While there are some factors of a productive workplace culture that are more subjective when it came time for our panel of judges to select the winners of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition – such as The Sky Factory's highly unusual practice of fully consensus-based decision making – other factors are more objective.

Two of these are average employee tenure and turnover.  Here's how these metrics broke down in 2009 among the 20 winners and 20 finalists of our award this year, as revealed in the June issue of Inc. Magazine, which is out on newsstands today:

Winning Workplaces sees – and the firms selected as this year's award winners certainly see – a through line from team building efforts designed to keep employees engaged, motivated, and satisfied, and their ability to hold onto them longer, on average, than other small employers.

The impact of higher employee tenures and lower turnover on the bottom line includes:

• Improved ability to promote from within (saves on recruiting costs).
• More time to implement practices to capture and run with employees' best bottom line-enhancing ideas.
• More time for managers and even their subordinates to improve vendor relationships, to lower costs and/or provide more value for the business.
• Typically stronger relationship-building with customers or clients, due to their interactions with the same people month after month, year after year.

Related: Check out this new article up on Inc.com, from the June issue, providing some other strong, key metrics of our top 40 workplaces this year.