Employee Engagement Practices

Our tagline at Winning Workplaces is "better for people, better for business."  Lately we've taken to tacking on "better for society" to this, reflecting the focus of some of the double and even triple bottom line businesses we've honored over the years for their demonstration of the payoff of employee engagement practices.

A new blog post by small business new marketing guru Chris Brogan re-reminded me of this focus, in a small but powerful way.  In outlining his expectations for himself and his readers he might meet at the 2010 South By Southwest festival that starts tomorrow, Brogan made his case for limiting the distribution of business cards:

Unless you want to do business with me, don’t give me a business card.  We both know how to reach each other, so unless one of us asks for one, let’s not hand them out.  ...

Save a card.  Save the planet.  Rewire the way humans do business.

I think this is a great tip for individuals, and applied en masse it has the potential to help all three stakeholders I mentioned above:

• Employees – less materials to worry about in sales presentations, networking events, etc.  (As an aside, you can use technology – smart phones, laptops, PDAs – to store a contact's info if you really want it and are sans biz cards.)
• Businesses – printing fewer cards because employees hand out less of them can slim down your marketing budget.  On a larger scale, more money to play with can spur more effective strategy work to meet customer demands, which can mean more (wait for it) jobs!
• Society – fewer demands on printers means more trees!  And that's good for everyone because they absorb more of the CO2 caused by global warming and produce more oxygen.

My question for you: How do you engage employees to innovate how you communicate with customers and other stakeholders to cut costs while still achieving your goals?

Photo credit: ChrisBrogan.com

One of the more fun (because it's obvious) examples of the payoff of employee engagement is the number and scope of business awards a company can apply for – and win! – on the foundation of a productive workplace.  Just look at the homepage of Top Small Workplace Gentle Giant Moving Co.'s new website.

Yesterday PrintingForLess.com (PFL), the Montana-based, online printing services firm of our Best Boss Andrew Field, announced that they won four 2010 Marketing Plus Awards from the National Association of Printing Leadership.  PFL took home the gold for sales/lead generation and direct mail marketing, and also the silver and a merit award for direct mail marketing.

Even though building trust in the workplace is a journey, PFL is crossing the finish line of a race that started with working on improving how managers interact with employees, and soliciting and acting on everyone's feedback for creating efficiencies in service delivery.  Field outlined his leadership approach that is paying dividends now in the form of these awards, which help with both employee and customer retention, at our annual conference back in 2006.

Congrats to PFL on their milestone here in their continuing quest to use progressive employee engagement practices to remain the #1 online commercial printing company!

For more on PFL, go here on our website and here on this blog.

Here's a sobering set of statistics for your Monday concerning employee engagement practices for workers with disabilities:

• Contrary to the opinion of many business owners that the costs of accommodating disabled employees are too burdensome, a Job Accommodation Network study (referenced here) finds that 20% of the cases examined involved no costs.
• In the remaining 80% of cases, the median cost was only $200.

Now, here's an interesting point of comparison: Among the nearly 500 small organizations nationwide that completed an application for our Top Small Company Workplaces award this year, those that provide educational assistance provide an average annual, per employee tuition reimbursement of $2,550.

So if your company is among the 4 out of 5 that end up paying to accommodate a disabled employee, the amount you'll spend is only 7.8% what an average company pays to better educate each employee, according to Winning Workplaces' latest employee engagement research.

In other words, accommodating a disabled worker is highly manageable from a cost perspective.  I think that this, combined with their above-average job performance (based on a 30-year DuPont study – see this post), should finally put to rest the fallacy that employing these workers is a cost center and does not lead to a more productive workplace.

Your thoughts?

I was pleased to see that our blog was cited on the Event Manager Blog authored by Anne Thornley-Brown, President of Executive Oasis International.  Anne pointed to this post, where I discussed three benefits of virtual team building, as exemplified by our Top Small Workplace Point B.

Note the reference to yours truly on LinkedIn – I am a member of her group there, the International Business Team Building Alliance.  It contains some good food for thought when it comes to team building activities for the workplace.  I urge you to check out that group.

For more on using employee engagement practices to manage employees virtually, read these selected posts.

It really is as simple as that, as Loyola University Health System points out this week via Newswise.  While there are a variety of factors that can result in employee burnout – both work- and non work-related – luckily there are more measures at small businesses' disposal than ever to keep them from becoming exhausted.

Learn about traditional and non-traditional employee engagement practices along these lines in the following posts:

• A Massage for Employees in This Economy? Yes, Especially Now
• Nonprofit Does Not Have to Mean Substandard Benefits
• 'Scientific Proof' of the Company Benefits of Flex Work Arrangements

What do you do as part of your workplace engagement to ensure optimum health for a more productive business?

Winning Workplaces is checking in with people – the majority of them CEOs – from the small firms that are applying for the chance to be named a 2010 Top Small Company Workplace in Inc. Magazine this June.  We're asking them how the process of completing our online application has helped them think about and further develop their human capital strategies to enhance their business strategy.

I've provided applicants' verbatim responses to this question in two recent posts.  But as an experiment, I wanted to see which words or terms stood out from the collective feedback on this that they've given us.  Here's a Wordle-generated tag cloud showing the results:

How does one interpret this?  Well, if I were to create an amalgamated answer to the question we posed to applicants based on this tag cloud, I would write it as:

This process helped in our thinking about how we can make our culture and work environment better for our employees.

A number of applicants report that what they learned from applying this year has turned into action steps to improve their employee engagement practices, so 2010 ends on a productive high note.  I love reading when this happens, as it's one of the benefits we intended when we worked extensively to improve the 2010 application over the 2009 version.

Want to increase your competitive advantage in your people practices area, too?  It's not too late to apply for 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces and reap similar value for your organization.  You can do so here.

I really enjoy SmartBrief on Leadership to get a good daily dose of small business news.  In fact, I've mentioned them in no less than four past blog posts.

But they disappointed me slightly when they linked to this article by Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.  Here's SmartBrief's summary of the Kellogg article:

When your service reps need to keep a customer waiting, it's best for everyone if they're vague about the likely delay, according to new research.  Telling customers only that a delay is likely to be "short" or "long" allows them to make an informed decision about whether to stick around -- but helps retain customers who might have left if they'd been given a more precise estimate, researchers found.  "The firm should always try to retain some level of ... ambiguity about the real state of the system," says the study's co-author.

The research here might back this conclusion, but in the real world I just don't buy it.  As a client of several vendors in my work at Winning Workplaces, I have been burned at times when they were vague with me.

Yes, in those instances a little more short-term income was made billing us for work done when we didn't know the whole picture of what was going on.  But by not being clear with us with where they stood, some of them shot themselves in the foot when it came time to renew the annual contract, and they could no longer count on us as a long-term relationship – and as a long-term revenue source.

So I think that, as with employee engagement practices for building trust in the workplace, in customer relations, honesty and detail make for the best policy.  And vague should not be in vogue.

What do you think?

For those business leaders who think throwing money and people at an issue alone can make it go away, I submit Byron Pitts' segment on CBS' 60 Minutes from this weekend on how two wars are slowing benefits reimbursement to a crawl at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

I happened to be channel surfing Sunday night and tuned in just in time to hear this interchange between Pitts and Ron Robinson, a VA employee for 13 years and also a 20-year veteran of the Army (read the full transcript of the segment here):

Robinson: We keep tryin' to fix [the growing backlog of claims – 400,000 since 2003], but it keeps gettin' out of hand.  We throw more money at the problem, more people, we still have the problem.

Pitts: So, what is it then?  If more people can't fix the problem, more money can't fix the problem, how do you fix it?

Robinson: It's a culture.  It's a leadership problem.

How are the leadership and the workplace culture at the VA to blame?  Robinson says it stems from the point system set up there, which ties the rate of processed paperwork to receipt of benefits.  But this system seems to fall apart at the customer (injured soldier) level because employees can make mistakes in pursuit of both benefits and promotions.

If overcoming a customer backlog with effective workplace team building and employee engagement practices sounds familiar, it should: I wrote last year about how Griffin Hospital, one of the companies profiled in the book Tribal Leadership, eliminated a three-month backlog almost exclusively through this leadership approach by their management.

So the next time you have a backlog or other major issue that doesn't seem to go away with more traditional resources, take a good look at your employee culture and ask if that's the root cause of the problem.  We can help you here.

(This post was inspired by this article on TheStreet.com)

Since I have often pointed to our small business honorees like Guerra DeBerry Coody and Lundberg Family Farms that play up their family-friendly employee engagement practices, including benefits, one might come to the conclusion that Winning Workplaces favors small companies that put employees with children ahead of those without them.

While we like to see small firms walk the talk when it comes to family-friendly benefits, we also recognize that these firms should be equally mindful of those workers without children.  See for instance, this list of benefits that we ask whether companies have in place in our Top Small Company Workplaces award application – benefits that in many cases can be better suited to recruiting childless employees:

• Medical insurance
• Health savings account (HSA)
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Employee assistance program (EAP)
• Life insurance
• Long-term disability
• Short-term disability
• Long-term care insurance
• Domestic partner benefits
• Employee stock purchase or other shared ownership plan
• Retirement plan
• Pre-tax spending benefits
• Transportation assistance
• Paid time off/vacation/holidays/personal time
• Sabbaticals
• Educational assistance
• Employee wellness/fitness program

Digging deeper: I thought you'd find it interesting to see the percentage of applicants* for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition that use each of the above benefits as part of their retention and employee development strategies.  Click on the thumbnail below to open a pdf (2.7 MB) showing the breakdown of "Yes" vs. "No" answers to our online questionnaire:

*Among firms that have completed the application as of Dec. 29, 2009.  Application window closes Jan. 22, 2010.

How does your organization compare for each of these benefits?

Check out this new video from community and social media guru Chris Brogan on setting and achieving SMART goals:

(If you can't see the video in your blog feed, click here.)

SMART goals are:

Simple
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic (or Relevant)
Timely

I had heard about SMART goals but had not gone down the path of forming and following them until our new president came on board earlier this year.  Now I don't know how I could do without them!  I find that the Attainable and Realistic caveats, especially, help keep my goals from not floating away from the realm of the possible like the house in Disney's Up.

When you think about your team building and employee engagement practices heading into 2010, you might want to give SMART goals a go, if you don't already.  They can help ensure that tasks you assign your staff align with your mission and goals, and improve the bottom line.

Google has been nothing less than a phenom in both business and popular culture since it came on the scene in the late 1990s.  It remains the number one search engine, and through its AdWords and AdSense programs it has helped solopreneurs, startups, and established small businesses reach many more potential customers and earn supplemental revenue through web traffic.  It has even been innovative when it comes to employee engagement practices and workspace design for a more productive workplace.

But I echo the concern Lisa Barone raises on Small Business Trends based on a key update to Google's user interface that the company announced this week.  At issue is the company's decision to integrate real-time search into its search results.

Here's the potential problem as Barone describes it:

Imagine that tomorrow a customer has a bad experience with you.  Frustrated, John Doe heads to Twitter and whips out a slew of libelous statements.  Then, a few hours later, someone does a search for your brand trying to locate your street address.  The [sic] first they see isn’t your Web site or Google Local listing.  It’s the live stream of tweets telling the world that you’re a liar and a crook.  Maybe it even shows other people joining in and doing the same.  It’s throwing the conversation that took place on Twitter and putting it [sic] right out into center court so that it’s impossible to miss.  It’s no longer a blog entry that can be pushed down or a bad review that can be rectified.  It’s gossip sitting at the top of your search results.

Barone follows this hypothetical, but likely, scenario with a natural question from the perspective of business leaders: What can I do to combat this?  Unfortunately, the correct answer she provides is to "listen faster" using technology, including Twitter Search.

Yet, there's a problem with this solution: Small businesses are already stretched to the limit with their manpower in trying to drum up business in new and creative ways.  I doubt many of them can spare even a part-time job function to listen faster to combat even a small to moderate amount of negative, real-time user feedback.

Further, the organizations best-positioned to counter this type of feedback are big ones that have a customer service staff that's large and diversified enough to make some headway, especially against unfounded real-time attacks.  But since the SBA has shown that small businesses create the majority of net new jobs – and thus, economic growth – Google's move could actually serve to stunt the fragile amount of growth we've achieved since the financial meltdown a year ago, if you assume small firms are at a competitive disadvantage here.

Do you view this development from Google, if it plays out as the company has specified, as I do – a risk – or as an opportunity to use workplace team building and employee engagement to get a better pulse on customer wants and needs than ever before?

Well, this was an unfortunate content pairing I saw on The Huffington Post today: On the left, an article about how a Bank of America employee was terminated after she helped customers who did not qualify for the bank's credit card modification programs; on the right, an ad to a BoA page that plays up their efforts "to fulfill our responsibility to the financial health of families, businesses, and communities."

To be fair, the HuffPost headline for its story on ex-BoA employee Jackie Ramos – "Bank of America Employee Fired After Helping Customers" – places more blame on BoA than is likely owed, considering that, as BoA's Tony Allen says in the article, Ramos deviated from her core responsibilities, allegedly misrepresenting customer information and encouraging them to misrepresent their own information.

But what is Ramos actually (allegedly) guilty of in the larger sense?  Although she apparently was not, she felt empowered to make on-the-spot decisions that put customers' needs first.  She showed the socially conscious trait of her generation (Y), as CIO Magazine and a number of other sources that study workplace trends have revealed.  As regular readers of this blog know, driven-down decision making and taking risks to deliver for the customer are qualities of Top Small Workplaces.

Is this a case of an employee trying to change huge BoA in some small way by impressing upon the company her generation's view that an organization should create social as well as monetary value?  Is there more of a story here than would normally be the case given Bank of America's size and, more importantly, taxpayer-funded status?

I'm interested in your thoughts here, particularly on where team building and employee engagement practices could have produced a different outcome than Ramos' dismissal.

As he often does, Marc Tracy at Slate's BizBox site pointed me to some compelling small business research.  In this case, CNNMoney's report of a decline in lending by TARP recipients to small firms by more than $10 billion since April.

These big banks have branches in large- to medium-size cities.  But what about small cities and towns?  What's the credit situation like for businesses there?

It's arguably better.  While, as small town and rural business expert Becky McCray told us as part of an interview we did with her last year, companies based in those areas have fewer options for access to credit, those communities tend to be off cycle from what the national economy is doing.

I think a trend that underscores what McCray alluded to is that smaller community banks generally have a better sense of their customer needs and keep a clearer head for long-term growth than do larger banks.  In another article Winning Workplaces ran, with two of our Top Small Workplace honorees that are community banks in smaller cities, they told us they're in a better position to lend today because they eschewed the trends big banks jumped on – relaxing credit standards and taking on high leverage – in the run-up to the financial meltdown last fall.

And having a pulse on customer needs to avoid being swayed by potentially disastrous market trends starts with having a pulse on staff needs through employee engagement practices for building trust in the workplace.  Read all about this and get takeaways for your industry/business in our Success Stories on the two community banks I mentioned above: Phelps County Bank and Paducah Bank & Trust.

If you run a business in a small city or town, how has access to credit been for you over the past year?

Image credit: Gridley Marketplace

Perhaps it's no surprise that, given the apex in our work lives today where flexibility, technology, and productivity meet, slowing things down a bit to take the time to gather a greater perspective – not to mention, to avoid burnout – has taken hold as a bonafide movement.

The recently formed Huffington Post Book Club's first pick, announced last month, is Carl Honoré's In Praise of Slowness.  Another source that is all about slowness related to employee engagement and building a productive workplace is the (sadly recently folded) site Slow Leadership.

And if well-regarded marketing guru Seth Godin had only hinted in the past about his respect for taking it slow to win the business race, he left no doubt about his opinion on the topic on his blog today.  Contrasting against the flashy pitch for the quick buck today, Godin advises,

Or you can win with consistent benefits, delivered over time.  You win by incrementally earning share, attention and trust.  This might take years.

This slower, longer-term tack is by and large what Winning Workplaces' small business honorees take to win the race.  And by winning, I mean getting and keeping the best people on the bus; creating meaningful employee development strategies that result in stronger innovation and teams that last to execute it; and unsurpassed, head-turning customer service that keeps sales from both new and returning customers strong.

These posts on our blog address the slow approach from several business perspectives:

• Hiring
• Business model ideation/execution
• Customer satisfaction/growth

Do you have employee engagement practices that promote the slow and steady approach?  Have you formally thought about this?

Photo credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In recent months, as Twitter, Facebook and other leading social media sites have made headlines for their user gains – particularly among Baby Boomers and older folks – a debate has raged with regard to their acceptance in the workplace.  Whether employee engagement practices to allow their use help or hurt productivity seems to vary depending on who you ask (just like job growth in small business).

Well, naysayers take note: No less a trusted authority than Harvard Business School has weighed in on the debate.  The university's opinion?  Use it (and allow employees to) or risk losing competitive advantage.

Based on research by two U.S.-based firms and an Australian university, HBS says that becoming an "über-connected organization" yields the following business benefits:

• Access to social media improves productivity.
• Millennials will seek jobs that encourage the use of social media (I would add that this is more of a selling point because in 2010 this generation replaces the Boomers as the most prevalent in the workplace).
• Companies that provide access to social media create a more engaged workforce.

Helpfully, HBS also suggests three questions that business leaders should ask to start their journey toward joining the likes of IBM and Toshiba in their trend-setting, über-connectedness.

Where does your firm stand on this issue?  How have you adjusted your workplace engagement practices to either bar or allow use of social media?

Last week I included 2009 Top Small Workplace Mike's Carwash on a list of 10 small businesses that Winning Workplaces has honored over the years, that use the element of surprise to increase their customer base and deliver value to them in unexpected ways.

This week on Human Resource Executive magazine's website, Wharton School Center for Human Resources Director – and Top Small Workplaces judge – Peter Cappelli provides more insight into the management and resulting employee engagement practices of this Indiana-based retail outfit.

Framing Mike's as a success story in an industry known for "bad jobs," Cappelli provides three quantitative data points that show why this is no standard-issue "Mom and Pop operation":

• Turnover of around 10% (if you're a big company you're considered to be doing well if you're at better than 33%).
• Great, uncommon benefits including paid vacation, tuition reimbursement, and 401(k) plans (yes, even for hourly employees).
• Lots of training hours (90 for entry-level workers) and individual development plans as part of the firm's employee development strategies.

Cappelli continues with lots of numbers-based meat for small business leaders who are looking to increase their competitive advantage through rare-in-industry team building strategies.  Read more here.

Ethics in business.  It caught consumers' attention in a big way at the start of this century with the Enron scandal, and unfortunately continues almost a decade later with the likes of JP Morgan Chase.

Yet, even though these big business stories grab headlines, it is smaller firms that, while lower in profile, are keeping ethics from becoming a completely throwaway notion.

One of these is Integrated Project Management Company (IPM).  A 2008 Winning Workplaces/Wall Street Journal Top Small Workplace, this Illinois-based consulting firm impressed our judges by how their President, C. Richard Panico, was able to take his academic interest in strong ethics and integrity (he has chaired De Paul University's Institute for Business and Professional Ethics since 2001) and use it to shape IPM's employee engagement practices to maximize client performance and, thus, company profitability.

IPM's work continues to earn the business accolades.  The Better Business Bureau (BBB) just announced the organization as a recipient of its 13th annual Torch Award for Marketplace Ethics.

To learn more about how IPM's employee engagement model impacts business results, read our Success Story on them.

Winning Workplaces often talks about how crucial training and development are within a framework of team building and employee engagement practices.  If you search for "training" on our website, for instance, you'll find 95 related articles.

But that's our take – what are successful small businesses actually doing when it comes to employee learning and development programs?  The table below shows nine of them in use in varying degrees at our recently named 2009 Top Small Workplaces:

We've broken them down by percentage among management as well as salaried, hourly, and part-time employees.  The salmon-colored cells show which of these employee types get the greatest share of time devoted to a particular strategy.

You can see that salaried workers at all of the 15 winning companies benefit from on-site workshops and training.  At the other end of the spectrum, 40% of firms provide career counseling and leadership development training to their part-timers (that's still pretty good, IMO).

Use the button below to bookmark this table or share it with your team, so you can benchmark your organization with the Top Small Workplaces when it comes to employee development strategies.

On his Entrepreneurial Mind blog today, Belmont University's Dr. Jeff Cornwall cited the results of a survey by American Express OPEN Small Business in making the case that Generation Y (Millennial) entrepreneurs could be our secret weapon in pulling the U.S. out of the current recession.

As Cornwall shares, according to the survey Gen Y entrepreneurs are more likely to do the following compared with their Gen X and Baby Boomer counterparts:

• Hire
• Have capital investment plans
• Take a financial risk
• Have positive cash flows
• Not be stressed about the economy
• Implement effective employee engagement practices to battle the recession (my favorite finding)

After speaking with Gen Y entrepreneurship author Donna Fenn for a Q&A that will be published in our IDEAS newsletter later this week (click here to subscribe – it's free), I believe there are four trends that explain the above survey findings – and provide compelling evidence that Millennials, with all the accusations of being entitled, might just turn out to be our economic saving grace:

1. With many not having families or children, their work/life balance is decidedly tilted toward the work end of the scale compared with Gen X and Baby Boomer business leaders.  This will shift in the future, of course, but in the short term our economy benefits from a high number of startups from this generation.
2. Gen Y grew up with parents who were cut from the cloth of the notion that you put in your time with one company that rewards you after decades of effort with a retirement package your family can live off of for the rest of their lives.  They also have seen this "bubble" burst, and, as Donna illustrates in her book Upstarts!, seek to start companies that operate much differently than firms that care more about short-term profit margins than the long-term good of their workers and other stakeholders.
3. There is another side to the above point: What one media outlet might call entitlement is another observer's (namely, a Gen Y entrepreneur's) business resource.  Donna told me that an increasing number of Gen X and Boomer parents are helping their kids achieve their entrepreneurial dreams, be it by simply providing funding or by working with – even for – their kids in their companies.
4. Finally, Gen Y entrepreneurs are much more serial in nature than their older counterparts.  In her book Donna talks about the factors that are contributing to this, from "rock star" entrepreneurial icons like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson to a sour job market, particularly for new college grads, that makes working for yourself more attractive.

What are your thoughts on the Gen Y approach to creating a profitable, productive workplace?

Congratulations to PRIZIM Inc., a 2007 and 2008 Top Small Workplaces Finalist, for being recognized for their exemplary employee engagement best practices by the Alfred P. Sloan Award program earlier this month.

As the press release by the Families and Work Institute, which sponsors the Sloan Awards, states, PRIZIM was deserving of this award because the 13-year-old, Maryland-based management consulting firm

is one of a small cadre of businesses that has been able to not only maintain but increase workplace flexibility in recent months.  Despite the economic recession, PRIZIM has enhanced and enriched the benefits and workplace flexibility options offered to its employees.

I have firsthand knowledge of how PRIZIM increases employee satisfaction and productivity through their flex practices – beyond, of course, the Top Small Workplaces application they've completed all three years we've run the program (they were not a Finalist in 2009).

Gabrielle McDonald, an environmental consultant for PRIZIM, attended our 2009 annual conference at the start of October.  She shared with me that she has taken on more responsibility within the company, branching out into HR.  She is willing to put in more effort because PRIZIM allows her to work out of a home office in Denver.  In fact, a number of the firm's 31 employees work from satellite offices in different parts of the country.

Related: PRIZIM shines in more than just employee engagement practices to create a flexible workplace.  In our post on 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies, check out what they do that promotes health and wellness and also aligns with their mission and service offerings (see #16).