People Practices

Close to 1 in 5 readers of this blog is from California – a greater share than our home state of Illinois.  And of those, most hail from where I've called home since last July: SoCal.

I speak now to you folks – and others if you want to fly or drive in: You can connect with me on March 23 by registering for this LA Chamber event on green entrepreneurship.  "Going Green for California," part of Occidental Petroleum's Power Hour Series, features Huell Howser, host of California's Gold on PBS.

According to the LA Chamber, this session will highlight "what innovative and creative Californians are doing to solve environmental challenges."  The registration fee is only $20.  Learn more and register to attend here.

If you can make it, I look forward to seeing you there.  I'll have business cards in hand – though not too many for environmental reasons – and I'd love to hear about what you do and answer any questions you may have about our work to equip small organizations with proven people practices.

Related: This week Taiga Company (a fellow user of our bloging platform, Compendium) shared 6 reasons why going green is a payoff of employee engagement, and makes for a more winning workplace.

Photo credit: Huell Howser Productions

Yesterday after the Associated Press reported on the results of a San Diego State University study finding that Generation Y (or Millennials) highly value compensation and vacation time, some in the blogosphere asked if, especially in this economic environment, Gen Y needs a wake-up call.

I don't think so – and I'm not saying that because I'm a card-carrying Millennial.  As someone interested in progressive people practices for a more productive workplace, I look at these two sticking points as the carrot at the end of a very lucrative stick for businesses.

Here are my top 5 reasons why I think Gen Y is entitled to its job wants:

1. It's now the most dominant generation in the workforce.  When you rise to that position and make decisions that benefit companies in both front-line and managerial roles, you get to call the shots when it comes to "skin in the game."
2. As Donna Fenn reports from a number of sources in her book Upstarts!, not only are record numbers of Millennials enrolling in entrepreneurship/MBA programs, but a greater share of those students than ever before are coming in with a business already in tow.  IMO, if these young people invest the ridiculous amount of time it takes to create and nurture a thriving business – and help our economy in the process through taxes and job creation – they deserve these two rewards.
3. As Penelope Trunk pointed out in a blog post I cited last year, Gen Y more readily embraces a proven leadership approach known as "fast failure."  Since our employee engagement research shows this can greatly improve innovation and thus productivity and customer satisfaction, again, I think Millennials deserve some just rewards for significantly scaling up a company's revenue and giving them a greater shot at achieving or maintaining profitability.
4. As organizational development guru David Lee argued on ERE.net last month, Gen Y doesn't beat around the bush on satisfaction – if they're not, you won't see them because they'll have left.  The cost-effective flip side of this for businesses is that they're much less likely than other generations to be "what the Gallup Organization calls ROAD Warriors — Retired on Active Duty."
5. Finally, as The CEO of YOU author Marsha Petrie Sue wrote in the California Chronicle, "Gen Y won't retire – they will reinvent."  Aren't greater pay and more time off fair tradeoffs for more productive ideas coming back from breaks and a longer work life spent helping companies improve their sales and bottom line?

Do you agree or disagree with my assessment?  Why?

Yesterday I blogged about our announcement of our finalist organizations for the 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award, showing where these businesses are located across the U.S.

You may be wondering, OK, so what made these 39 firms stand out among the almost 500 that applied?

Our finalists stand out when it comes to their use of effective, progressive employee engagement best practices to drive improved business outcomes.

The two tables below spell this out in detail.  Here are some key best practices/benefits where the finalists stood head and shoulders above all applicants, on average...

...which helped them produce the following outcomes:

Metric/Outcome	2010 TSCW Applicants	2010 TSCW Finalists	Finalist Improvement
Percent profitable in 2009	91%	95%	4%
Average years in business	16 years	28 years	75%
Average employee turnover	19%	8%	138%
Average % open positions filled from within in 2009	22%	28%	27%
Average employee tenure	4 years	7 years	75%

So, yet another employee engagement research sample that shows the payoff of winning workplace engagement strategies.

Help a blogger out: Have you seen any new workplace research showing that better people practices bring better business results?  Let me know by commenting below.

The comments are coming in fast and furiously to Wally Bock's latest post on his Three Star Leadership Blog.  That's not surprising given his topic: first-line managers.

Bock cites a blog post by Tom Peters in which he goes so far as to call these managers a "peerless strategic opportunity" for innovation and growth.  Expanding Peters' case, Bock explicitly links nurturing these integral staff to more desirable outcomes in engagement, turnover, and, yes, profitability.

In addition to Bock's "boss's bottom line" that employee leadership development helps a company grow even as its key players do, he provides value in these three qualities to look for in first-line managers to assess their longer-term leadership potential:

• They talk to others about behavior and performance,
• They make decisions, and
• They enjoy helping others succeed.

I hope more leaders read the advice of Peters, Bock, and other respected authorities who are pointing to this pivotal cog in the machine of small business – and business in general – as one that can easily be improved, for the benefit of their bottom line, and ultimately everyone through the job growth more thriving enterprises create.

Related: We wrote an editorial a few years ago on the importance of new manager training to more robust (and productive) employee engagement and people practices, and it still holds up today.  Read it here.

One of the comments we hear from small business leaders is that they often feel isolated – that they have to work hard to find peer validation for their efforts, and that they wonder how much impact they have outside their organization's walls.

As Management-Issues alluded to today, they have a HUGE impact, and therefore shouldn't feel so alone.  While The Conference Board's recent survey of 5,000 U.S. households revealed that over half of employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, Management-Issues points to their poll of 200 CEOs around the same timeframe which actually shows that company leaders are "increasingly upbeat."

As Nic Paton writes,

While excellence in execution and consistent execution of strategy by top management remained the top-ranking challenge overall for CEOs, more growth-oriented challenges such as sustained and steady top-line growth, customer loyalty/retention and profit growth were all now getting higher ratings as "greatest concerns".

This shift presents business leaders with an opportunity to make inroads on two significant fronts: employee engagement to boost productivity (good for the company, and for the country), and to better satisfy their people at the same time.  The latter outcome is good in that it would likely reduce the currently high share of folks who are ready to jump as the economy improves – but, again, this benefits companies because less of their top talent would turnover, which reduces their recruiting and training costs.

So while CEOs may feel siloed in what they do in building trust in the workplace – especially compared with more tangible tasks related to managing product/service delivery and the numbers side – they should take comfort in the fact that their contributions to ensure progressive people practices for a more productive workplace bring real returns, for their business and for our economy's return to growth.

If you run a business, how optimistic are you for 2010 performance vs. 2009?

Did you look closely at the byline on our post from yesterday arguing that employees are absolutely critical to achieving strong business results?  It's none other than our President, Gaye van den Hombergh.

You can read Gaye's bio here on our website.  She assumed leadership of Winning Workplaces last June, and in addition to the work she's been doing since to chart our strategic course and ensure excellent service, she recently, and graciously, agreed to join me as a writer on our blogs.

You can access Gaye's blog, which is titled "The Payoff of Progressive People Practices," here.  You'll want to bookmark it so you can stay current on her latest thoughts and tips on the payoff of employee engagement from a leader's perspective.

"Am I already a Winning Workplace?"

This is one of the most common questions we get, and it really makes sense given the economy and, by extension, companies' ability to invest in their workplace.  They understandably don't want to spend any more than is absolutely necessary here.

One way to answer to this question is to benchmark themselves against applicants of our Top Small Company Workplace award with Inc. Magazine.  The process I've outlined below will allow you to do this:

1. Click on the title of this post to ensure you're just looking at this post by itself, and not with the rest of our blog feed.
2. Click here to print this post.
3. On the page that prints out, complete the "Your Firm" column below for each metric/practice of a productive workplace.
4. Once this is done you will get a rough* picture of how your people practices are contributing to your bottom line success.

Metrics

Organizational

Medical and Other Benefits

*This represents only a limited view of how well your organization is doing when it comes to the payoff of employee engagement.  There are many more factors than those shown here that go into creating a Winning Workplace.  For a more detailed picture, please contact us.

If you own or run a business, would you like to experience strong revenue growth – growth that makes your enterprise highly coveted if you wanted to put it up for sale?

This is what Karen Oman realized with her Minnesota-based specialty job placement firm Certes Financial Pros.  (Winning Workplaces named Oman a Best Boss in 2003.)

She details her people practices to create a productive workplace, which led to the two business outcomes I mentioned above, in the following post, which is cross-posted on Oman's site Time to Breathe.  I thank her for agreeing to share her wisdom here.  Enjoy:

Cracking the Work/Life Balance Code Once and For All!

I just discovered the Yerkes-Dodson Law which was written up in the 70’s in the Harvard Business Review.  It says that with stress comes productivity...to a point.  But with too much stress, productivity plummets.  The resulting graph resembles an upside down U with stress on the x axis and productivity on the y axis.  So, just as we know that our stress-free zombie-like state is not productive, our overstressed state is equally not productive.  The secret is to back off the stress just enough to be at our peak in productivity.

So, if stress is coming on too strong, and we all know what that feels like, get out of there!  Take a walk, call a friend, read something funny in the broom closet, take deep breaths, or if more serious, call it a day and do what you love.  Don’t worry about the boss because, in the end, if you are the only one containing your stress appropriately, you will easily be the most productive person in the office.

I started my own company because after 15 years in corporate jobs, I couldn’t handle the stress any more.  As CEO of my new company, I granted flex hours, only gave deadlines when absolutely necessary, minimized overtime, tried to be transparent by over communicating, and even bought five executive vacation homes around the country that our employees could use free-of-charge (now available to you too at www.certifiedleisureproperties.com).

We unexpectedly grew to $20 million in 13 years.  When I decided to sell, 11 companies wanted to buy us because we obviously had a great culture, as well as off-the-charts productivity statistics.  As any of my corporate peers will attest, I was just your normal average CPA with nothing to predict this sort of result.  I just knew that if I didn’t stress employees and myself out, we would all have much better lives and I would succeed somehow.  Now, with the Yerkes-Dodson Law, I understand why we succeeded so well...and so do you!

Related: Get more employee engagement strategies from this webinar that Oman co-presented for us.

The recent actions of big players in some industries have helped sour business' overall reputation.  I'm referring to the likes of Goldman Sachs and WellPoint, who are awarding themselves with, respectively, record bonuses and rate hikes while consumers continue to languish in this economy.

When big business' rep takes a dive, employees who work for them, and even workers in small businesses that partner with them, can become disenfranchised.  Disenfranchised, of course, is another way of saying disengaged, and when this happens, productivity suffers.

Greg Hakim, a new employee of our Top Small Workplace Corporate Ink, wrote on this on their company blog this week.  He starkly defines the differences in business outcomes when leaders engage employees as merely numbers, or business assets, versus as the dynamic, innovation starters they truly can be when workplace team building is similarly dynamic and innovative.

A workplace culture that doesn't place any value on job meaning produces siloed work, customer or client dissatisfaction, and turnover that's often above the industry average.  On the other hand, companies that demonstrate through their people practices that they respect their workers and also invest in employee leadership development enjoy more and better innovations from collaborative work, which make customers/clients happier and also make it much more likely that workers won't bail, keeping your recruiting/training costs under control.

Related: Helping to instill a sense of meaning in your workforce doesn't have to be expensive.  This post reveals ways to do employee recognition "on the cheap."

There's an interesting new article over at HumanResourcesJobs.com that weighs investing in your workplace through employee education versus through perks like an on-site fitness center – and even bonuses.

While this piece concentrates almost entirely on the educational (tuition reimbursement) side, and therefore is not balanced in terms of listing the pros of company perks, I still think the writer makes a strong case.  By paying as much as $75,000 to help an employee earn a college degree, "The organization gets to keep and nurture an existing employee, making them more productive, useful, and loyal, and avoids the need to use recruiters or search firms and then assimilate a new employee."

The payoff of employee engagement and increased competitive advantage factor into the writer's final summation on the value of a company's educational investment in its workforce:

Organizations that are positive, encouraging, and supportive of employees who are trying to better themselves will have lower turnover rates, make more money and have a better public reputation than those who don’t.  The cost of tuition reimbursement programs is small compared to the benefit and a more liberal approach to tuition reimbursement and on-going education, especially when recruiting new college grads, is a powerful recruiting tool.  It’s a way to differentiate your organization from others.

The cost here is indeed small.  The over half of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award applicants that offer educational assistance reimburse tuition per employee by an average of just over $2,500 annually.  What they get from this and their other investments to create a productive workplace includes:

• Average annual reveue of $21 million
• Average revenue growth of 151% over the last three years
• Average annual turnover of 14%

(Source)

I think when you consider two of the chief cons of company perks like that fitness center that the article above mentioned – investment to educate that it's there, and more substantially to track its usage/ROI – the benefit of educational assistance makes even more sense.

How does education factor into your people practices spending?  And what impact has it had on retaining top talent?

Here's a silver lining for small businesses in this economy: trends more typical of big companies, including automating customer service functions and employing fewer customer service representatives per (potential) customer, mean that the bar is often set fairly low for you to "over-deliver."

I speak from experience on this.  Check out this feedback we just received from a company that completed our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award application:

I especially appreciated the quick response to an email I sent to customer service.  Technical support responded within 24 hours, thanked me for pointing out the mistake and assured me the problem would be fixed.  I was surprised to receive a response at all.

While we pride ourselves at Winning Workplaces on delivering excellent service across all our employee engagement activities, that last sentence in the applicant's feedback wouldn't have materialized if someone they dealt with before us didn't under-deliver.  Consider that in your employee engagement and team building initiatives that involve your customer service staff.

While we're on the topic of customer service, have you ever wondered what the optimal ratio of reps to customers should be?  It varies, of course, but you could use as a baseline what our ratio ended up being while assisting this year's TSCW applicants.

We had 3 FTE reps to a little over 600 customers.  Or a ratio of 1 to 200.

How does this compare with your current ratio?  And have you seen feedback from your customers that affirms a low service bar set by your competitors that your people practices help you surpass?

If you're reading this, you probably understand and place stock in the link between great employee engagement and a thriving, productive workplace culture.  Great people practices can maximize a company's internal performance.

But then there's that pesky, all-important external performance – particularly against larger competitors that can outspend you in everything from advertising to inventory to recruiting.  What's a small business to do?

Luckily, there are tried and true ways to beat back bigger competitors.  Our friend Becky McCray shared four of these this week over at Small Biz Survival.

Her second one centers on the intrinsic value of a cohesive work culture:

You have a better connection with what your people want, how they like to be treated, and what touches their emotions than any big company can.

Becky's right.  As we have seen time and time again with our Top Small Workplace award winners, a highly effective culture has powerful implications on employee retention, which directly affects customer retention and satisfaction – two factors that often drive the bulk of revenues for small firms.  (Just look at our 2007 winner Gentle Giant Moving.)

Incidentally, the effectiveness of Becky's #1 and #4 methods can be enhanced when #2 (culture) is firing on all cylinders.

Related: This post explains another benefit of top tier work cultures: increased likelihood of surviving multiple economic downturns.

This post from last week on Canada's Axiom News site caught my attention.  In it, Jennifer Higgs cites the Vermont Employee Ownership Center – and our 2007-09 Top Small Workplaces – in making the case that companies that are employee owned have "disproportionate excellence" relative to their peers that are not.

Higgs' evidence to support this case includes the fact that a third of our winners the last three years thrive with the help of a true culture of ownership, and that, at least in Vermont, employee-owned firms have tended to win more awards.   She also cites employee engagement research compiled by the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) which finds that, as we've shared here, employee-owned firms "tend to grow faster and are more profitable with higher productivity than non-employee-owned companies."

But, while desirable, do these business outcomes equate to "disproportionate" excellence, or success?  One firsthand perspective I can offer might shed some light on this question.

This year I had the opportunity to read and score a batch of our Top Small Company Workplaces applications.  I looked at the following factors for success, as assessed in our extensive application:

• *Business structure & growth
• Employee metrics
• Benefits
• Learning & development
• Workplace culture & people practices
• Impact of people practices
• Employee participation
• Impact of economy & company response
• Fostering community & collaboration
• Goals & sustainability

I put an asterisk (*) next to the first bullet above because this is the area that asks about employee ownership.  It is only one of 10 areas I, and the rest of our reading teams, are looking at.  I personally put as much or more weight into applicants' benefit offerings, employee development strategies, and responses to the essay questions that make up the last six areas listed above as I put into their business structure/growth.

For me and surely for others now reviewing applications, employee ownership by itself is not a guarantee of moving on to the next round (where our judging panel – of a caliber on par with our 2009 roster, TBA – will select the winners that will be featured in the June issue of Inc. Magazine).  Because employee ownership has historically been viewed similarly relative to many other success factors by our final judging panel, you get the majority of our winners over the last three years that are not employee owned.  This includes such excellent organizations as Healthwise (2007 Winner), Lundberg Family Farms (2008), and Anthony Wilder Design/Build (2009).

So in terms of addressing the claim that employee ownership equals "disproportionate excellence," I stick by what I wrote here last month: While employee ownership is not essential for creating a Winning Workplace, it is often tied to the ability to do so.

How much weight do YOU give employee ownership, as compared with other factors, to achieving excellence (defined as long-term success and sustainability)?

Here's a quick tip based on real-world experience – mine.  If you're on the fence about creating a Facebook page for your business, or keeping one up compared to your time spent promoting your business on other social networking sites, ask yourself two related questions:

• How well does my product/service resonate with my target demographic within Facebook (here's a link that shows a breakdown of users by generation, for starters)?
• Is even heavily veiled marketing of my product/service via my Facebook page – ie, status updates; new photos or video – going to be perceived as too hard of a sell?

I bring this up because as an Admin for two Facebook pages – the one for Winning Workplaces and a newer one for my wife's recently formed, Los Angeles-based production company, title3 – I've noticed striking differences in such desired metrics as the rate of increase in new fans and the number of interactions, or any time someone comments, likes, or shares a page update or comments on the page's wall.

To see how this tip plays out, consider:

• The Winning Workplaces page is about: workplace people practices that create better work environments in small businesses.
• The title3 page is about: artistic works that are innovative and provide opportunities for women in the arts.

Here's how many fans each of these pages attracted in their first month.  Keep in mind that more work went into the Winning Workplaces page over similar timeframes.

Yes, these pages are in wildly divergent industries and have different target audiences.  But it is also true that the title3 page has a more visceral product (staged and filmed works) offered under a mission statement that appeals to more people (a good share of the 5 million women in LA County, at least).

One more thing: Your answers to the questions I posed above have implications for employee engagement training and employee leadership development.  It may well be a better use of your and your workers' time in the marketing/sales area to focus less or not at all on reaching Facebook users and converting them to paying customers, and more on reaching them via more traditional channels.  Do more of what works best, after all.

I've blogged several times to make the case – because I don't think it can be stressed enough – that using people practices that may seem "squishy," with the goal of producing more highly engaged employees, is in fact a productive long-term business strategy.  Here's one recent example of this.

InnovationTools is one of the most recent resources to underscore this case.  This quick read on the site by strategy expert Roy Luebke argues that something as simple as management's persistent effort to show their supervisees respect (one of our six building blocks for creating a Winning Workplace) can improve a company's innovation.  Greater innovation, of course, fuels customer satisfaction and growth, leading to higher revenues and profitability.

The small organizations that just finished applying for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award bear out this case in the real world.  Of the record-setting 496 firms that completed an application this year,

• 450, or 91%, were profitable in 2009
• They had average 2009 revenues of $28.3 million
• They grew revenues 12% over 2008 – in a very tough economy!

How do these impressive business results tie back to respectful employee engagement?  When I review these applicants' answers to our qualitative questions that run the gamut from unique workplace culture practices to employee leadership development strategies, the word "respect" came up 331 times.  That averages out to two-thirds of a reference per company.

So it's obvious that creating a culture of respect is top of mind for these firms, and they actively design their trust building activities to support the attainment of key organizational goals.

What are your thoughts on the relationship between respect in the workplace and achieving desired bottom-line outcomes?

This week our President, Gaye van den Hombergh, was the guest for Unity.FM Online Radio's show "Good Business."  This program features Dr. Charlotte Shelton, President and CEO of Unity, and Dr. Martha Lynn, Vice President of SpiritPath at Unity Village.

Gaye answered the following questions raised by Shelton and Lynn:

• What's the importance of creating a Winning Workplace?
• How do you counter employees being less engaged and productive because of the state of the economy right now?
• What is the link between a strong workplace culture and a company's financial performance?
• What are Winning Workplaces' activities outside of our annual Top Small Company Workplaces competition/award?
• What's the first step in creating a Winning Workplace?
• In the Winning Workplaces building block of Trust, Respect & Fairness, what does Fairness mean?
• How does our work look different in for-profit firms vs. not-for-profits?
• Because it can vary widely, what's our definition of work/life balance?

Later in the segment Gaye also addressed how a leader can effect positive change in a well-established culture.

If you're looking for a primer on people practices for a more productive workplace, along with the business case behind them, you'll find that in this recorded interview.  Access it here.

I am looking at the countdown clock on our application website for 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces and currently small firms have 5 days, 11 hours, and 59 minutes to submit their application for contention this year (by midnight in your North American time zone).

The prize is worth the effort, which typically has taken applicants a day or two – and only a few hours if they've gathered the required information before applying online by first reviewing our sample application on our website.

Winners of the 2010 award will be featured in the June issue of Inc. Magazine, providing them with priceless exposure and allowing them to show pride for the innovative employee engagement and team building strategies that have helped them maintain high productivity and profitability in a tough economy.

As I've discussed in these three posts, there is also considerable value for ALL applicants through the process of applying – especially now as companies take a fresh look at the effectiveness of their people practices to make 2010 a year of strong growth.

Don't miss out on this small business award opportunity.  Apply today!

It's my impression that the hospitality industry is ahead of the game compared with some others in terms of realizing and acting on the connection between better employee engagement and higher customer satisfaction.  Because companies in this space deal with customers face to face more often than others, they were on the leading edge when the economy tanked starting a little over a year ago, and they had to make some changes in how they dealt with them or risk losing them, since they deal in "nice to haves" and not "must haves."

So therefore I was happy to see organizational and workplace culture consultant Gene Ference explain how companies whose leaders adapt to foster greater workplace team building will be more successful this year, on Hospitality Net.

Specific people practices Ference points to include:

• Taking more time in hiring to make sure the right people are on board
• Seeking and providing more feedback to employees
• Create more nuturing environments for employee leadership development

Here's how he describes what ideal employee engagement looks like, and the business benefits that occur as a result:

The key to a peak-performing organizational culture is engaged employees who are invested in their work.  As in Star Wars, effective leadership develops cultures in which people « feel the force » rather than merely collect a paycheck.  Clarity about the organization’s vision, mission and values allow employees to embrace that spirit and make it their own.  ...  Put another way, leaders need to make sure employees understand the brand and their roles in helping to build, energize and sustain that brand.

Talented employees who are fully invested in their jobs provide huge payoffs to the bottom line.  They increase productivity, reduce turnover and generate higher employee and guest satisfaction, all of which result in more profit for the organization.

Related: Winning Workplaces written Success Stories on three hospitality companies and the practices they use to strengthen their bottom line.  Check them out:

• Emmett's Tavern & Brewing Co.
• Kahunaville Management, Inc.
• Zingerman's

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.

At Winning Workplaces, we often say that small organizations that rise to the top of our annual Top Small Company Workplaces competition have built unique workplace cultures.  But "unique" can encompass all manner of individual and group dynamics as part of a communications team building environment.

One of these dynamics that has a real appeal for current and prospective employees is being, well, weird.  No less a successful company than Zappos proudly waves their weird flag, as their CEO, Tony Hsieh, shared this weekend in The New York Times.

Companies that are a lot smaller and scrappier than Zappos also find success in recruiting, sales, and a whole host of other business metrics through employee activities designed to maintain an offbeat culture.  One of these is Caturano and Company, the accounting and business services firm of Winning Workplaces Best Boss Richard Caturano.  We profile their outside-the-box approach to their people practices in our Success Story on the Massachusetts-based company.

One more point I would add is, look for this trend to only increase in the coming years.  A driver here is that, as Upstarts! author Donna Fenn shared with us recently, the emerging leadership generation of Millennials are purposely forming businesses that shun the corporate cultures of their parents' employers.

What do you think about the effectiveness of "weird" company cultures in today's marketplace?