Employee Engagement Activity

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!

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).

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.
• 2008 Top Small Workplace King Arthur Flour Company – the MacGyver of the kitchen, who's eager to share tips and also has a sense of humor.
• 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?

Photo credit: GuitarSam.com

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":

1. Hire the best and avoid the rest.
2. Provide flexible work schedules adapted to the needs of the individual.
3. Get rid of the slackers and whiners.
4. Soft skills are becoming the hard skills.
5. If they can't "move up" they will "move out."  (A case for employee leadership development.)
6. *Create an early warning detection system.
7. *Create an alumni program.
8. Look for triggers.
9. Take the temperature of your workforce.  (We offer one way to do this here.)
10. Complete an Individual Retention Plan on your best employees.
11. Focus on the family.
12. Identify and weed out poor managers.
13. *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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I wish I could share with you now the kinds of companies that are applying, fast and furiously, every day for Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine's 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition.  One company that started their application yesterday is one that we wrote about a few years ago, and impressively it's grown revenues 41% since then through great employee engagement.

What I can share with you now, though, is more feedback from current applicants on the value inherent in the process of applying.  Yes, there's a benefit even for organizations that aren't named as our winners in Inc. Magazine in June.  Read on....

The process was very easy and it did help solidify our people practices.  It was easy to follow your format technically.  Thanks for putting this program together.
– CEO, applicant from Georgia

One of the things we realized that some items we wanted to say would have been more of a wish list than an actually done list, and so those are now goals for 2010.  Great job by your team.
– President, applicant from California

I like doing a process like this because it reveals what processes we have done in the past that the team failed to do in the current year.  It also makes you think of several things you could do in addition to help build a team and a better workplace culture.
– CEO, applicant from Texas

Apply today for the chance to show company pride by appearing in the pages of Inc. this summer – and for the immediate benefit of assessing the scope and success of your staff engagement activities.

Over the past few weeks my wife has piqued my interest in the Bravo TV show Tabatha's Salon Takeover.  If you're not familiar, the plot is that each week hairdresser and business owner Tabatha Coffey, in her unfettered style, takes the keys of a salon in desperate need of help from the owner.

She then proceeds to revamp everything from poor employee styling techniques to the salon's appearance.  Each episode ends with Coffey's recommendations for improvement and a subsequent, impromptu check-in to see if her advice made an impact on the business.

While clients' hair and the employees who tend to it factor prominently in the footage that airs, what I find most inspiring from the perspective of a small business leader is the time Coffey devotes to try to make over the salon owner's employee engagement attitude and/or business model.

In the current, second season, for instance, Nikki Mallon, owner of not just Brownes and Co. in Miami, but the entire building of their coveted South Beach location, openly admits that she would like to just be the landlord and not have to deal with employees whom she thinks are backstabbers.  Sadly, in episode 6 which features Mallon and Brownes, the ceiling-mounted cameras to monitor employees that are fed to Mallon's home-based laptop, which Coffey removes as part of her salon makeover, are back a few weeks later when she checks back in on Brownes.  So much for the Winning Workplace building block of Trust, Respect & Fairness.

In episode 8, which aired last night, Coffey visits Chicago Male in Chicago's Boystown village – a salon that should be doing fine given its access to, as owner Scott Neesham states, over 50,000 potential customers.  But Coffey identifies a flawed business model and a missed opportunity: barring the all-male stylists from doing women's hair, and limiting appointments to 30 minutes – which collectively have reduced capacity to 25%.  Luckily in this case, Neesham follows Coffey's sound advice to a tee, and when she returns a few weeks after her takeover business is up and you can tell that there are more highly engaged employees.

If you find yourself with some free time on Tuesday night at 10/9 Central, you should check out this show.  I'd love to hear what staff engagement activities – or ones to avoid – you come away with.

Here's an interesting finding from the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College via WFD Consulting: While 80% of managers' and employees' workloads, and thus stress, have increased over the last year, team engagement activities have helped to keep workloads manageable.

Because workload is linked to stress, this should be a real concern for leaders and managers.  After all, greater workplace stress is linked to higher absenteeism, presenteeism (where employees are at work but aren't fully engaged or productive), and turnover.  All of these three outcomes lead to higher costs for businesses at the end of the day in terms of recruiting and retraining.

Winning Workplaces came to the same conclusion as WFD Consulting when we wrote our Benchmarking & Best Practices Report on the 2008 Top Small Workplaces.  One of the nine themes we identified among winners that year was teamwork, and specifically we wrote that

Team-based operations lead to greater camaraderie and make it easier for managers to balance individual, family and business needs.

One of the 2008 Winners that exemplifies this approach is Jump Associates.  In our Benchmarking Report we reported that at Jump,

Teams are routinely encouraged to take breaks and have fun to recharge.  The firm places a premium on holding retreats, allowing teams the time to step back, reflect on past work, acknowledge the group efforts and plan for the future.

As one employee said, “I thought I had worked on teams before I came to Jump, but they were just a collection of individuals.”

Get our 52-page report on the major themes and employee engagement best practices of the 2008 Top Small Workplaces here for the best price of $24.99 as part of our Year End Special.

If you follow small business and entrepreneurship news, you must have read the name Barry Moltz at some point in the last month.  It seems like you can't turn a corner without hearing about the advice Moltz provides in his latest book, BAM! Delivering Customer Service in a Self-Service World.

Moltz, who has founded several small businesses over the last 15 years, first got on my radar screen when Becky McCray at Small Biz Survival gave BAM! some kudos.  (Based on her recommendation I included it on my recent list of 20 business books for holiday office stocking stuffers.)  I also saw this weekend that Zane Safrit scored an interview with Moltz, which is worth a read.

The latest from Moltz is a post on Small Business Trends on 10 customer service trends to look for in 2010.  The whole list is spot on, but I was especially drawn in by his #10 trend:

Get Small.  All startups used to want to appear big.  We bought typewriters and later computers and web sites to make ourselves look the part.  Now, every [sic] company, as Chris Brogan says, wants to be human.  I call it getting small.  Every company wants to seem like the corner store, but have the global pricing power and distribution of Walmart.  Furthermore, big business is now consistently targeting your small business since it is the a sector of the economy that is growing.  President Obama will continue to emphasize [sic] that small business is the core of American business.  You have arrived!

While I think this is a trend that will definitely continue next year, it's been emerging for some time.  Check out these links that underscore why it's hip to be small:

From Winning Workplaces' website:

• A Conversation with Accounting and Consulting Firm Blackman Kallick on Chicago's Economic Outlook, Part 1
• Achieving Adaptability Through Employee Empowerment
• Are We Setting Up 'Too Big To Fail,' Only Bigger?
• ATA Engineering Teaches Lessons on Consensus Decision Making
• In the Bank Bailout, Small is Beautiful
• Review of Small Giants by Bo Burlingham

From this blog:

• Is Being Small and Privately Held an Advantage?
• Kauffman Foundation to Policymakers: Support Young Businesses
• Rackspace's Graham Weston: 'No Voicemail Jail for You!'
• Welch Redeems Himself: Think Small

How are you using employee leadership development and team engagement activities to use your small size to your advantage?

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

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

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

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

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

With the economy in the state it's in, I think it will be a long time before the phrase "competitive advantage" is no longer in vogue.  Sure, as conditions improve companies will hire (back) more workers.  But the focus will continue to be on improving efficiencies, just like during these tough times.

This is a great thing, affecting everything from physical workspace to R&D prowess to, of course, the strength of the leadership team.  But one element of workplace culture is often missing in discussions of maintaining or increasing competitive advantage: employee training.

The small businesses Winning Workplaces has honored for translating employee engagement activities to greater profitability understand that in both good times and bad, an investment in training pays substantial dividends in greater camaraderie and productivity that enhances the bottom line and aids in retention.

Don't believe me?  Data don't lie.  Check out the table below:

The top part lists the percentage of our 2009 Top Small Workplace winners that offer nine types of training initiatives or financial support, followed by the percentage of all applicants that do so.  I highlighted in green the segment of the two whose firms provide a greater share of each type of training.  More winners provide all types of training than do applicants as a whole.

But where this table really gets interesting is at the bottom, where you can see the ROI of training for these same two survey samples: Our 15 winners this year have greater average revenue, revenue growth, and employee tenure, as well as lower turnover.

Of course, employee training is not the end all, be all of successful people practices.  But as you can see based on our research, it is linked to greater competitive advantage by the key business metrics that matter to small business leaders.

Help us gauge employee training for our 2010 small business recognition!  Apply now for Top Small Company Workplaces 2010 for the chance to be featured in Inc. Magazine.

Flexible work arrangements are gaining in popularity as leaders in organzations that have benefited from them become success stories in a press that's currently starved for positive business news.

Yet, when these leaders (and HR folks and front-line employees) tell their stories, often missing from the narrative are company benefits that are not tied to a specific industry or workplace culture.  Put another way, we know that greater commitment and productivity usually accrue from flex-oriented employee engagement activities, but it can be difficult for even the CEO to attach costs saved or revenue generated to their use.

Well, as NWjobs reports, a new study of managers at a dozen midwestern grocery stores by researchers at two universities is shedding more light on this to help expand the narrative when it comes to flex work:

According the study, employees with managers who champion a flexible workplace are more satisfied with their jobs and in better physical health.  What's more, those employees have less turnover than staff whose managers aren't as supportive of flexible work.

Greater employee satisfaction leading to higher tenures and lower turnover, and reduced medical insurance premiums because the workforce is healthier – that's a pretty convincing argument to bring to leadership to adopt flex practices.  Maybe that's why 11 of the 15 companies Winning Workplaces named Top Small Workplaces this year offer some kind of flexible work options. 

We're once again asking companies about what they do here and the impact it has on the bottom line in our current, 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces application.  Apply now and share your flex-based experience with us (and enter for the chance to be featured in Inc. magazine next summer).

One of the most recent blogs I've added to my Google Reader feed is thoughtLEADERS, LLC.  Written by Mike Figliuolo, his military background comes across, I think, in his in-your-face writing style.

Figliuolo's latest post from today is on "4 Leadership Trends You Can’t Afford to Miss."  Number 3 on his list is saying people are your most valuable resource.  I agree with the author when he writes,

This is one of the emptiest statements I regularly hear organizations espouse.  When someone says this, I ask one penetrating question: can you show me the actions that back up that statement?  Befuddled faces follow.

Saying people are valuable and showing they’re valuable are two very different things.  The statement looks great on a recruiting brochure but if you’re not backing it up with action, your associates will quickly figure that out and head for greener pastures.

This is so true, as I've written about here a few times.  To be and remain competitive on everything from sales to retention, leaders should put matching reality to stated intent when it comes to their employee engagement activities high up on their to-do list.  In other words, walk the talk.

If you feel your company does this well, you should apply for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition with Inc. magazine.  Hurry, the application deadline is January 11, 2010.