Did you catch this rare bit of good news about the economy this week?  Reuters reported that based on increased consumer spending, U.S. gross domestic product grew at a 2.5% annual rate in the third quarter, up from a 1.3% in the second quarter.

If a strong or even stronger fourth quarter follows, will companies dip into their historic profits to hire in a manner that will be meaningful in terms of making a dent in the high unemployment rate in early 2012?  That's anyone's guess at this point, but what is known is that eventually -- as the recovery comes or continues to happen, depending on your perspective -- recruiting efforts will need to pick back up.

And, as leadership educator, executive coach, and speaker John Baldoni argues in his new column on BNET this week, companies need to cope presently with a workforce that, in large part, is and has been doing more with less.

He cites a new People Metrics report in making the case that employee engagement best practices matter because they enable workers to feel positive about their organization (the fact that their firm is still in business being a contributing factor in their engagement level).

What's more, as hiring picks up in tandem with an improving economy, it may make an even bigger impact on your current workforce.  Baldoni notes that in this scenario, employees know that their options have expanded, so the extent to which their employer's people practices make them feel integral to the team and chart a tangible path for their growth and development within the organization become "a critical factor in whether an employee stays or leaves."

As Winning Workplaces advised in an editorial on our website in July 2009 -- ironically at the same time that many economists later said we were out of the "Great Recession" -- businesses would do well for their long-term prospects if they purposefully shared the rewards of recovery with their workers as both an acknowledgement of their taking the hard journey with leadership, and as a means of encouraging continued commitment and camaraderie to maintain a productive workplace culture.

Next Step: Whether you are in a hiring mode now or waiting to do so based on how your sales forecast plays out and how the economy as a whole continues to perform, this guest post on our blog provides great tips to motivate your workers, including many that are cost effective.

Congratulations are in order for 15 individuals and organizations that Winning Workplaces has previously pointed to on our website and blog for the value they provide small business executives as everything from examples of hyper-productive workplace team building and improving employee retention, to leading workforce researchers, to purveyors of proven yet cost-effective marketing and brand-building strategies.

The people and firms below were just named 2011 Small Business Influencers by Small Business Trends and Smallbiztechnology.com.  The recognition is sponsored by BlackBerry, Infusionsoft, and Sage, among others.

The list of Champions includes:

• Norm Brodsky
• Jeff Cornwall
• Donna Fenn
• Inc. Magazine
• John Jantsch
• Rieva Lesonsky
• Becky McCray
• oDesk
• Dharmesh Shah
• YoungEntrepreneur.com

Honorable Mentions include:

• 37Signals
• Jonathan Fields
• Ladies Who Launch
• Network Solutions
• John Spence

Go to Small Business Trends for information on the selection process and judging criteria.

Congrats again to these and all of the honorees!

What do you think of their picks?

If your business has a Facebook page, and/or other social media outposts, you might have noticed that when you go to share your content in those places (or that of partners, customers, competitors, etc.), the text that appears below the article headline/link is fixed.  This text is usually the first sentence or two of the article.

But what if you want to emphasize a certain point or quote from what you're sharing?  What if you want to paraphrase something said and personalize it to you or your company?

At least on Facebook, you're in luck.  The site recently and quietly changed it's link-sharing capability so that you can modify the main message area – the space below the link title.  You can change this text from what it is by default to whatever you want.

Let me show you how this works:

Make sure you're on your Wall tab.  Then click Link.

Copy and paste your link in the space provided.  After a second while Facebook processes the entry, you will see the link title, address, and a portion of the copy in it.  As you can see from my screen capture, when the mouse floats over this copy it changes to yellow to show it's editable.  Just click and start typing to make it say whatever you want.

The applications of this on your branding are many:

• If your senior leadership have complementary activities that serve to build the brand, call attention to them.  (Corporate social responsibility initiatives come to mind.)
• Engage in virtual team building by promoting employee successes.  (This is an emerging tactic among employee retention tips.)
• Highlight key customer online reviews or other mentions.
• Promote beneficial vendor or partner relationship deliverables or key victories.
• Take the bold move of linking to your competitors and showing how you're the better choice.

Related:

1. If you're not our fan yet on Facebook, go here and click "Like."  We share a combination of our latest news and original employee engagement research, plus relevant content from our workplace award media partner, Inc. Magazine, among other sources.
2. The link-sharing example I used in my screen capture above is one of two articles I wrote exclusively for Inc.  Go here to read both of them.  We hope to add more to our roster there soon.

I bet this is a press release your company would love to be putting out right now: Dealer.com Closes 2010 with Substantial Growth, Increased Research and Development.  (Kudos to you if you have or will soon.)

This 14-year-old, Vermont-based company's customer base is automotive manufacturers, auto dealers, and media companies – all of which have been especially hard hit by the Great Recession and continuing down economy.  So how exactly did the firm, as their press release yesterday stated, grow revenues 60% over the already impressive $51 million they netted in 2009, the year prior to their entry in our Top Small Company Workplaces award competition (which they won)?

Dealer.com's response to our 2010 award application question "How have your organization's people practices contributed to your top line revenue and bottom line profitability?" provides a large part of the answer (not to mention, a template for cross-departmental employee engagement and team building for adoption by your company):

Keeping employee turn-over low significantly contributes to both the revenue and profitability of Dealer.com.  High employee retention in both management and staff member positions helps provide outstanding and consistent service to clients and sense of well being for employees as a team.  Further, client retention rates are at an all time high.  Hiring and promoting from within also contributes to financial strength by decreasing recruiting expenses and creating a faster learning curve for employees who change positions within the organization.

The sales, account management and marketing teams are joined to commit to each other for strategic teamwork on a daily basis.  The marketing team's number one goal is to generate sales leads for both the retail sales team and for the account management team, mainly through email direct marketing.  In return the account management and retail sales teams spend time gathering email addresses to add to the prospect and customer database.  The marketing team compensation plan has a variable component and is paid out levels that correspond to sales lead generation.

In addition, the account management team is responsible for not just reactive customer service for the customer like the majority of Dealer.com competitors, but to also be proactive Internet marketing consultants to customers.  The account management team's daily call direction is two out-bound for every one in-bound call.  In other words the account management team is pushing our client base to high levels of performance, versus waiting for the customer to reach out and ask for help.  The team collaborated with the marketing team to help prioritize which of their customers had the largest advertising opportunity and sent them email marketing campaigns with the "advertising estimates" customized for each dealer.

For more insights into Dealer.com's profitable people practices, sign up for our free IDEAS newsletter – our upcoming February issue will have a profile of success on the business.

Photo credit: Inc. Magazine

Barry Moltz, author of the well received, customer service-oriented book BAM!, has a new post on The Small Business Blog in which he offers up his list of the 20 most important words in small business.

While one of his words – Empowerment – is directly attributed to employee engagement performance, Moltz frames the other 19 squarely in a customer satisfaction context.  That serves his readers well, particularly those who have a primarily customer-facing role.

However, many of them can also be applied to internal people practices for a more productive workplace culture.  In addition to Empowerment, I found four other words in Moltz's list that small businesses in our network are using to get better results from their employees, with consequential and favorable financial impact:

Empowerment: Winning Workplaces' weekly, bottom line-improving tip for Sept. 15, 2010 was all about this word, used by our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award finalist LoadSpring Solutions.  Here's what the company told us in their award application, which we shared with our email subscribers: "Our employees are empowered to make decisions that make their jobs easier and more effective with the net result being that in 2009 we successfully supported customer growth of 500% over 2006 numbers while decreasing tech ops personnel expense as a percentage of revenue for the same period."

Feedback: From our profile of success on Kahunaville Management: Feedback from surveys and informal meetings have ... helped [Director of HR Joy] Macon understand what motivates cast members.  "We found that more than half of our employees thought respect, fairness and openness were their top motivating factors," says Macon.  "So we knew that if we were motivating by incentives that just pass out dollars, we'd miss more than half of our employees."

Happy: I wrote a post back in December 2009 on the OPEN Small Business Forum's coverage of our 2009 Top Small Workplace Bailard Inc.  "OPEN's VP of Brand Management, Marcy Shinder, shows how Bailard's communications team building practices result in tangible business outcomes," I said then, including multi-year client retention of 98% and best-in-class (among our award winners that year) average employee tenure of 13 years.

Mistake: Sharing a management takeaway I have heard him say several times since we wrote our profile of success on his 2007 Top Small Workplace award-winning firm Gentle Giant Moving Company, their CEO and Founder Larry O'Toole advised, "I think a big part of [problem solving] is allowing people to make mistakes.  You want people to be able to learn from that without feeling they'll be castigated."

Voice Mail Jail: Graham Weston, our 2006 Best Boss who serves as Chairman of Rackspace Hosting, delivered probably the biggest "wow" moment at our 2009 annual conference when he demonstrated by having an attendee place a call to his company the revenue-enhancing impact of making the bold choice to eliminate a voicemail system, and have all calls be answered by a real person within a few rings.  I recounted this in this post.

Related: See this post for a video featuring Moltz's take on how entrepreneurs can get back on track (or stay on track) in a down economy.

According to this article from Federal News Radio, public-sector companies have their work cut out for them when it comes to using employee retention tips to keep top performers.  Smart retention strategies are particularly needed, the site writes, in the face of looming pay freezes and budget cuts.

Meg Beasley's article offers tips under four areas for improvement suggested in a new Booz Allen Hamilton report specifically on retention of federal employees.  Interestingly, what I found when I compared some of the individual tips the report offers to employee engagement strategies we just finished assessing among our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award applicant pool is that the dozen governmental firms this year are embracing them in a big way.

Here's what I found, under each of the four areas outlined in the Booz Allen report:

Teamwork, supervision and leadership

• Offer management development or training to new and existing managers: 100%
• Team-based acknowledgement of employee contributions: 42%

Agency mission and employee skills match

• Organizations with strategic plans: 100%
• Among those, strategic plan includes a strategy for improving organizational performance through its people: 100%

Employee development and support

• Offer mentoring programs: 58%
• Cross training: 67%
• Internally developed/delivered training sessions: 67%
• Outside sessions/conferences: 100%

Performance management, compensation, benefits and work/life

• Offer employee medical insurance: 100%
• Percent of employee premium paid by company: 90%
• Dependent medical insurance: 100%
• Percent of dependent premium paid by company: 90%
• Domestic partner benefits: 50%
• Bring children to work in an emergency: 42%
• Flexible working arrangements: 100%
• Bonuses based on company profits: 67%

And the big question on the part of CEOs and CFOs – what has this people practices investment gotten them when it comes to the bottom line?  While our governmental applicants recorded average 2009 attrition of 18% (I find the 5.8% figure from a separate but related report mentioned in Beasley's article suspect because it's so low), they also:

• All are profitable,
• Have average 2010 revenue of $49 million, and
• Have not-too-shabby average employee tenures of 3.7 years.

Stay tuned to our blog for more information soon on how our current award applicants in different industries are performing compared with their peers.  Click here to subscribe if you don't already.

In an article in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, management consultant Ram Charan emphasized the need for CEOs to put implementation of proven employee retention tips at the top of their agenda (SmartBrief on Leadership has a good short summary of it; you need to subscribe to WSJ to read the full article).

Perhaps Charan has seen the results of this study of 1400 workers, published earlier this month by Manpower's Right Management group.  Astonishingly, the share of employees who say they plan to pursue alternate job opportunities in the new year shot up 24% from 2010-looking-toward-2011, vs. 2009-looking-toward-2010.

Taken together, this is ample evidence that companies need to continually revisit and revamp their employee engagement satisfaction practices.

You can benefit from some small firms that have done so and succeeded financially as a result – select applicants for Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine's 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award.  (We're accepting applications through January 14, 2011; learn more about this competition here.)

Here are some of their unique approaches to retaining top talent.  To maintain anonymity, only their state and industry are listed.

1. Start with great referrals, especially in a virtual office (Pennsylvania-based education provider): Since there is no central office - employees are distributed around the US and Canada - we have been able to make exceptional hiring decisions, almost exclusively through referrals, based solely on talent and drive, not location.  We are blessed to hire the best people and the best fit, without conventional restrictions.
2. The top level is involved, and takes their time (Kansas-based financial services provider): Our CEO and General Manager work very hard to support the culture by taking their time with hiring decisions, making sure that the position fits the personality of an employee.  If we find employees who are dissatisfied with their current job, we work to ensure we can find a suitable position in the company either via promotions or departmental transfers.  A majority of the time is spent in creating processes.  With the right personnel and processes we have seen a consistent improvement in overall company performance.
3. Base hiring/retention on revenue targets (Illinois-based business services provider): We have a revenue target goal of $100 million within the next six years and we plan to increase hiring approximately 15% next year.  In order to achieve $100 million, we will continually invest a minimum of $200,000 in annual training in order to attract, retain, and develop staff.
4. Focus on key roles (Missouri-based advertising/marketing firm): Hiring a high-level analytics expert -- and paying him an above market-competitive salary -- has been the best decision of 2009.  He has made internal communications more efficient, our transparent reporting to clients more seamless, and allowed for us to accept a greater workload.  Investing in his career has improved the performance, results, and bottom line of our organization.
5. Focus specifically on your sales staff (Illinois-based environmental services provider): We have invested heavily in a sales training program that includes the hiring of a full-time sales trainer, as well as utilizing the services of outside sales consultants.  This has helped our company better leverage our sales team and grow revenues by an average of 25% over the last 3+ years.
6. Promote lifelong learning (Maryland-based IT services provider): We send employees to seminars and training, subsidize training they seek out on their own, and provide tuition reimbursement.  In addition, continuing education is part of employees' annual performance reviews and is a criteria for our quarterly bonus program.
7. 1+1=3 (New York-based manufacturer): Our company partnered with the State Labor Department's Workshare Program allowing employees to retain their jobs while having limited access to unemployment insurance benefits.  To help sustain in the leanest of weeks in 2009, we facilitated Workshare benefits for employees whose hours were reduced due to reduced business.  Working hard to increase sales and partner with various suppliers and vendors allowed the company to keep the reduced work hours to a minimum, getting staff back to full-time work more quickly than originally anticipated.

Think your small business does better at finding and keeping top talent than the ones listed above?  Then you should apply today for our 2011 workplace award and a chance at being featured in Inc. Magazine next June.

Last week entrepreneurship and small business expert Jim Blasingame shared on his blog the results of an audience poll he conducted.  He found that a minority of respondents (44%) are currently funding a 401(k) or other type of employee retirement plan.  The majority who are not (56%) cite "reasons ranging from not having the spare capital to the weak economy" for why they're bowing out right now, Blasingame says.

Yet, Winning Workplaces' employee engagement research – data from our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award applicants – reveals quite the opposite trend: of our 497 applicant firms this year, 453 (91%) fund retirement plans and 44 (9%) do not.  Here's the findings of these two surveys next to each other:

As with most people practices spending, when combined with a nurturing workplace culture we find that our small business award applicants that fund measures like retirement plans are able to justify the expense through the improved business results to which they often contribute.  This is certainly true of our 2010 award applicants – the table below shows that the vast majority of those who offer retirement plans are seeing higher average revenues over the last three years, higher average employee tenure, and lower average turnover.  In addition, a slightly higher percentage of them were profitable in 2009.

So, do retirement plans have a significant impact on performance?  While Blasingame says a company needs to do well before it can fund this benefit, we see evidence going back to our 2008 award winners that leaders who draw a line in the sand and fund retirement plans regardless of the economy or market conditions see strong business results.  In good times and bad, it's hard to argue that retirement plans aren't a top recruiting and retention tool – giving firms that offer them a better "blank canvas" with which to spur greater motivation and productivity through actvities like these.

Your thoughts?

One of the employee retention tips I mention most often here, based on its success rate at our award-winning small and midsized businesses, is hiring for attitude and fit – even over skills – to keep the atmosphere of team building strong and, thus, your workplace culture productive.  Owners and leaders of these companies report that hiring in this way helps keep turnover low, and it also provides a better base for promoting from within.

In addition to picking one thing and doing it well from a product/service/branding point of view, getting the right people on the bus is pure Jim Collins.  Yet, Stanford University management professor Robert Sutton, author of his own bestseller The No Asshole Rule (read our review of it) and the just-released Good Boss, Bad Boss, says employees' personal motivations trump hiring for fit.

In the October issue of Inc. Magazine, Editor at Large Leigh Buchanan – who will speak at our October 27-29 event with Inc. in Denver – asks Sutton if it's harder for bosses at small companies to manage, given that their reports tend to range from the highest down to the lowest level.  Sutton replies that

It is harder.  Because the people you oversee will have different motivations.  With all due respect, this is where Jim Collins is full of shit.  I have a friend whose family bought a chain of movie theaters.  Maybe all that get-the-right-people-on-the-bus stuff applies to the managers of those multiplexes.  But a couple levels down, you're dealing with teenagers who are going to be in the job for a year or less.  My friend said there are four things you want those people to do: show up to work, look decent, not make out or get stoned while they're on the job, and not steal.  If you can find people like that, you have a successful business.

What do you think about Sutton's response?  I have two observations:

1. Today the Kansas City Star highlights an ominous statistic from the September unemployment report: barely more than one-quarter of teens have a job.  With this level of job insecurity, will teens who secure work act more like adults and curb their behavior along the lines of what Sutton says his business-owner friend sees at the lowest level?  My guess is yes, and if this is true, this would create a work environment where more of these folks are prone to drinking the motivational Kool-Aid for fear of losing their job.
2. I also think Sutton's repudiation of Jim Collins when it comes to hiring for fit doesn't give leaders enough credit.  Just among Winning Workplaces' award winners, Phelps County Bank in Missouri and Gentle Giant Moving in Massachusetts illustrate that you can create a workplace that entices teens to come on board and motivates them to stay on and look for increased responsibility as young adults.  It can and does happen, irrespective of industry or location as the aforementioned two examples show.

For leadership insights on everything from growth strategies to people practices, don't miss the Inc. Leadership Conference.

I enjoyed reading this assessment by Belmont University's Jeff Cornwall of the presumed impact of the small business bill that passed the U.S. Senate this week.  The bill, which would provide community banks $30 billion to lend to small businesses and increase SBA lending, is expected to pass the House and be signed into law by President Obama before the midterm elections in November.

Dr. Cornwall, the university's entrepreneurship chair, warns that

with small businesses seeing weak sales and narrowing profits, more debt is the last thing they need.  More debt will only make small business more vulnerable to failure in the long-run.  Recovery for the small business sector of the economy is going to be a long, slow process that is based [on] more customers willing to spend money.  It is not going to come from easier access to the artificial cash flow that comes from taking on more debt.

He makes great points – ones with which many a small biz CEO in the trenches of this tough economy would readily agree.  However, Cornwall assumes that all business leaders that accept loans provided under this bill (if it becomes law) would turn around and use it directly in some kind of customer-facing way, whether to better satisfy current and past customers or to stoke demand to court new ones.

"The problem is that customers are not spending money like they did in the past," Cornwall writes.  This is the biggest hurdle to revenue and profit sustainability for small businesses across the board right now.  But that doesn't mean additional lending can't set them up for long-term success, and thus the economy as well.

What do I mean?  Well, the small firms in our network, including participants in our annual employee engagement research project, are compensating for reduced consumer spending by investing in their workplace for the long haul in these and other ways:

• Forming employee committees to task them with designing people practices, including benefits.  This reduces spending on benefits that don't resonate with workers, and the sense of empowerment in the business it gives them improves retention.
• Bringing in staff outside of just sales, marketing, and business development to provide new business proposals, incentivizing those that result in significant pipelines and sales with special bonuses.
• Opening up the books to all employees and in some cases teaching them to read financial statements.  While this is not for all companies/workplace cultures, this has proven to be a powerful way for employees to assist leaders in making the tough choices of when to pull back or reallocate cash and other resources in tough times.
• Investing in frequent employee surveys; a number of businesses formulate their questions around customer/client success so management gets insights "from the front lines" on how to proceed moving forward.
• Partnering with academic institutions, business coaches, and others to provide employees with ongoing career education and training.  This is an employee leadership development strategy that helps companies with both retention and process improvement – both of which cut costs.

These examples demonstrate just a few of the ways that recipients of business loans can make smart use of more debt, to solidify their operation for the long haul even in the face of reduced customer/client demand in the current economy.

If you run a company, what are your thoughts on the small business bill in Congress?

One of the blogs I follow is Engaged Employees, Remarkable Results! by Mark Hirschfeld.  Mark is Principal in the Human Capital practice at SilverStone Group, and on the side he also writes about how better employee engagement leads to stronger business results.

On his blog yesterday he pointed to an interview he recently did with Jennifer Benz of Benz Communications.  The first question and answer from this article stood out to me:

Of all the programs and incentives you heard about in your interviews [for your book with Leigh Branham, Re-Engage], which stood out to you as the most innovative?
The thing that impresses me about highly engaged employers is how thorough and methodical they are in their efforts to create a great workplace.  Truly, nothing seems left to chance.

This is a valuable insight for both business leaders looking for team building and employee retention tips to cut hiring, training, and other HR costs, as well as employees who are fed up with their subpar workplace cultures (if you're one of the latter, tell us about your experience and learn from those of others in your shoes here).

Mark's truism – that great workplaces are achieved methodically, not by happenstance – is one that we've communicated over the years based on our findings from our small workplace recognition project.  Leaders of our award-winning small and midsize businesses understand that more cohesive work cultures aren't a means unto themselves; well nurtured, they lead to improved metrics ranging from lower absenteeism and turnover to process improvement/cost savings and higher revenues.

To underscore the methodical-versus-random nature of the human capital strategies the small firms in our network use, check out the table below.  It features people practices we've shared weekly with our email subscribers since late July.  Note the bottom line results these enterprises track and enjoy from their investment on the people side!

(If you're reading this in an RSS feed, you may need to click here to view the table in its proper format.)

*Source: 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award application/survey

To start getting practices and results like the ones above in your email, go here.  (Side benefit: You will be registered to receive our next IDEAS newsletter, which will contain our review of Mark Hirschfeld's book Re-Engage.)

Since I talk at you on this blog about human capital strategies to improve employee engagement for a more productive workplace, I'm delighted when you talk back to me (well, really to all of us at Winning Workplaces – we're a very small team like many of the businesses we research and consult for).

Here are 10 recent posts I wrote that resonated with your fellow readers.  Check out what I said and what they said in response, and please add your thoughts to the mix.  Thanks!

1. Small Business CEO Makes Compelling Case for Hiring the Right People
2. My Top 5 Things to NOT Do When Business Blogging
3. New Deloitte Survey Highlights Connection Between Employee Trust and Retention
4. Three Resources to Help Leaders Set New Managers Up for Success
5. Guitar Magazine Poll: Team Building Matters More Than Skills
6. Ride the Remote Work Wave for Cost Savings, Greater Productivity, Lower Turnover
7. ESOPs Declining, But More Employees Are Stockholders Among Our Award-Winning Small Businesses
8. Is Size the Enemy of Consensus Decision Making?
9. 10 Ways to Make Performance Reviews Meaningful
10. Four Reasons Why Gen Y Entrepreneurs Might be the Ones to Pull Us Out of the Recession

Given this blog's focus on how employee retention tips and other people practices lead to a more productive workplace culture – and how leadership strategies such as succession planning reduce dependency of the business on key people if they leave or are otherwise taken out of the equation – a reader might conclude that decisions made in the C-suite matter less now than they once did.

This conclusion would be wrong, however, argues Tyler Leverty, assistant professor of finance in the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business.  According to this Newswise article, which references Leverty's paper "Dupes or Incompetents: An Examination of Management’s Impact on Firm Distress," some CEOs significantly improve a firm’s performance, while others hurt it.

Writes Newswise,

[Leverty] found ... good CEOs can remove their firms from regulatory scrutiny 8 to 16 percent faster than a poor manager.  And in insurance companies that are going out of business, a more talented CEO can get a better return on the firm’s assets by up to 10 cents on the dollar.

The takeaway is that events and other learning opportunities that deliver a good ROI for leaders are worth the investment – even in tough times.  This is why Winning Workplaces is excited to partner with Inc. Magazine to host the Creating Competitive Cultures (C3) Conference in Denver on October 27-29, 2010.  As Inc. says on their C3 website, CEOs and other attendees can expect to learn "the newest leadership strategies for developing the best possible company culture, one that results in a loyal, motivated, inspired, and focused team."

Click here to learn more about this event.  You'll want to register by tomorrow, August 31, to get the early bird rate, a $300 savings.

I don't yet have it in my hands, but I already know I'm going to like the latest book from workplace generational expert Neil Howe, Millennials in the Workplace.

According to StreetInsider.com, Howe "turns [the] downbeat message [from the media on Millennials, aka Generation Y] on its head."  Taking the position that Millennials are an asset and opportunity rather than a lazy (insert other adjectives here) liability, the website writes, Howe's new book serves in part as a resource for employee engagement and team building strategies to find and keep them.

Providing a sample of the employee retention tips Howe shares in Millennials, StreetInsider.com links to this pdf from Howe's company, LifeCourse.  At its core is the following list of recruiting and retention strategies tailored to this young generation that, some reports say, became the most pervasive one of all this year: 

1. Treat them like VIPs
2. Co-recuit the parents
3. Find them early
4. Look after them
5. Offer structure and teach them the basics
6. Provide tight cycles of feedback
7. Don't offer a "McJob"
8. Make them part of the group
9. Be active in the community
10. Take an interest in their success

I really like that the pdf includes a section on "What To Do" under each of the above strategies to take them from the world of the ambiguous to the practical.

Given the Millennial workforce's size and its stature as the dominant generation in the work world for years to come, it's no surprise that our Top Small Company Workplaces are already using many of the above strategies to help them tackle pressing issues from process and supply chain improvement to sales lead cultivation and delivery.

Related: Read my 4 reasons why Millennials may be the ones to pull us out of our troubled economy.

I enjoyed this post by Susan Fronk on the America's Best Business Practices blog.  In it she argues that the one thing that can most positively impact your small business – over and above measures to grow revenue, cut costs, and deliver excellent customer service – is finding and keeping great employees.

She provides more value later in her article by sharing three ways small businesses can build a more productive workplace culture by attracting and retaining great employees:

• Do a good job of recruiting and hiring,
• Create a great working environment, and
• Build relationships with your employees and foster relationships among employees.

I thought I would expand upon Fronk's informative post by sharing with you some specific ways that Winning Workplaces' 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award winners find and keep great employees:

1. Hire slow.  It's not uncommon for job candidates to go through as many as 8 interviews before a hiring decision is made.
2. Hire for cultural fit.  This includes not just when a position is open, but generally when someone looks like a good fit for the organization; a number of firms prefer to keep their feelers out and plug someone in when they come across that person.
3. Grab top talent from competing firms.  Top talent is top talent, and our winning small companies are unabashed about leveraging a bad economy that has forced competing firms to shed staff to their advantage.
4. Systematize the orientation/onboarding process.  Many companies do a good job during the middle period of an employee's tenure, but few are exceptional at the beginning, a critical time for new hires.  Our Top Small Company Workplaces really excel here by doing things like mentoring and scheduling meetings with the CEO to ramp up the new employee's understanding of and commitment to the organization.
5. Managers have frequent contact with their subordinates.  For many small companies, managers only interact one on one with employees, to review performance and also their top concerns/hurdles, every three months.  Our award-winning firms typically do this every two weeks to a month.  This helps better engage employees for greater commitment, and also helps firms react to emerging issues sooner.
6. Invest in employee leadership development.  The Top Small Company Workplaces share a belief that they are best served when their top talent stays to fill and create roles of increasing responsibility, and they have seen results from their action on it including process improvement, product innovation, and better customer service – not to mention mid- and top-level employees who stay longer, keeping recruiting and training costs down.  As far as their specific leadership development strategies, see this post.
7. Give employees a voice in the decision making.  Lots of companies have an open door policy, but this no longer cuts it if you want to foster two-way communication that results in greater employee engagement and productivity.  Our award winners give their employees a voice by holding daily huddles and frequent (at least once a month) all-hands meetings.  In addition, many of them open up their books and explain the company finances so people gain a crystal clear understanding of how their role affects the top and bottom line.
8. Do employee recognition.  I've blogged before about how recognizing your staff can be meaningful and still inexpensive.  Often times a simple, face-to-face thank you or small gift personalized to the employee can make a powerful impact.
9. Be generous in providing time off.  More employers need to come to the realization that being flexible around employees' personal and family obligations makes for a more committed and productive worker.  Paid time off should be a primary consideration, but if that's not in the budget, being flexible – especially for unanticipated obligations – through measures like cross training will help immensely with retention.
10. Empower workers down to the lowest levels to make good spot decisions.  This involves a lot of trust from leaders and some additional training, but when it works it makes a dramatic impact on business results.  Just think how much happier you've been when you've called a vendor and you didn't need to be transferred up the phone/responsibility chain to have your issue resolved.  The same sense of satisfaction can mean the difference in whether your customers or clients come back to you and refer you to others.

Is there a measure you think should be in this list?  If so, I welcome your comment on it below.

As Inc. Magazine's profile on our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award winner PortionPac Chemical Corp got a lot of attention in terms of showing the payoff of employee engagement at a manufacturer – an industry that has been especially hard hit in this economy, and which is not typically known for great workplace practices – today I wanted to share a bit more about another manufacturer: NewAge Industries, one of our 2010 award finalists.

Specifically, I wanted to enlighten you on five practices that leadership of this Pennsylvania-based provider of disposable pharmaceutical processing systems uses to increase competitive advantage.  For 56-year-old NewAge, one solidly quantitative way to define "competitive advantage" is their share price increasing 219% since 2005, while those of their two biggest, publicly traded competitors dropped substantially over the same period.  In addition, the company has never carried debt.

Here are five of NewAge's staff engagement activities that stand out for their revenue-generating and employee retention potential – again, particularly with respect to what other manufacturers are doing right now:

1. Bring on temporary producton employees for up to three months before hiring decisions are made.  This helps NewAge determine if someone is the best cultural fit for the organization, especially when viewed through the lens of employee leadership development potential.
2. Use tough times like these to launch an educational initiative aimed at helping employees understand and address their personal finance concerns.  At NewAge, the CEO in coordination with the accounting department recently hosted five, one-hour sessions with all staff on this.  As a result, many workers have closed the gaps in their personal finances.  This ultimately benefits the company because less financially stressed employees are more productive.
3. Weave cross-training firmly into employee practices and the workplace culture.  Leadership's goal here is to avoid over-hiring in busy times and rampant layoffs in slow times.  They fundamentally believe that this cycle that's so typical of companies is flawed, and they have the numbers to show that their steadier approach works (2009 was their sixth record-breaking year in a row for profits).
4. Pay workers for referrals.  NewAge employees receive a $1,000 bonus for any successful referrals they make.  Management has found that this practice helps to reduce hiring costs and results in higher quality applicants, since employees value the work culture and don't want to be responsible for spoiling it.
5. Put a twist on your tuition reimbursement program and subsidize both work- and non-work-related learning.  NewAge reimburses each employee up to $2,500 annually, and the tuition can be used for any type of learning, whether or not it is directly related to one's job.  Leaders' rationale is that the act of learning anything new and different can spark innovation – not to mention foster employee loyalty.

What people practices, in addition to those mentioned above, do you think directly impact and boost competitive advantage?

Our past annual conference speaker Sue Shellenbarger of The Wall Street Journal wrote a blog today on a notable development when it comes to the intersection of workplace culture practices and the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).  Shellenbarger notes that with Australia now requiring their employers to offer paid leave, the U.S. is now "alone among developed nations in offering no financial support for new parents post-childbirth."

The 12 weeks of leave that our government does mandate, for both eligible new mothers and new fathers, is unpaid.

Where the government is in supporting unpaid versus paid leave is a stark contrast to what the applicants, finalists, and winners of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition offer.  Here's what we see in our employee engagement research of this pool of 497 total small businesses:

• 100% of the 20 winners offer paid time off (PTO)
• 100% of the 20 finalists offer PTO
• 97.6% of the remaining 457 applicants offer PTO
• 11 (2%) of the 497 total applicants go further and specifically offer paid paternity in addition to maternity leave (above and beyond general paid leave)

Why do these organizations, which are small and lack many of the resources (including financial) of big companies, make this kind of investment as part of their employee benefits packages?  Certainly it keeps them competitive on the recruiting front.  Yet, considering their overall people practices allow them to keep workers for a long time – 7 years on average among our 2010 winners and finalists; 4 years among the remaining applicants – they see being generous in supporting time off for personal as well as family commitments as a means toward achieving industry-best retention and employee leadership development.  This in turn directly affects their ability to maintain and improve both customer and vendor relationships.

Related: This article on our website describes the push for paid sick leave legislation in the U.S., including some of the major players involved.

Trust building activities may register high on the radar screens of the organizations Winning Workplaces named as 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces in the latest issue of Inc. Magazine, but on the whole among the roughly 27 million small businesses across the U.S., they do not.  These and other human capital strategies are considered by many leaders to be "soft," and therefore, in a down economy, not worth leadership's time and energy compared with other areas of the business.

But as Greg Harris noted on The Science of Work blog yesterday, and as I subsequently tweeted about, Harvard Business Review – long a barometer on where business is and where it's headed – has seemed to focus of late even more on the "fundamentals" of people management.  This means employee engagement strategies to build a more productive workplace culture.

Harris mentioned the May HBR headline "How to Keep Your Star Talent."  Is it a coincidence that this month the AP reported on employment data which show that more employees are jumping ship as the economy improves?

I think not.  Yes, we always see the cycle that in tough economic times, employers don't have to worry as much about retention because people are thankful to have a job, and that in better times they need to pay more attention to it because workers sense a job-seeking advantage and are more apt to leave.  But we are coming out of the Worst Recession Since the Great Depression® – a time when many employers' first reaction was to let go of staff and ask for a great deal of concessions from their remaining workforces.

It's no wonder, then, that employees, feeling beaten down in many cases, are looking for the exits.  This is especially true of top performers, who have a good understanding from their latest performance reviews that they're a strong commodity.

What can keep these folks from leaving?  At a base level, a work environment of trust, respect, and fairness – qualities we point to as one of six building blocks of a winning workplace.

It will be interesting to see how many more leaders and managers put activities designed to maximize trust, such as investment in employee leadership development, at the top of their to-do lists.  And by doing so, moving people practices from the "soft measures" to the "hard measures" column to maintain their competitive advantage.

Your thoughts?

Last week I attended the webcast "Changing Engagement Challenges: The New Deal to Engage Talent."  Workforce Management sponsored the event; Ilene Gochman of the global professional services company Towers Watson was the presenter.

Here are the slides for the session.  I thought it would be helpful to you, from an employee engagement and workplace culture-building perspective, to guide you through them with my top takeaways on the research and best practices that Gochman presented:

1. Employers clearly still have an advantage on the talent front in a down economy, especially those based in the U.S.  Slide 5 shows that the U.S. is second only to Germany in the number of employees who work for only one organization.  However, the U.S. has the most people who report working for 2-3 firms.
2. While employees understand that they're much less likely to get their way when it comes to getting significantly higher pay in this economy – 74% say this is important, but only 22% believe it's achievable in their organization – the disparity is much lower when it comes to taking on a wide range of positions and work experience: 55% say this is important, and 37% of those folks think it's achievable where they currently work (Slide 6).  This suggests that employee leadership development can be among the strongest employee retention tips.
3. Slide 11 makes clear that the payoff of employee engagement practices starts with the leadership team and the workplace culture they create; Slide 16 reinforces this especially for leadership related to research on top engagement drivers done in late 2008 and throughout 2009.
4. Towers Watson found in its 2010 Global Workforce Study that while competitive pay, paid time off, and healthcare benefits are top recruitment drivers, leadership and the prospect of career development are most responsible for long employee tenures/low turnover (Slide 31).
5. Slides 33-35 should be even more helpful to small business leaders, as they describe, in descending order, the most common drivers of attraction to a company for those in Generation Y and Baby Boomers, as well as high potential candidates.

What are your top takeaways from the slides for this webcast?  I invite you to share them by commenting below.

You might not know it based on their visibility and reach, but the satirical newspaper and website, The Onion, is a small business.

Founded in Wisconsin in 1988 and now headquartered in New York City, the 160-employee publisher has been in business longer than over half of Winning Workplaces' 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces finalist organizations.  Not only that, in an era in which the viability of the traditional newspaper is being questioned, The Onion has grown its market share through successful forays into book publishing and web video broadcasting.

Last week The New York Times interviewed The Onion's CEO, Steve Hannah.  Asked about his top leadership lessons, Hannah offered employee leadership development and employee retention tips that were far from satirical.  In fact, what he talked about echoes the experience and advice we hear from our award-winning small firms and others in our network that understand the transformative power of smart people practices.

For example:

• CEOs who look after their employees soon find that loyalty is a far more powerful motivator than fear.
• "Listen to the people below you because they are on the front lines."

Read Adam Bryant's full Corner Office Q&A with Hannah here.