If you're not doing this one thing over and over and over in your team building and employee engagement best practices, your work culture will not be as strong and effective as it could be to produce such bottom line-improving metrics as lower turnover, lower absenteeim and presenteeism, higher morale, and higher productivity:

Communicate!
Communicate!
Communicate!

On the Slow Leadership blog today, Nina Simosko writes how communication by management is more important now than ever, with employees feeling increasingly insecure about their contributions in an economy that is eating their neighbors for breakfast.  She notes that with advances in technology, "Nearly everyone has some kind of message-taking system available to them," and so there is no excuse for leaders and managers to avoid talking openly and honestly, often, with their people.

Here are some ways to communicate that our 2008 Top Small Workplaces are using, as mentioned in our Benchmarking and Best Practices Report on them:

• Consensus-based decision making is a company core value (ATA Engineering)
• Open work spaces and collegiate-style campus encourages a free flow of ideas (Phenomenex)
• Regular manager's luncheon at a local cafe where personal work stories from the week are shared (Lundberg Family Farms)

It's worth noting that with Lundberg's practice, which also occurs at Digineer (the company of 2006 Winning Workplaces Best Boss Michael Lacey) these off-the-cuff gatherings often result in conversations that lead to new revenue-generating ideas.  In Digineer's case, one of their "Lunch Arounds" resulted a six-figure idea.

There's no such thing in your workplace as over communicating, so refine it as part of your employee engagement activities and do it often.  The result could be another much-coveted C – more cash.