership Blog.  That's not surprising given his topic: first-line managers.

Bock cites a blog post by Tom Peters in which he goes so far as to call these managers a "peerless strategic opportunity" for innovation and growth.  Expanding Peters' case, Bock explicitly links nurturing these integral staff to more desirable outcomes in engagement, turnover, and, yes, profitability.

In addition to Bock's "boss's bottom line" that employee leadership development helps a company grow even as its key players do, he provides value in these three qualities to look for in first-line managers to assess their longer-term leadership potential:

• They talk to others about behavior and performance,
• They make decisions, and
• They enjoy helping others succeed.

I hope more leaders read the advice of Peters, Bock, and other respected authorities who are pointing to this pivotal cog in the machine of small business – and business in general – as one that can easily be improved, for the benefit of their bottom line, and ultimately everyone through the job growth more thriving enterprises create.

Related: We wrote an editorial a few years ago on the importance of new manager training to more robust (and productive) employee engagement and people practices, and it still holds up today.  Read it here.

Today Winning Workplaces is formally announcing our partnership with a new, Chicago-based startup called Tix4Cause.

The brainchild of consumer products industry veteran Kevin Nemetz, Tix4Cause is the realization of Kevin's very cool idea: benefit charities of people's choosing with the up to 60% of season tickets that go unused, while at the same time getting those tickets to folks at fair market prices and providing ticket donors with a tax deduction.

Why is Winning Workplaces joining other charities on Tix4Cause's roster such as Heritage YMCA Group and Ronald McDonald House Charities of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana?  Because we're a nonprofit and our mission to equip small and midsize businesses with proven, practical, and affordable team building and employee engagement activities is as needed as ever, as our president explained on her blog last week.

So let's connect the dots here:

• Your donation and/or purchase of event tickets through Tix4Cause...
• Helps support our fundraising efforts, which go toward...
• Three primary initiatives designed to help small organizations create a more productive workplace: our consulting and training services, our Top Small Company Workplaces recognition project, and our free employee engagement best practices information for company leaders and employees.

Here's our affiliate link to register (free) on Tix4Cause, after which you can donate your unwanted or unused tickets to our cause and purchase tickets for ours or other causes.  Thank you in advance for any help you can offer!

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

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

As Nic Paton writes,

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

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

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

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

I was thinking about the title of this post this morning.  We've been hearing since at least late 2008 about rising unemployment, and even though it's leveled off, we're still not at a stage of job growth.  We're just not losing as many (relatively speaking) jobs per month.

Two other employment trends have been making headlines lately.  There's underemployment, where because of hour and pay cuts by employers so they can keep their doors open, people aren't making as much as they did before the recession.  Compounding this issue is the fact that often their employers are demanding more from them, leaving these folks with less time to look for a new job that would provide more pay.

Then, there's the tendency of businesses, especially small ones, to replace laid off full-time employees with temp workers.  The benefit for organizations is that they can manage current and even emerging job functions (as markets improve and they see the need) by paying someone less than they paid a FTE, and with less of a commitment if it turns out a temporary hire is suddenly not needed.

My fear is that if, as many econmists are predicting, economic/job growth is extremely slow for the next year or two, these three employment factors – unemployment, underemployment, and the rise of temp workers – will impede the adoption and cultivation of the qualities of a productive workplace.  These qualities, or hallmarks, include many of the workplace team building and employee engagement best practices we talk about on this blog.

You may ask, what's the harm over the next few years if this scenario does, in fact, play out?  For one thing, less cohesive workplace cultures – those that, for instance, don't rein in toxic managers – very often increase supervised employees' stress levels.  On a macro level, studies have shown this hurts our GDP to the tune of $300 billion annually.

This, of course, doesn't even begin to address costs such as absenteeism, turnover, and recruiting/training that could become even less manageable under this scenario.

Do you agree or disagree with my assessment?  If you agree – how do you think should firms, especially small ones, should respond?

I like Dragan Sutevski's comparison on his Entrepreneurship In a Box blog of running a business to being in a dream.  According to Sutevski, there are only a handful of factors keeping this experience from turning into a nightmare.

Number 7 on his top 10 list that he shared this weekend is employees:

Your employees can contribute to your business to be successful, but in the same time they can harm your business.  Employees are the heart and the most important resource.

Sutevski makes the case that although they represent perhaps the most important resource, your employees are still only that – a resource that can be useful or useless depending on how the leadership engages them and acts on their expertise.

In the right leader's hands – and in the context of the right workplace culture – employees can bring a company substantial bottom-line returns at every stage of interaction.

For example:

• Prospective hires, both those that join the workforce and those that are not the best fit: managers' interview questions lead to feedback that can influence product/service development and delivery.
• Once a person in "on the bus," employee engagement best practices such as mentoring, annual opinion surveys, and monthly or quarterly all-hands meetings can promote cross-department learning, as well as improve internal processes and external marketing.
• Promoting from within is particularly useful to building trust in the workplace, and keeps your knowledge base intact and strong.
• Employee exits, especially if they are voluntary, can also produce valuable feedback on improving of your culture and your customer satisfaction.

Go here to read Sutevski's top 10 list of resources to make your business life easier.  How do you rank employees compared to the other resources in terms of potential?

Consumer confidence is down – no doubt in large part because one in 10 Americans is still without a job.  That combined with mostly inaction from Washington has created a climate where entrepreneurs must (with due credit to Jack Matson) innovate or die.

Adam Toren wrote a great post on the YoungEntrepreneur site last week on this necessity.  Perhaps the most powerful of the five tips he shares to "keep your fire burning strong" is to guard against negativity.  As I've written here before, negativity results in employee stress, and that can wreak havoc on your ability to create a productive workplace culture.

Picking up and running with Toren's point on ridding your workplace of negativity, here are three road-tested strategies you can use to get there.  Use them in tandem for best results:

1. Hire slow.  Don't be afraid to bring prospective hires in for interviews with staff they would report to, as well as decision makers in other departments or areas.  Doing this will greatly increase the likelihood that they're the best person for you and, on the flip side, that you're the best organization for them.
2. Communicate with employees often, and give them a voice in how the company operates.  Frequent all-hands meetings and annual or semi-annual employee surveys are great action steps under this strategy.
3. Invest in employee leadership development.  We've seen that while some leaders think paying to advance workers' career development will lead them to jump ship, by and large they show their appreciation for their employer's commitment to their growth by staying put and instead looking for growth opportunities from within.  In turn, this helps keep your knowledge base strong and also saves on recruiting and training costs.

When you engage employees, do you do anything in addition to the above measures to make your organization a positive place in which to work?

When you went to determine how many days off (hopefully paid) you award one-year or longer-term employees, did you consult any benchmarking sources to point you in the right direction?

If not, or if you'd like a good new source to turn to for this employee engagement activity, I give you the following data points as averaged across our nearly 500 applicant organizations for the 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award:

In a paid time off (PTO) Plan:

• Days: 15.7
• Plus holidays: 8.7
  • Total days: 24.4

Not in a package:

• Vacation days: 10.7
• Sick days: 5.1
• Holidays: 8.5
• Other* days: 3.3
  • Total days: 27.6

*Other includes:

• Personal
• Bereavement
• Birthday
• Floating holiday
• Flex
• Jury duty
• Service/volunteer
• 1/2 or 1 day before the weekend
• Tenure-based vacation
• "Shut down week" between Christmas & New Years
• Family leave

Related: Switching gears, check out our Ask An Expert column that shows how employees can make the case for time off to management (hint: it leads to a more productive workplace).

The recent actions of big players in some industries have helped sour business' overall reputation.  I'm referring to the likes of Goldman Sachs and WellPoint, who are awarding themselves with, respectively, record bonuses and rate hikes while consumers continue to languish in this economy.

When big business' rep takes a dive, employees who work for them, and even workers in small businesses that partner with them, can become disenfranchised.  Disenfranchised, of course, is another way of saying disengaged, and when this happens, productivity suffers.

Greg Hakim, a new employee of our Top Small Workplace Corporate Ink, wrote on this on their company blog this week.  He starkly defines the differences in business outcomes when leaders engage employees as merely numbers, or business assets, versus as the dynamic, innovation starters they truly can be when workplace team building is similarly dynamic and innovative.

A workplace culture that doesn't place any value on job meaning produces siloed work, customer or client dissatisfaction, and turnover that's often above the industry average.  On the other hand, companies that demonstrate through their people practices that they respect their workers and also invest in employee leadership development enjoy more and better innovations from collaborative work, which make customers/clients happier and also make it much more likely that workers won't bail, keeping your recruiting/training costs under control.

Related: Helping to instill a sense of meaning in your workforce doesn't have to be expensive.  This post reveals ways to do employee recognition "on the cheap."

Who will be responsible for choosing which of our almost 500 applicant organizations will be named as 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces in Inc. Magazine this June?

We just posted our panel of judges this year on our website.  Those who will be making the final determination in early March as to which firms best showed the payoff of such productive workplace factors as team building and employee leadership development include:

• Elaine Brodsky – Former Co-Owner of CitiStorage, LLC
• Dan Denison – Professor of Management and Organization at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland
• Craig Hickman – Author of The Oz Principle and other bestselling business books
• Bart Houlahan – Co-Founder of B Lab
• Ken Lehman – Winning Workplaces Founder and Chairman; former Co-Chairman of Fel-Pro Inc.
• Bill Marshall – President and CEO of Top Small Workplace Phelps County Bank
• Julie Silverstein – President and COO of SmithBucklin Corporation
• Kevin A. Trapani – President and CEO of Top Small Workplace The Redwoods Group

Related: This post shows the company success factors our award application solicits data on, which our judges will take into account in making their decisions.

Due to my workload, one of my Winning Workplaces New Year's resolutions – being a more active discussion moderator here on our blog – has been on the backburner since January 1.  I'm happy to report, though, that I've shuffled some things around and have also placed more of a premium on being present when you take the time to comment on one of our posts.

To catch you up and hopefully spur more dialogue where it's already been started on workplace team building and employee engagement, here's a list of posts where I've most recently commented on someone else's thoughts.  I'd love to read your take on the following:

• Employee Engagement - It Takes Two to Tango
• Paid Sabbaticals Less Radical
• Don't Be Afraid to Expand Employee Training to Include General Career Advancement Skills
• Stanford Prof Reinforces Theory: Poor Employee Engagement Will Lead to Talent Exodus
• Bob Sutton: Don't Cut Bottom 10 Percent of Workforce as a Knee-Jerk Reaction
• Who's in the Wrong Here: Employee or Company?
• What 'Tabatha's Salon Takeover' is Really About
• '60 Minutes' Reveals the VA Benefits Backlog is a Leadership Problem
• Nonprofits and Blogs Were Made for Each Other
• Ingredients Common to Business Success Involve Employee Engagement

Here's a silver lining for small businesses in this economy: trends more typical of big companies, including automating customer service functions and employing fewer customer service representatives per (potential) customer, mean that the bar is often set fairly low for you to "over-deliver."

I speak from experience on this.  Check out this feedback we just received from a company that completed our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award application:

I especially appreciated the quick response to an email I sent to customer service.  Technical support responded within 24 hours, thanked me for pointing out the mistake and assured me the problem would be fixed.  I was surprised to receive a response at all.

While we pride ourselves at Winning Workplaces on delivering excellent service across all our employee engagement activities, that last sentence in the applicant's feedback wouldn't have materialized if someone they dealt with before us didn't under-deliver.  Consider that in your employee engagement and team building initiatives that involve your customer service staff.

While we're on the topic of customer service, have you ever wondered what the optimal ratio of reps to customers should be?  It varies, of course, but you could use as a baseline what our ratio ended up being while assisting this year's TSCW applicants.

We had 3 FTE reps to a little over 600 customers.  Or a ratio of 1 to 200.

How does this compare with your current ratio?  And have you seen feedback from your customers that affirms a low service bar set by your competitors that your people practices help you surpass?

Will this be the decade in which the employee engagement activity of flexible work arrangements becomes systematized and pervasive across companies and countries?  2009 gave us a nod squarely in that direction, as human capital strategies consultant and author Dr. Sandy Burud writes on the Sloan Network Work and Family Blog today.

In both 2009 and 2010, four out of five of our Top Small Company Workplace award applicant firms report flexible work arrangements among their employee benefit offerings.  To provide you with some solid employee retention tips, check out these 18 top, specific flex work practices our 2010 applicants are using:

1. Employees can adjust schedules to leave early to accommodate childcare pick-up or attend evening classes.
2. Offer weekend work to allow hourly employees to earn extra hours if they missed a day but have used up all their personal time.
3. Managers can telecommute and/or work evening or weekend hours to accommodate personal responsibilities.
4. Religiously observant employees can opt to work a company holiday and take their own religious holiday off with pay.
5. Host our own IT services such as VPN servers, email, webmail, and intranet with a focus on "any user" "anywhere" "anytime" so that users have full and easy access from all remote/mobile locations.
6. Flexible arrival and departure times allow employees to arrive late or leave early with notice to supervisors in order to attend to personal matters.
7. Variable lunch hours.
8. Allow employees to split duty in divergent job descriptions in order to satisfy their personal needs for challenging work.
9. 100% telecommuting option.
10. Mothers and/or fathers with infants are able to work from home up to 80% of the time.
11. Average full-time employee work week of 30-35 hours.
12. Job-sharing including a reduced work schedule and cross-training to cover team members on "off days."
13. Flex Fridays in the summer during which employees may leave the office at 1 pm on Fridays after working a compressed schedule earlier in the week.
14. Three shifts available to work.
15. Pets are allowed at work.  Children are allowed in certain instances and in case of need.
16. Managers are trained to accommodate flexible work arrangement requests, and systems for accountability and communication are in place to facilitate successful flexible work arrangements.
17. Offer laptops and mobile phones with email to support people working where and when they need to so they can prioritize family/personal time.
18. Staff is allowed to work four, 10-hour days due to weather, travel or family/personal conditions with approval from the leadership team.

Related: Two Winning Workplaces Best Bosses shared how flexibility factors into their strategies for a more productive workplace in this webinar.

This post from last week on Canada's Axiom News site caught my attention.  In it, Jennifer Higgs cites the Vermont Employee Ownership Center – and our 2007-09 Top Small Workplaces – in making the case that companies that are employee owned have "disproportionate excellence" relative to their peers that are not.

Higgs' evidence to support this case includes the fact that a third of our winners the last three years thrive with the help of a true culture of ownership, and that, at least in Vermont, employee-owned firms have tended to win more awards.   She also cites employee engagement research compiled by the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) which finds that, as we've shared here, employee-owned firms "tend to grow faster and are more profitable with higher productivity than non-employee-owned companies."

But, while desirable, do these business outcomes equate to "disproportionate" excellence, or success?  One firsthand perspective I can offer might shed some light on this question.

This year I had the opportunity to read and score a batch of our Top Small Company Workplaces applications.  I looked at the following factors for success, as assessed in our extensive application:

• *Business structure & growth
• Employee metrics
• Benefits
• Learning & development
• Workplace culture & people practices
• Impact of people practices
• Employee participation
• Impact of economy & company response
• Fostering community & collaboration
• Goals & sustainability

I put an asterisk (*) next to the first bullet above because this is the area that asks about employee ownership.  It is only one of 10 areas I, and the rest of our reading teams, are looking at.  I personally put as much or more weight into applicants' benefit offerings, employee development strategies, and responses to the essay questions that make up the last six areas listed above as I put into their business structure/growth.

For me and surely for others now reviewing applications, employee ownership by itself is not a guarantee of moving on to the next round (where our judging panel – of a caliber on par with our 2009 roster, TBA – will select the winners that will be featured in the June issue of Inc. Magazine).  Because employee ownership has historically been viewed similarly relative to many other success factors by our final judging panel, you get the majority of our winners over the last three years that are not employee owned.  This includes such excellent organizations as Healthwise (2007 Winner), Lundberg Family Farms (2008), and Anthony Wilder Design/Build (2009).

So in terms of addressing the claim that employee ownership equals "disproportionate excellence," I stick by what I wrote here last month: While employee ownership is not essential for creating a Winning Workplace, it is often tied to the ability to do so.

How much weight do YOU give employee ownership, as compared with other factors, to achieving excellence (defined as long-term success and sustainability)?

At some point, your CEO will want to step down.  Then the question, possibly for your board of directors, will be: Do we hire someone from outside or promote from within to fill this role?

Hiring CEOs from within has been the pinnacle of the employee leadership development strategies of the small businesses Winning Workplaces has honored with our Top Small Company Workplace award.  In fact, among our almost 500 award applicants for 2010, close to one in four job openings last year was filled from within.

As Administaff's HRTools site reports, new research from Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business finds that this tack when it comes to filling the CEO position is better for businesses in the long term, versus tapping a qualified candidate from outside.

Here's how this looks in terms of outcomes, according to HRTools:

[A]fter three years, it’s clear that inside CEOs fare better than outside CEOs....  As tenure increases, obvious opportunities for cost cutting and divestment dry up.  Inside CEOs, because of their deep knowledge and root in the firm, are more likely to initiate and implement strategic changes that can build the firm’s long-term competitive advantage....

One of the researchers involved in this study of close to 200 CEOs over a five-year period went so far as to warn company boards that hiring a CEO from outside poses "greater risks" to the firm's performance.

Related: Read what we have to say on succession planning as part of employee engagement at work by accessing our relevant posts here.

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've followed the In Good Company Workplaces blog for some time and agree with most of what Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams write about there.  Subject matter-wise, they overlap with our main focus of small business, and also delve into issues affecting women entrepreneurs.

However, I disagree somewhat with their latest post from today, which argues that the ingredients of success are unique to each business.  While it's true that such factors as a coveted, not-easily-duplicated widget; interesting coming-to-market story; and charasmatic founder/owner/CEO can build buzz and result in strong sales from highly engaged customers, other factors that contribute heavily to long-term business success can, in fact, be replicated by other organizations.

I was going to build a case for this based on my writing here, which itself is based mainly on the employee engagement research Winning Workplaces does each year through our Top Small Company Workplaces recognition project.  But I found this post from last week by serial entrepreneur Geri Stengel on the Ventureneer site that does this for me.  Citing the key team engagement activities of four of our 2009 Top Small Workplaces, Stengel identifies these employee engagement-themed common success ingredients:

• Soliciting ideas from employees
• Team or family mentality – either way, everyone is included and cared for
• All employees have a financial stake in the company's success
• Shared pain in bad times; shared recovery in better ones
• Employee involvement in management decisions
• Recognition of work/life balance
• Employee training initiatives
• Promotion from within
• Cross-department relationship building; also conscious management of multiple generations
• Flat hierarchies
• Above (industry) average benefits

These common ingredients come together to form a plethora of (also common) business results:

• Lower turnover
• More ideas to help fuel sales and company growth
• Better customer service from a more loyal, dedicated, and creative staff
• "A flexible, trained staff that can respond to crises efficiently" (Are you listening, Toyota?)

Related: Read more about team building strategies of the four Top Small Workplaces that Stengel cites here.

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)

Would this post benefit someone you know who's seeking employment?  If so, click the Share button below to email it to them, or to post it on your social networks.  Here's the short permalink for this post to paste in your email or status update: http://bit.ly/bK8NP5

This new article on CNNMoney.com profiles six companies on Fortune magazine's 2010 "100 Best Companies to Work For" list that have never had a layoff.

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?