Employee Engagement Ideas

As you may know, this week Winning Workplaces and Inc. launched our joint 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition.  Online applications are coming in, and as they do we get the great opportunity to study, as they relate to current business challenges, particularly effective employee development strategies.

I'll share two with you that I thought were strong.  For the sake of privacy, I'll just say they're being used by an advertising firm – which makes sense given the content of the employee engagement ideas presented.

In answer to our question "Please give one example of a learning initiative that you have found particularly effective or innovative," this company said:

• Every new employee is required to go through an extensive 3 month training process prior to assisting to manage any client efforts.  In this process they learn the basics about our industry as well as our internal process.  Each new hire is trained by two designated staff members at the same time.
• Additionally, each new hire is required to become certified in paid search via Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.  We have found this particularly effective even if the team member is not directly involved in search marketing – it helps with an understanding of digital media, tracking, analytics and overall granularity of our business.

Think your business is doing better employee leadership development than this one?  Give 'em some competition!  Click here to apply now.  The prize for the winning organizations is being featured in the June 2010 issue of Inc. magazine!

Recently America's Best Companies shared four employee engagement ideas for managers to boost morale.  They're all strong, time-honored strategies; check them out here.

But what end does the means of increasing morale serve?  A new article in the Las Vegas Sun argues that it's keeping your best employees grounded and motivated to continue to put forth their best effort in an economy that results in their neighbors (former coworkers) disappearing due to layoffs.

The Sun cites as a subject matter expert Wharton School faculty member – and Top Small Workplaces judge – Peter Cappelli, who warns that, "If you don’t tell them what you know, employees make up a story, and that story is always worse than reality."

We all learned when we were in school that things can change drastically during a game of Telephone.  Apply that to a workplace setting at an organization where the leadership doesn't practice communications team building and the resulting, unfounded level of stress can be debilitating to company productivity as everyone wonders who's next to go, and when.

For more on how boosting morale can have a real and lasting impact on the bottom line, see these related posts:

• The Crisis of Employee Engagement Among Top Performers
• Office Dog is Boosting Morale at Best Boss Company
• Employee Engagement: A WorthWHILE Metric
• Team Building Improves Hospital's Productivity
• Stable Workplaces Keep Legal Threats in Check in a Tough Economy
• The Hidden Costs of a Lack of Employee Engagement

Book-ending Winning Workplaces' annual conference earlier this month, at the tail end of the event, was Diane Hessan.  Hessan is President of Communispace, a Massachusetts-based provider of online customer communities for big companies, and a Best Boss.

The theme of her keynote address was "lessons learned in building an enterprise."  I am posting the 10 lessons she shared, which encompass employee retention tips and other people practices, below.  As her discussion solicited feedback from attendees, I'm also including two lessons they provided.

Learning hat on?  OK then...

1. Do not fall in love with your own idea – Keep listening and questioning.
2. Customers are everything – Get great ones early; have them serve as references.  If they help you build your business tell them that you will be their best customer.
3. Look for serendipity – Business plans are only so useful.  Pay attention to what shows up through the changes.  Keep your head up and do what you love.
4. Hire passionate people – Give them what they need; it allows you to play “full out.”  Our scare resource is not time, it is energy.
5. Communicate constantly – She shared this innovative practice with attendees that we've mentioned before.
6. Learn to be a great salesperson – If you have a product and can’t sell it, it's not a product but a hobby.  Many people think they are not great salespeople, but they are.
7. Make it a great culture – It is your brand.
8. You don’t have to be brilliant to sell great, just “smart enough” – Help others to be smarter.  Have them practice, it will hurt less.
9. Relish the tough times – She quoted Warren Buffett: "It is only when the tide goes out that you know who is naked."  It is easy to stay put, so get dirty.
10. Focus on building an amazing company – She also quoted Seth Godin: “There is no business as usual.”

Here are the two attendee lessons:

1. Celebrate accomplishments along the way – monetarily and non-monetarily.
2. Expand your stakeholders (mentors, customers, shareholders, suppliers).  They will also share in your success.

If you think someone on your team or in your network would benefit from these employee engagement ideas, you can share them by using the button below.

How instrumental can employee engagement ideas be in creating a productive workplace?  Just ask Desiree Vargas, Co-Founder and President of Chicago-based GiveForward.org, a social venture whose mission is to make it "super-duper easy for people to raise money online for the things they care about."

Desiree attended Winning Workplaces' annual conference in 2008 and again this year.  She sent us an email last week sharing how the learning we provided that underscores the payoff of employee engagement has helped GiveForward go from a fall 2008 launch to managing nearly $400,000 in fundraising and a mention in USA Today in fall 2009:

Hello,

I just wanted to thank you for the conference last week.  I thoroughly enjoyed the workshops and keynote speakers. 

Last year after the conference, I came back with ideas on what kind of employer I wanted GiveForward to be.  I took those tips I learned and created an amazing internship program that has both students and post grads eager to work with us. 

This year, one of my best takeaways had to do with building an open brand.  We've already been on Twitter and Facebook for a while, but what I really learned is that it's important to be honest when using those platforms and that giving your company a personality that people relate to does wonders for your business.

Again, many thanks.

Desiree

These are the kind of tangible-benefit stories that our conference attendees come away with every year.  We're happy to have played a small part in GiveForward's success.

If you haven't checked out their site, I encourage you to do so today.  They really do make it easy to raise money for the causes you care about.

The Google Map I posted here this summer representing the locations of the 2007 and 2008 Top Small Workplaces got 50% bigger as of September 28, 2009, when The Wall Street Journal announced the 2009 winners.

Here's the expanded Google Map showing our now 45 honoree firms:

You may want to bookmark this page (use the Share button below), as when we write Success Stories on the 2009 winners you'll be able to access them directly from their marker on this map.  These Success Stories provide an in-depth look at the employee engagement ideas of our honorees that illustrate how investing in your workplace can lead to desired outcomes including increased productivity, lower turnover, and repeat business from more satisfied customers.

If you own a business, what's your most important pain point?  The Small Business Blog at Business Know-How writes today, based on new employee engagement research by Warrillow & Co., that almost a third of small business owners say it's poor sales.

What's your greatest fear?  Close to 40% of respondents in the Warrillow study say it's not marketing effectively.

So what can owners and leaders do to address both of these?  The short answer is, look inward and identify opportunities among their workplace team building and employee engagement activities to help workers understand how their responsibilities result in revenue for the company and the continuation of their jobs (the sales aspect), and how their attitude and evangelism for the company can boost awareness of it and its street cred (the marketing aspect).

Looking for specific information on each of these?  Read on...

On addressing owners' chief pain point, poor sales: This article on our website provides 10 examples from a recent survey we did that show exactly how employee engagement can increase sales.  Note the variety of industries and size of companies represented.

On overcoming owners' greatest fear, ineffective marketing: This blog post makes the case that small firms' products and services are only as good as the people behind them.  By using workplace practices that make best use of employee ideas and innovations, small firms can slash their budgets devoted toward traditional advertising.

For even more examples in line with the above, do a search using the box on your right for "sales" and "marketing".

Photo credit: Austin Media Outreach

I thought you'd appreciate an almost-packed view of my old office, and one of my office-to-be out of my new home in Los Angeles:

As Winning Workplaces tries to practice what we preach in terms of using innovative employee engagement ideas for greater workforce effectiveness, I am very happy the staff here is OK with my change to telecommuting from home full-time to accommodate a family move.

I plan to follow up soon with some do's and don'ts for other telecommuters and would-be telecommuters out there based on my own experiences.  In the meantime, as I need to finish packing, I leave you with these two resources:

• From today, Renee Oricchio's Inc. Technology post on The Sub-$1000 Home Office
• Helpful answers to my recent LinkedIn question on things to do and avoid in setting up a home/satellite office

More to come in August....

Emily Lonigro is back for another guest post.  Emily is owner of Chicago-based LimeRed Studio, a firm that specializes in branding creative for small businesses and nonprofits.

This time around she provides a how-to for pitching a project to a creative professional to quickly get that person in the know and – just as valuable – weed out those who aren't up to the task.  Think about how you can use this for both your vendor relations and internally for your workplace team building and employee engagement ideas.

At some point, you’re going to have to hire someone to do creative work for you.  It might be for an online ad campaign, a print brochure, a website, an identity overhaul, whatever.  You might do a search on Craigslist, post an ad, use a creative job board site, or ask for referrals to find people to bid on the job.

Trust me, this can get messy.  You’re going to have way more responses than you know what to do with.  What I like to do is advertise with a list of three project-related questions or requirements.  If the responder doesn’t address any one of those, then they’re out. 

Regardless of how thorough you are with your search, talking to a creative person for the first time can be downright intimidating.  A lot of times it goes like this:

You: Hi, I’m from Company, Inc.  I saw your ad on Craigslist/My friend said you were great/I’m calling out of the blue and I really need a website.  How much do you think that would cost?

Creative Person: Um.  Well... (mutes the phone and laughs/rolls her eyes) that depends.  What do you want it to do?

You: (thinking: isn’t that your job – to tell me what it should do?) I just need something simple to get myself online.

CP: (already frustrated) A website can be anywhere from $500 to $25,000.  I mean, it really depends on your content.  Do you have a wireframe?  (Designy language ensues.)

You: (sigh)

I’ve been on both ends of this conversation and it’s equally frustrating for both sides.  One way to alleviate some of the creative pain is to get your thoughts together before you even talk to or email anyone.  What I’m suggesting is writing a creative brief.  It’s a shortened, less time-intensive version of an RFP.

A creative brief is a one- or two- page statement of work that you can use to request proposals, compare estimates, and make sure you are comparing apples to apples when choosing a firm or freelancer.  The components are:

• objectives,
• project description,
• specific elements,
• deliverables,
• timeline,
• who supplies what, and
• any other information you can think of that is relevant to the job. Make it brief and make it informative.

I wrote you one to use – access it here.

Related: Read Emily's previous two posts for us here and here.

In the July/August issue of Inc., Lorien Gabel, the Founder of Pingg, shares his Twitter strategy.  It's an uncommon one – instead of focusing on volume of followers and flooding them with product or service links, he uses TweetDeck to track what's being said under 10 terms that matter to his business, which provides "free stylish online invites and announcements, worthy of print."

In other words, he's mainly in listen-only mode.  As I've been reading more evidence that on Twitter, quality of audience matters more than quantity, I've focused on this, too. 

This is how I came across many of the following thought leaders who are active on Twitter.  These people have been kind enough to RT (retweet) one or more of my posts on our Twitter account.  So today I return the love and post their IDs so you can check them out and follow them, too, if you wish.

I guarantee that each of these people will help you generate and execute employee engagement ideas as part of a strategy for investing in your workplace:

Kim Fabian (@TeamBuildingMD)
Twitter bio: Take your team to the top with Baltimore-area corporate team-building programs in golf, cooking, yoga, wine tasting, Spinning, scavenger hunts and more

Kevin Kennemer (@ThePeopleGroup)
Twitter bio: Company Culture Expert, Workplace Consultant, Speaker and Writer

Becky Robinson (@LeaderTalk)
Twitter bio: Writer. Blogger for Mountain State University, Leadership Development, Social Media, Mom, Homeschooler

Kelly Spors (@KellySpors)
Twitter bio: Freelance writer & former Wall Street Journal entrepreneurship reporter & blogger
(I've known Kelly since before we got started on Twitter but thought she was a great addition to this list.)

SBDC DaytonaBeach (@DaytonaBchSBDC)
Twitter bio: SBDC helps businesses become more successful. Starting business, buying business, growing business, selling business or looking for financing, we can help

Steve Roesler (@steveroesler)
Twitter bio: Designing success at the intersection of people and work

Ken Gaebler (@gaeblerdotcom)
Twitter bio: All about small business and entrepreneurship!

Pamela Grow (@PamelaGrow)
Twitter bio: The ultimate resource for the harried one-person nonprofit development office - and fundraising newbies.  Author of Five Days to Foundation Grants.

Janet Morris (@JanetATHP)
Twitter bio: HP US Small Medium Business Marketing.  The opinions expressed by me are not intended to be those of HP.

Peg Rowe (@pegrowe)
Twitter bio: I work with leaders and teams to increase their effectiveness and ensure alignment with the organization’s purpose,strategy and goals

Related: Our post on 10 specifically small business people to follow on Twitter.

Dharmesh Shah wrote a post on the OnStartups blog yesterday that has generated a ton of comments.  Apparently the topic of things MBA schools won't teach you about startups is a resonant one.  Makes sense, since due to economy-spawned layoffs many former employees are striking out on their own, contributing to an increase in entrepreneurship.

I smiled when I read #4 in Shah's Top 10 list:

It helps not to call people "human resources".  They're people.  And, as it turns out, people like to be treated like people.  Go figure.

People do like to be treated like people, as our research into small organizations that create a culture of ownership and actively solicit and implement employee engagement ideas shows.  What's more – CEOs, are you listening? – living the Golden Rule in your workplace can improve your metrics across the board, from employee to customer retention.

Here are some applications for the Golden Rule in business, culled from our website:

• Leading by example
• Maintaining professional conduct and accountability to avoid employee lawsuits
• Attracting and retaining servant leaders
• Building and benefiting from a diverse workforce
• Empowering workers on the front lines
• Discouraging abuse of paid leave
• Generally improving workplace team building

How does the Golden Rule play out in your firm?

Image credit: About.com

The last few days have been bad ones for those that believe that human capital strategies can turn decent organizations into truly exemplary ones when it comes to employee engagement ideas translating to lower turnover, greater retention, and higher productivity.

First there was this post by author Jonathan Fields that argued that great companies don't exist, which I addressed in my previous post.  And then, today, Tim Sackett of HRU Technical Resources wrote on Fistful of Talent that employee engagement is a "worthless metric."  Here's his justification:

Once a year we, the HR Dept., are going to justify our jobs for a month as we roll out our annual Employee Engagement Survey and then act like Nazis and throw pizza parties in the attempt to get everyone to fill one out.  Then spend [sic] the next month collecting all the data and making the largest PowerPoint presentation on the planet, so we can show our senior executive team the good, bad and ugly.  Finally, we add fat free pudding to the cafeteria menu as a response to our two month project.  Really!?  Is this adding value?  Lou Holtz said it best "Motivation is simple.  You eliminate those who are not motivated."

While I agree with the advice Sackett repeats from Lou Holtz, I take issue with the argument that employee engagement research is a lost cause and a waste of money.  Clients of our workplace consulting and training services certainly don't view it that way.  Check out these case studies of three of them on our website.  Outcomes from our analysis of what employees of these client firms were saying and subsequent assistance included, respectively:

• A huge uptick in the percentage of employees who feel that senior leadership took their feedback seriously
• Profitability after 13 months of declining revenues
• A better-functioning team with higher morale and a CEO who is a more effective leader

Need more evidence?  Read these posts on our blog:

• 30 Employee Development Strategies to Boost Productivity
• Six Ways to Measure the ROI of Employee Engagement
• Google Employees Can't Get No Satisfaction?
• Unorthodox Trust Building and Its ROI for the Company
• Great Employee Engagement Can Keep Jobless Claims from Climbing Even Higher

Still think employee engagement best practices are worthless?  Send me a comment and tell my why you think so.

Thanks to my new contact at LifemeetsWork, their President Kyra Cavanaugh, for passing along this study by Corporate Voices for Working Families (CVWF).  As Kyra explained in her email to me yesterday, "Since it often seems easier to think of flexibility in terms of exempt employees, you might find it interesting to review best practices intended for shift workers and admins."

This study is indeed interesting.  It culls employee engagement ideas from an in-depth, year-long review of five organizations that have found success implementing flex work arrangements with at least a portion of their low-wage workforce – typically those earning $12 per hour or less.  The trends CVWF identified, which you might compare against your own measures to strengthen your culture of ownership, include:

• Flextime in production, operations and other settings in which coverage is essential
• Flexible "flexibility policies" and "just-in-time" time off reduces absenteeism and overtime and increases retention
• Telework for administrative assistants and customer service representatives
• Team‐based compressed workweek schedules
• Full-time benefits at 30 hours (side note: at our judges meeting yesterday the fact that several of our 2009 Top Small Workplaces Finalist organizations do this at 20 hours was a point of discussion)
• Career flexibility – flexibility over the life cycle
• Employee-designed schedules for continuous operations
• Employee-managed shift trades

Read the full study for lots more great info, including key findings in addition to the above trends as well as success factors (hint: the latter underscore our building blocks to a Winning Workplace).

Look for an interview with Kyra at LifemeetsWork in our next IDEAS newsletter.  (Subscribe to it here.)

Photo credit: daylife/Getty Images

This article I came across today, from The Rancho Cordova Post (named for this suburb of Sacramento, CA), demonstrates that employee engagement activities to create a winning workplace are not just "better for people and better for business," as our tagline suggests – see our logo at the top of this blog – but better for communities as well.

In yesterday's article Michelle Ventress reports that the City of Rancho Cordova has been named a Sacramento Workplace Excellence Leader in the seventh year of this competition that recognizes Sacramento-area organizations for their "unique and exceptional human resources practices."

As with our Top Small Workplaces, the city's returns from exceptional employee engagement start with a clear vision and long-term support from leadership.  Ventress describes how Rancho Cordova's City Manager, Ted Gaebler, was an asset here with his expertise in "transforming governments from outdated bureaucratic organizations to flexible, customer-focused organizations."

Exemplary practices Ventress points to that made the city stand out include:

• Mechanism to solicit and take action on employee ideas, which they literally call the Office of New Ideas
• Committee created last year to cultivate cost-savings and revenue-generating strategies
• Another mechanism, the Employee Advisory Team, that brings people together from different departments to help build skills and implement workplace team building activities

Ventress' quote from the employee who nominated Rancho Cordova is short and sweet, and yet it speaks volumes about the city's impact on retaining and satisfying not just its employees, but its whole population: "I enjoy coming to work and being allowed to make a difference."

Congrats to the City of Rancho Cordova for showing that the building blocks of a winning workplace can be applied to governmental entities and not just private or public firms.

What does your city or town excel at, and how do people make the difference in that?  What could they improve upon, and how can people be better leveraged to make that happen?

Image credit: City of Rancho Cordova website

Jessica Lee, an employment manager for APCO Worldwide, a global PR firm in Washington, DC, wrote a great post on the Fistful of Talent blog yesterday.  She put some scary numbers behind the notion that a four-year college degree will almost certainly be less visible on the resumes of job candidates in the future. 

Beyond employers shifting to review candidates' associate degrees and other, less traditional forms of education, she surmises, they will also have to place more stock in how they've made a difference at their prior employers.  They will have to look for signs of innovation.

If Lee is correct – and I think the math she cites supports her thesis – then employee engagement and all manner of team building will be much more important than they already are, for both individuals and the companies they work for.  Organizations, becoming ever more capable of connecting workload to results, will want to see how employees' ideas affect the bottom line.  And workers will need to document this on their resumes to earn promotions where they work and to seek and find employment elsewhere.

Small business has a real opportunity where innovation is concerned.  The SBA has found that small firms are 14 times more innovative per employee than large firms.  This can be due to fewer bodies and hierarchies translating to less red tape standing in the way of ideas and execution for the customer.  Yet, I believe to get up higher than 10 times the innovation of large firms and be super-productive, these firms must have stellar employee engagement.  I'm talking about employee engagement activities that occur at every step between recruiting and having leaders that have a long tenure and have grown in a company.

Consider how innovation has played out at some of our Top Small Workplaces:

• Integrated Project Management Company (2008 winner) and NRG Systems (2007 winner), among many others, invest in many interviews with prospective hires at all levels.  They want to ensure candidates know what they're getting into, and they also want adequate time to evaluate how their attitude and other traits will factor into their existing culture.
• Resource Interactive (2008 winner) and many others have employee engagement best practices in place that make their workplace supportive and flexible.  They report that this investment comes back to the firm tenfold in "fearless" innovation, not to mention commitment and client service excellence.
• Jump Associates (2008 winner), Point B (2007 winner), and the vast majority of other winners have systematized in-person and electronic team building practices that serve as breeding grounds for innovative, fresh ideas.  This type of environment strengthens camaraderie and equips them to deal with tough times such as our current struggling economy.  This is why our honored firms are able to grow revenues – albeit at a slower pace than in the recent past in some cases – while their larger competitors and even those of similar size but without great workplace team building merge or fail.
• JA Frate (2008 winner) and others have used innovative ideas from their committed workforces to identify more value-added solutions for current and new clients.

To learn more about the innovative best practices of the Top Small Workplaces, click here.

I think Lee's piece brings new meaning to the oft-used mantra, "Innovate or die."  What do you think?

Last week I wrote a post that attempted to draw a line between progressive employee engagement best practices and a decrease in the number of workers that companies need to layoff.  My thought process was this: Good employee engagement can improve the bottom line through increased sales and better productivity, and this can have the added benefit of lowering turnover and increasing employee tenure.

Shortly afterward I got some great feedback on the subject from some folks who saw this topic when I posted it on our LinkedIn group.  Scott Span, a strategic consultant and expert on organizational development, communications, and culture integration, wrote:

As someone who works with employee engagement and retention, my take is that this is not happening.  Most employers don't even have engagement and retention staff/departments to deal with this sort of thing in a standard economy.  In poor economic times one of the biggest mistakes companies make is to cut budget to training and engagement initiatives.

The mentality I've found in my work seems to be, "So what, when things improve we can always offer to hire them back or find new people."  Not only is this approach much more costly in attracting and hiring new employees, but it also tarnishes the company's image, another costly thing to repair when the economy improves. 

Businesses need to maintain a focus on engagement in both good times and bad.  Many ways to engage the workforce are not that costly at all.

I also heard from Bill Catlette, co-author of Contented Cows MOOve Faster:

There's no doubt that the heightened levels of employee engagement which typically reside at smaller firms will help prevent the current business climate from worsening, and indeed allow those that get the benefit of that extra oomph to climb out more quickly.  That said, smaller firms need access to capital, too.

Finally, Jim Collison, President of Employers of America, said:

There's no quick fix to the rapidly degenerating, depressing economy.  Yet, there's one aspect of employee engagement that all employers and managers can initiate immediately.  I recommend to employers and management that they initiate active employee involvement in idea generation.  Most employees know ways to cut costs, improve quality, increase sales, and add income.  The best quick-start employee engagement is a quick-start mining of employees' ideas...and involving employees in implementing their own viable ideas.

This is helpful discussion and I wholehartedly agree with all three commentors.  Thanks for your thoughts, gents.

Does anyone out there want to play devil's advocate?  Do you think, for example, that no amount of quality team building will help us out of our financial rut, much less stunt the number of jobless claims?  If you feel the glass is half (or more than half) empty when it comes to engaging employees as a recovery strategy, I want to hear from you!  I welcome your thoughts below.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons