Importance of Team Building

I wrote here last week on how corporate social responsibility (CSR) can help your brand reputation, and how employee engagement can help your CSR efforts. One of the 2008 Top Small Workplaces I pointed to as a great example of this was New Belgium Brewing in Colorado, maker of Fat Tire Ale.

After I wrote that post I saw on New Belgium's blog that the League of American Bicyclists had awarded the company with their platinum-level Bicycle Friendly Business award. "We are one of the first two businesses ever to receive their highest-level ranking," the company wrote. View a video of their award presentation here and check out some bike racks they installed in partnership with the City of Fort Collins, a local design house, and a local metal fabrication firm.

Then over the weekend I saw this item from the Denver Post. New Belgium is getting a two-fer by building brand awareness with its billboards that raise awareness of the good that comes from biking to work (lower transportation expenses, no pollution, physical fitness), and it also makes a profit on its bike-messenger bags that will be made from the vinyl used in its billboard ads.

Can you see the link here to one of our building blocks central to creating a Winning Workplace? I see a big link to the tenet of Teamwork & Involvement, which we define as

a sense of teamwork and collaboration within the organization, with employees feeling that they have the opportunity to contribute directly to the organization’s success, and to the larger community.

Beyond the revenue from the bike bags, what other ROI is New Belgium getting from this and its other community and environmental efforts? The company has attracted 1,594 followers on Twitter, making it the number 7 account in its hometown of Fort Collins, according to twitterholic.com and as cited by Coloradoan.com. And all this extra attention increases the chances that registered users at popular websites like BeerAdvocate will rank more of New Belgium's craft beers. (Forty-two of their beers have been reviewed on this site alone; one is in their list of the Top 100 Beers on Planet Earth – see #49.) That's a lot of taste-testing – and a lot of purchases to power it.

So as you evaluate your workplace team building to keep building employee engagement, think about how CSR fits into your mission and how your people can help you implement some activities to do good in your community – and help yourself in the process!

Photo credit: NeonSign.com