Employee Engagement Best Practices

If you were among the over 41 million people who watched the 82nd Academy Awards telecast last Sunday, you might have seen one of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award finalists: outdoor clothing designer/distributor/retailer Patagonia.

During the program American Express ran an ad for their Members Project, a new partnership with social action network Takepart.com.  Here's the commercial if you missed it:

The ad features Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who according to their application for our award – and the company's own press materials – is still actively involved in the business he established almost 40 years ago.

This post on Patagonia's employee and customer blog explains the set piece in the ad, the Matilija Dam, and why removing it would be good for the planet and people (which, along with profit, make up the three pillars of the growing triple bottom line business movement).

Patagonia's work maintaining a strong triple bottom line is readily apparent.  On their website homepage, a vast Environmentalism section is given equal weight to revenue-friendlier sections such as Clothing & Gear and Product Information.

This perfect weave (pardon the pun) of company mission and like-minded employees and customers has kept business strong, even in a down economy.  I can't get into specifics, because our Top Small Company Workplaces media partner Inc. Magazine will share those with you in its June issue should Patagonia be named a winner for 2010.  But trust me that they're doing very well on the key business metrics you're concerned about in your own organization.

Watch for the June issue of Inc. on newsstands to read about this year's winning firms and their workplace culture improvement and team engagement activities, which you can adapt for your company.  You can also subscribe to Inc. and get the issue as soon as it comes out.

[I]f the current recession turns out to be very long and deep and a business finds it must take further action, the fact that sharing the pain was tried first makes the next steps more palatable for all stakeholders involved, especially employees.  For one thing, those who stay after one or more round of layoffs will be better equipped to mitigate the dreaded "survivor syndrome."

Our Founder and Chairman, Ken Lehman, gave this advice a little over a year ago in a Winning Workplaces editorial titled "Share the Pain."  Since then I've blogged when I've found others concerned with how to improve employee engagement endorse this same strategy.

Last week a major player, Fortune magazine, came out in support of sharing the pain – specifically, going above and beyond to provide the softest landing possible for those you've laid off.

In their article HR outsourcing provider CEO Burton Goldfield recounts how one of his clients invested only $5,000 for two, half-day-long workshops for a good portion of his workforce that he was forced to let go within the last 14 months.  The ROI on that money would seem to be well above 100%:

• 10 (60%) of the 17 participating employees had found new jobs just a few weeks after attending the company-sponsored workshops – helping to, as Goldfield says, "put food on the table for those who once slaved on your payroll."  This reflects our view that Winning Workplaces are better for employees and the greater society.
• This practice was also better for the business: Goldfield says his client told him that many of the remaining employees told the CFO how impressed they were that a company that small would take a step like that.  Guess what?  That's going to make it much more likely that they won't bail – even if the economy takes a bigger dip and more team sacrifices need to be made.  This means the CEO's investment of $5,000 can be worth many multiples in terms of the costs saved if they needed to recruit to replace less committed workers who would leave.  (The cost to replace an employee has been found to range from 50% to 150% of his/her salary.)

Have you needed to engage employees in sharing the pain in your firm during this recession?  If so, how did it help them and your business?

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?

Yesterday I blogged about our announcement of our finalist organizations for the 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award, showing where these businesses are located across the U.S.

You may be wondering, OK, so what made these 40 firms stand out among the almost 500 that applied?

Our finalists stand out when it comes to their use of effective, progressive employee engagement best practices to drive improved business outcomes.

The two tables below spell this out in detail.  Here are some key best practices/benefits where the finalists stood head and shoulders above all applicants, on average...

...which helped them produce the following outcomes:

Metric/Outcome	2010 TSCW Applicants	2010 TSCW Finalists	Finalist Improvement
Percent profitable in 2009	91%	95%	4%
Average years in business	16 years	28 years	75%
Average employee turnover	19%	8%	138%
Average % open positions filled from within in 2009	22%	28%	27%
Average employee tenure	4 years	7 years	75%

So, yet another employee engagement research sample that shows the payoff of winning workplace engagement strategies.

Help a blogger out: Have you seen any new workplace research showing that better people practices bring better business results?  Let me know by commenting below.

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!

I'm all for outsourcing when it makes sense for a business leader.  In fact, this week I retweeted Adam Toren's suggestion that busy executives can save time by outsourcing some of their more tedious household responsibilities.

But I think that if employee engagement or the workplace culture could suffer, then don't do it.  Building trust in the workplace, IMO, should always be the top item on any CEO's to-do list.

So therefore I can't endorse Douglas R. Palmer's pitch on the Small Business CEO blog to outsource your finance department.  I have two thoughts here as to why (in addition to the line in the sand I laid out above):

• First, while Palmer's list of the pros of doing this does make business sense, one associated risk is the loss or accidental distribution of sensitive information.  Even if you've thoroughly researched your options and chosen a winning partner, that can still happen.  Would you take that chance with your company's balance sheet and salary info?
• Second and more importantly from a productivity standpoint, keeping this function in-house is one more piece of the intellectual capital pie that can benefit from leadership, if not team, involvement.  One of the themes of our Top Small Workplaces over the years has been their ability to anticipate marketplace changes, which especially helps them navigate tough times like these, in large part because their leaders engage employees by sharing financial information with them and teach them what it means, which spurs actionable ideas on creating efficiencies and optimizing revenue sources.  If they outsourced their financial component, this outcome would be difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Where do you stand here?

Last month in The New York Times, Peter S. Goodman wrote about "the new poor" – a growing segment of the U.S. population slipping out of the middle class due to falling or nonexistent unemployment benefits at the same time that sluggish economic growth is keeping companies from adding jobs for which they could apply.

Goodman warns that this phenomenon may be a factor for years.  Yet, the Hitachi Foundation is following the old life-lemons adage and taking this opportunity to provide assistance to young entrepreneurs whose missions align with helping this very population.

Triple Pundit, a site that writes on the triple bottom line of "people, planet, profit," shared the details of Hitachi's Yoshiyama Award.  It's for entrepreneurs aged 18-29 – the demographic of the Upstarts that Donna Fenn writes about.  Hitachi is offering six winners up to $50,000 over two years to help support their work.

If you know someone in that age range who runs a business aimed at helping America's poor, tell them about it by using the Share button at the bottom of this post.  And tell them to hurry if they want to apply for 2010: the deadline is March 22.

Related: All social entrepreneurs should get in the habit of doing a "social audit."  There's a story in today's Wall Street Journal on this topic which profiles The Redwoods Group, a specialty insurance provider that Winning Workplaces honored in 2008 for their incredible team building and employee engagement best practices.

Just as employees crave recognition, organizations covet it, too.  In fact, that was the theme of my post yesterday on PrintingForLess.com.

I just heard that Winning Workplaces was named to the FastUpFront Small Business Blog's list of the Top Free Government Business Resources.  This designation joins others on our "mantle" including being named a Top HR Influencer for 2007 by HR World, and this blog being named a Top 100 Leadership Blog last year by BestUniversities.com.

We thank the FastUpFront Blog and the other two entities mentioned above for introducing more folks to us and our mission to equip small business leaders with proven, practical – and yes, FREE – team building and employee engagement strategies to improve their workplace culture and productivity.

In celebration of this recognition of our efforts, I offer these selected blog posts that will help you reward and recognize your employees, with minimal effort and cost:

• (Employee) Love Don't Cost a Thing*
• Employee Recognition on the Cheap
• How Important is Employee Recognition? Leading Book on It Gets Second Edition Makeover
• All Employee Recognition Roads Lead to Greater Company Productivity
• 10 Team Building Strategies of the 2009 Top Small Workplaces Finalists
• Nine Resources for Becoming an Employer of Choice

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?

LEED certification by the U.S. Green Building Council can be a tough caveat for small businesses.  However, I think the benefits of acheiving this designation for your facility far outweigh the costs involved.

Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Cost savings – most typically in reduced water and electricity consumption.
• Local and national recognition, exposing your business to more potential customers.
• Increased ability to attract top talent who value eco-friendly (and generally employee-friendly) workplaces.
• Greater perception of "walking the talk" when it comes to the carbon footprint of your organization and its products/services.
• Maybe most importantly in this business climate where some CEOs are making headlines by using profits to fund lavish lifestyles that are out of touch with what most Americans are experiencing right now – writing a new narrative for the media in which the CEO is a hero for dumping profits back into the business in a way that benefits not only the company, but its employees and the greater community.

Winning Workplaces Best Boss Nicolas Thomley is enjoying all of these benefits based on the LEED Gold certification his company, Pinnacle Services, announced last week.  You can read their press release on it here.

Related: Read how employee engagement and team building strategies factored into the workplace "greening" of three other organizations in our network.

Regular readers of our blog are familiar with on-demand employee recognition solutions provider Globoforce.  I've mentioned them in these three posts, and their VP of Global Strategy, Derek Irvine, commented on one of them.

I just saw on PR Web that Globoforce is partnering with Aberdeen Group to host a FREE webinar March 4 on recognizing the right employee behaviors to achieve company objectives.  Stated learning takeaways for attendees include:

• What employee engagement truly is and how it differs from employee satisfaction
• How to build an engaged, motivated, and productive workplace
• When and where to implement employee engagement strategies to maximize its impact on business objectives and overall organizational performance

For more info on this session, click here.  You can register for it here.

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."

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?

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.

Yesterday and today I've been doing some serious number crunching to find trends in the employee engagement research Winning Workplaces does through our annual Top Small Company Workplaces recognition project – in this case, for the 2010 applicant pool that finished applying last month.

As a result, I can now tell you what a typical 2010 applicant firm looks like:

• Privately held
• S Corp
• $0-10 million revenue in 2009
• 21-50 employees
• In the Consulting industry
• In California
• In business for between 6 and 20 years (6-10 and 11-20 years, the largest segments in a range of years, have an equal number of applicants)

Benefits include:

• Medical insurance – company pays 73% of an employee's premium
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Educational assistance – tuition reimbursement of $2,550 per employee, per year
• Paid time off/vacation/holidays/personal time – for a one-year or longer-term employee, 24 days in a PTO plan

Stay tuned for more information soon on applicants' top human capital strategies, which you can adapt for your organization.  (Do you follow our blog?  Add it to your feed reader today.)

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.

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.