What’s the first thing to get cut when companies are economizing?  It’s always training.  In the last three years, training budgets have fallen by nearly a quarter.  It’s stupid.  ...  Because when you’re battling for customers and trying to do more with less, your most valuable asset is your staff.  And they can do more and better if you train them more.

These are the wise words of "serial CEO" Margaret Heffernan on BNET this week.  If you found our blog searching for employee engagement or employee development strategies, I'm sure you're already on the same page as Heffernan (and us).

But having the willpower and carving out a budget for training is one thing – implementing tactics that work (eg, have yielded results for other businesses your size or in your sector) is another.

Fortunately, I'm happy to share the five resources below to get your started, or help you improve upon your current efforts to keep employees engaged...and ever more productive:

1. 21 articles on our website covering "training program" in leading workplace research we've synthesized, and successful small businesses we've profiled.
2. Our blog post: 20 Effective Employee Learning Initiatives for Small Businesses
3. Our blog post: People Practices ROI of the 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces
4. Our blog post: How a Small IT Firm Creates Knowledge Leaders, and the Company ROI
5. And new from WorkAwesome: 11 Tips from Training People at Work

If you are already systematic about employee training, what have been your successes and lessons learned?  Please share in the comments for the benefit of your fellow readers.

Yesterday in an email to our subscribers, and recently on this blog, I urged readers to register by August 31 for Inc.'s October 27-29 Leadership Conference in Denver so they can attend at the early bird rate, which is $300 less than the conference rate.

Well, three things have changed:

1. Inc. has a new website for their event (same dates and city/venue, though),
2. The conference has been retitled/rebranded as a Leadership Conference (it had been called "Creating Competitive Cultures [C3]"), and
3. Best of all if you have not yet registered, you can still get in at the early bird rate through next Friday, September 10.

Visit the new website for this event and mark your calendar.  With Inc.'s promise to turn you into a "smarter, more proactive and responsive business leader," you will be better equipped to improve employee engagement for a more profitable and productive workplace culture.

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.

Since I wrote this "line in the sand" post back in March arguing that you should abandon a strategy of hiring for skills in favor of hiring instead for attitude and fit (for a more harmonious and productive workplace culture), I've written several more citing outside sources – as opposed to our own employee engagement research – that help make this case.

But perhaps Brett Owens, CEO of software startup Chrometa, makes the most compelling case for getting the "right people on the bus" in the first place; his post on the Small Business CEO blog pits this as a choice for leaders as opposed to using effective employee leadership development strategies to get the most from the people already on your team.

Creating a hypothetical example from his own experience, Owens says the "coached up" productivity gains of current staff members might make them, at most, 50% more productive than a baseline performer.  Yet, a new hire who's a better workplace fit might be three times – 300% – more productive than the baseline employee.  Thus, he concludes that getting the best from your current staff is

important - but when we do the math, we small business owners know it’s not nearly as important as getting the very best people in the first place.

Related: Leaders, do you have any bad workplace experiences that have resulted from not hiring the right people?  Share them, and your solutions to this issue for the benefit of your fellow readers, here.

SmartBrief on Leadership was one of the sources I noticed that touched upon what appears to be a relatively new employee engagement approach: allowing workers to take unlimited paid vacations.  Recently they linked to this NPR article on the trend.

But then last week they raised the topic again; linking to this article by Chris Grams, SmartBrief wrote:

An increasing number of companies are taking a relaxed approach to worker management, letting staff decide for themselves when they take vacations and how they spend their time at work.

The emphasis on the word "relaxed" above is mine.  It's only one word, but in my opinion in terms of leaders taking something away from their summary, it's an important one.  "Relaxed" can imply "quick and easy."  In fact, getting your workplace culture and productivity to a place in which your organization can truly succeed with a "no policy" vacation policy requires a lot of time and, especially, buy in and long-term commitment from leadership.

I think of the pinnacle of an unlimited vacation policy as the visible part of an iceberg – there's a whole lot more going on under the surface than what's apparent:

What's your take on this trend, and on the team building progress and other people practices work that needs to happen before it's feasible to jump on it?

My thanks to one of the bloggers I follow, Aaron Juckett of The One-Stop ESOP Blog, for pointing me to a new study by Hewitt Associates which uncovers some of the most conclusive evidence I've seen that poor employee engagement leads to an undesirable outcome for the top-priority stakeholder for many companies: shareholders.

As Hewitt explains on their website, since the onset of the economic downturn in July 2008, they have analyzed changes in employee engagement levels by quarter for more than 900 global organizations.  Juckett points to their most recent findings published last month, which show that

Organizations where 65% or more of employees are engaged had total shareholder returns 19% higher than the average total shareholder returns.  Companies with less than 40% of employees engaged had total shareholder returns that were 44% lower than the average.

I find this to be incredibly powerful, especially when I look back to a 2007 study by another leading workplace trends research firm, Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson after merging with Watson Wyatt in January), which we've summarized on our website.  That year-long study of 50 companies found that those with the most engaged employees had a 28% increase in earnings per share, while those with the least engaged workers had an 11% decline in earnings per share.

When we put the results of these two studies back to back, the payoff of employee engagement and team building on shareholders and other investors could not be clearer:

Likely due in part to layoffs and other workforce cuts made after 2007, shareholder returns for companies with the highest engagement – while still above the average – did drop 147%.  But look at the whopping drop of 400% in returns among companies with the least engaged employees.  Ouch, or as my Norwegian ancestors might say, Oofta!

These findings serve to advance the case that it's in companies' best interest to take up, or improve upon, their long-term strategy to motivate employees to create a more harmonious and productive workplace.

Related: Among the best practice articles that those who share their bad workplace experiences with us receive as part of our free, 20-page white paper is one on employee practices that increase competitive advantage.  Get the white paper by sharing your bad experience (and solution) here.

Could the current worker strike of the Mott's plant in Williamson, New York – as expertly covered last week by The New York Times – be to the workforce and the economy what the Google-Verizon deal is to advocates of Net Neutrality?  (That is, a sign of bad things to come?)

Check out this excerpt of the NYT article on the Mott's strike, which began almost three months ago:

The strike has become so important because of the prominence of the brands and because of its unusual nature: a highly profitable company is taking the rare and bold step of demanding large-scale concessions.

...

The workers ... are incensed that the company is demanding givebacks when it posted record profits last year and increased its dividend by 67 percent in May.

This represents what I'm seeing as a trend: companies – typically, large public corporations – holding onto profits after already making moderate to significant workforce cuts, as opposed to following their pattern in past economic recoveries and reinvesting the returns back into the business in the form of employee development strategies (including benefits).

However, if this plays out on a larger scale (other large companies taking a cue from Mott's if they're successful, regardless of whether there's union involvement), it could potentially lead to a deflationary outcome if workers' wages slowly spiral downward.  If that happens, companies could join workers in a lose-lose situation, because that would mean even less disposable income from most Americans to spend on their products and services.

Winning Workplaces takes the position that for the long-term good of companies and individuals, midsize and larger companies (especially) should change their workforce investment strategy from one of further cuts to one of sustained, smart investment.  Using employee engagement best practices, they can benefit quickly and over the long haul from the increased productivity, lower turnover, etc., that come from treating workers fairly, and not unnecessarily harshly, when it comes to what to do with their profits after bouncing back from the worst of this recession.

Related: Read this post which argues, based on business school research, that a consequence of deep workforce cuts is long-term industry lag.

The following is a guest post by Sean Conrad.  Sean is a Senior Product Analyst at Halogen Software, one of the leading providers of performance appraisal software.

Most of us are familiar with Gallup's employee engagement research and the twelve statements they use to measure it.

When I look at the list, it strikes me that there are some basic employee performance management practices that, if done well, address most of these needs.  They include:

• Giving employees meaningful feedback on a regular basis.
• Being clear about goals and helping employees see how their work matters to the organization.
• Recognizing and rewarding employees fairly.
• Giving employees opportunities for growth and development.

Given their importance and impact, we'd do well as managers to give them our time and attention.

Give Employees Meaningful Feedback on an Ongoing Basis

Research consistently tells that employees want meaningful, ongoing feedback.  But many of us struggle to make it part of our work culture.  Here are some things that can help:

Increase the frequency of your performance appraisals
Instead of just doing annual performance appraisals, conduct quarterly mini reviews.  This helps to give managers and employees a regularly committed interval for dialogue and feedback.
 
Gather feedback from others
Feedback from multiple sources is broader and more objective, and helps the manager and employee get a more accurate view of their performance.  You can keep it simple, and just request feedback from another employee or manager who works with the employee, or conduct more formal 360 degree assessments.

Keep ongoing notes on performance
Keeping and sharing notes on performance year-round helps to better document performance, opens up the dialogue between a manager and an employee, and makes writing performance appraisal faster and easier.  Highlights, challenges and disconnects that might not otherwise be discovered until the annual performance appraisal meeting can be shared and explored in a timely way.
 
Define Clear Goals and Link Them to Organizational Goals

Employees need to clearly know what is expected of them, and understand how their work contributes to the organization's mission and success.

SMART goals are broadly recognized as the most effective way to write clear goals.  Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound goals let employees know what is expected of them, how success will be measured, and when they must complete work.

But we should also give employees a context for their work by linking their goals to higher-level organizational goals, so they understand how they're contributing to organizational goals.

Recognize and Reward Your Employees Fairly and Consistently

Recognition and rewards should be frequent and come in many forms.  Since we're all motivated by different things, it's important to know what your employees value, so you can reward them effectively.  But all programs should be tied to employee performance. And your employees should know the metrics used as measurement.

Provide Opportunities for Growth and Development

Employees need to feel as though they have a future with an organization, and a career path that helps them further develop their knowledge, skills and abilities.  Make sure you provide things like formal training, challenging work assignments, mentoring programs, etc.

Related: For more guidance on creating an effective performance management system as part of a winning set of team building and employee development strategies, check out our Ask An Expert column on measuring key competencies.

On August 4 I told you about our new feature for email subscribers, a weekly people practices email geared toward improving your company's bottom line.  Tom Walter, CEO of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace Tasty Catering, commented on that post saying it's a great idea.

This week he shared specifics with me on exactly why he thinks business leaders should sign up for this free email (emphasis mine):

The Weekly Bottom Line-Improving People Practice email should benefit all business leaders.  The world has become commoditized.  The true marketplace differentiator is human capital.  I enjoy learning the Best Practices other companies use with their most valuable asset - their people.

An engaged workforce is typically harmonious, productive and profitable.  These Best Practices eliminate the need to manage.  We have replaced management with effective leaders armed with Best Practices, and the difference has been remarkable.

While Winning Workplaces surely plays only a small part in Tasty Catering's success, you can't argue that they're not doing a lot of things right in their staff engagement that comprises their highly productive workplace culture: As we shared in the company's award profile, in a very tough year broadly and certainly in their industry (2009), their employee leadership development and other strategies helped them earn above-average revenues.

Register now to start getting our weekly, bottom line-improving people practices email FREE in your inbox.

I had a "wow" moment yesterday when I was reviewing my post history in our Compendium software and realized today's post will be our 900th.  900 blog posts in roughly 800 days (our blog has been running since June 4, 2008) – that works out to about one new post per day on employee engagement and team building strategies to help small businesses create a more productive workplace.

In addition to the writing I do here to (hopefully) make your work life easier, I also follow over 100 blogs in Google Reader, choosing some of the best stuff from them to share here as well as on Twitter.  In all this time I've picked up on some important best practices when writing business blog posts – along with some things to avoid.

I want to focus today's post on the latter to help you draw in and better engage your readers, and – addressing what CEOs and others who hold the purse strings care about – get them to take a desired action that meets your goals or helps your bottom line.

Here's my top 5 list of things to NOT do when business blogging:

1. Truncate your RSS feed.  In layman's terms, this means setting up each new post so the reader only sees a bit of teaser text in their RSS feed (explained here if you don't know what this is), and must click through to your blog to read the full article.  I'm on the same page as Techdirt CEO Mike Masnick as to why this is a bad business decision.  I'm sorry, but I look at this the same way I do a pay wall: you're putting a barrier in front of me, and my gut reaction is to leave.
2. A "link dump" or "flashback" to an earlier week or month of posts.  I've seen a growing number of blogs do this, and although I do get why they do so (more targeted, quality links help with search engine optimization), it's really a disservice to the reader.  A link dump says to me, "I've found this collection of articles, but I don't care enough about your time to put any kind of analysis or framework around them...and I'm sure you have an hour to kill reading all my links until you get to the last one."  A flashback is even worse; usually it's a linked list of dates corresponding to posts – that tells me nothing about what I can expect to read by clicking through.  You have to ask yourself if even your most engaged readers will go with you on your stroll down memory lane.  I guarantee a huge percentage of them will not.
3. Use too much "inside" language.  There's a prominent blog I follow, which I won't name, where lately almost all of the posts are about the author's spouse – who is not relevant to the title (read: promise) of the blog.  This author has written some greater material over the years, but lately I've been tempted to hit "Delete" next to that blog for this reason.  The lesson?  Keep your first-time readers in mind and don't veer too far off course from the promise to your readers stated or implied in your blog title.  (Or, do it but then change your blog title/focus.)
4. Write too many posts per day.  Speaking of moves that are great for SEO but bad for the average RSS follower, don't publish so many posts per day that it becomes burdensome for your average reader to keep up.  How many posts/day are too many?  My number is five.  Tip: Survey your readers to learn the max that they're comfortable with, and don't go over it.  (Side note: A number of the blogs I've seen that publish what I consider to be way too many posts/day accomplish this volume by enlisting guest writers.  If your goal is build relationships with these folks and to get great SEO at the expense of the average reader's time, then by all means keep doing what you're doing.)
5. Write posts that are too long.  Frankly, this was not a concern of mine when I started writing here.  But the more I've written with the reader's time in mind, and seen this come up again and again as a blogging best practice, I've tried not to do this.  Right now, in my mind, this post is getting to be too long, and I'm at 734 words.  That's about 100 words shy of the average, feature-length article on getting employees engaged in our quarterly newsletter.  Too long for everyday consumption, so this list is ending...now.

What's on your list of pet peeves or things to avoid when blogging for business results?

Image credit: oz 2 designs

Last week my wife had a birthday, so in celebration we decided to spend part of the day miniature golfing in Sherman Oaks.  On the way back home, I noticed that the Bookstar Barnes & Noble in Studio City was using its marquee (the building used to be a movie theater) for a very important purpose – to recognize its employee of the month.

Here are pics I took of both sides of the marquee:

I write almost exclusively about employee engagement and recognition in small businesses – because of their small size and typically reduced hierarchies/flat structures, they tend to shine in making employee rewards and recognition meaningful.

But that doesn't mean the "big boys" can't excel here, too; the pics above are a great example of this.  Can you imagine if more organizations – of all sizes – put employee recognition front and center at the same level as their product news?  I can, and I think the result in terms of a more robust culture of ownership and team building would be substantial.

Have you seen any businesses in your area that do employee recognition in big or unconventional ways?  I'd love for you to add a comment pointing me to links to photos – especially if they're your own!

Hat tip to Burt Klein at PortionPac Chemical Corporation – one of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award winners – for sharing this post on the Letters of Note blog.

The post is a compilation of memos from the last years of the now-defunct, Texas-based Tiger Oil Company.  The memos, which appear to be real, show a CEO who was far more concerned with finding faults in employees than focusing on what they do well – the latter being a more effective approach to creating a productive workplace culture, to which many of our award winners and finalists can attest.

While we're on the topic of bad bosses, I wanted to point you to a new feature on our blog.  As a service to your fellow readers, if you are facing a bad workplace experience we invite you to share it and, most importantly, what you would do about it if you were king or queen for the day.

Learn more about our call to action regarding bad workplace experiences and solutions here.  Those who share their stories and insights receive a FREE white paper on great people practices that produce a payoff of employee engagement on the bottom line!

What an amazing community of small business leaders Winning Workplaces is fortunate to know!  After I wrote this post last week providing resources to help leaders set their new managers up for success – in which I shared a facet of our honoree Andrew Field's approach to this – the President of PrintingForLess.com emailed me with expanded tactics intended to help you with your own employee leadership development of this pivotal group of workers.

According to Field, here are some things that PFL implemented to grow great first-time managers in a relatively short time:

The critical first step in cultivating new managers is to identify candidates before they are needed in their new positions, and to begin giving them the preparation they need well in advance.  It is critical to have an explicit "leadership pipeline" and to hold yourself and your management team accountable for the development of your future leaders.

At PFL, this looks like having a standing agenda item at our broad monthly management team meeting that involves each person who has direct reports identifying their top and bottom performers, along with what they are doing to grow/reward/engage their top people, and what they are doing to "coach up" their low performers.

The second tool for success that we equip our new managers with is a template for regular (weekly or biweekly) one-on-one conversations with each of their direct reports.  The critical elements are personal connections, specific project updates, and discussion about professional growth plans.

Many entrepreneurs say that they don't need regular, scheduled one-on-ones because they have so much impromptu contact with their teams.  Nice try.

Spur-of-the-moment discussions are important, but they are not a substitute for regular one-on-ones, which encompass deep discussions focused mostly around the employee's work and development plans, rather than just current action items.

Our third support system for new leaders is that we provide them with development paths that include opportunities to expand their experience levels within the company.  In addition to education and mentorship (both of which are structured), we give future and current leaders the opportunity to test themselves in leadership roles, ranging from running a small project to leading a large group of people.  We move them around to different areas of the company in order to broaden their knowledge base, as well as giving them a chance to build robust networks within the organization.  Critical to the success of this OJT ("On the Job Training") is that we structure discussions about learnings and challenges.  We have found that peer-to-peer discussions are every bit as productive as boss-to-employee interactions.

At the end of the day, PFL has grown our best people by identifying potential leaders, modeling good leadership habits, and showering them with resources aimed at nurturing their growth.

Related: Andrew Field clearly knows his stuff when it comes to team building in the workplace – and seeing a payoff of employee engagement.  Learn even more about his employee development strategies on our website.

I would imagine that many of you are familiar with recent employee engagement research finding that one of the ill effects of mass layoffs on companies is an increase in top talent who leave or are looking to do so once the economy picks up a bit more.  I have shared studies attesting to this here since August 2009; Human Resource Executive has a new article on this.

But another worrisome effect that I was not aware of until today is the prospect of a reduced and/or demoralized knowledge base of workers leading companies down a path of a long-term lag versus their industry.  Quoting Wayne Cascio, the Chair in Global Leadership and Management at the University of Colorado Denver Business School, National Public Radio published an article yesterday in which it warns of an industry lag of 9 years for companies that cut their workforce by 20% or more.

NPR frames the issue of significant layoffs as a choice for leaders between short-term financial gain and a deficit in long-term competitiveness:

Extreme downsizers do see an immediate boost in productivity as fewer workers do more.  But it can also lead to burnout and eventually the departure of top performing employees.

It will be very interesting to see what the statistics look like starting in 2017 for companies that have, over the past two years, cut their workforces by 20% or more in terms of revenue, profitability, market share, and turnover and related spending on recruiting/retention.  Not to mention, good team building, the measurement of which has come a long way in the past few years and will surely be even more precise at that time.

Your thoughts?

When it comes to staff engagement activities for a more productive workplace culture, how important are newly promoted managers?

VERY (so important, I put the answer to my question in its own paragraph).

In fact, the CEO of one of the most successful small businesses we've honored for their bottom line-enhancing people practices – Andrew Field of Montana-based PrintingForLess.com – told us a few years ago that he doesn't blink at spending half of his time mentoring and modeling tasks with his new managers.  He sees their success as that important to his business' ability to satisfy existing customers and attract new ones, as well as improve internal processes.

If you're reading this, you likely understand and value this connection.  With that in mind, here are three resources to help you make the most of the new managers in your organization:

1. Dan Rockwell's post on succeeding when you’re new - 8 hints for new supervisors on his Leadership Freak blog
2. Our editorial on the importance of new manager training
3. Wally Bock's guest article for us on 10 steps to improve your bosses' performance

Are there any good books or other resources you have turned to and would recommend to other business leaders?  Please share your picks in the comments.

Last month on TIME magazine's Curious Capitalist blog, Barbara Kiviat, citing the New York Times, argued that because

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have enrolled in federally financed training programs in recent years, only to remain out of work ... job retraining is a wash.

This position may make sense from a policymaker or an economist's point of view – and in fact the Curious Capitalist blog carries a tagline saying it's about the economy and markets as much as it is business.

Yet, based on the evidence we see from the applications for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award, small business leaders don't view retraining as a wash.  However, most* do keep tabs on it as a measurement of their failure to attract and retain the best people while aligning those people with the company's needs and deploying effective employee leadership development strategies.

In other words, while they value retraining, they see it as an employee educational investment of last resort.

Consider the responses to our essay question on how people practices contribute to the top line revenue and bottom line profitability from the following three companies:

KeyLogic Systems, Inc., West Virginia:
"At KeyLogic our product IS our people; which we hire through strong recruitment and employee referral programs.  We have a low turnover ratio which has impacted both the top line revenue (allowing for employee to customer continuity) and bottom line profitability by allowing us to focus more on developing our current employee resources through professional training as opposed to the high cost of recruiting, re-training and developing new employees."

Prenova, Georgia:
"Since our managers and executives interact with lower-level employees, they can impart much of their knowledge and information on an as-needed basis, rather than waiting for issues to be discovered (often because of a costly emergency) and spending large amounts of time and labor developing ways to distribute that information. Conversely, employees can quickly and easily access other team members capable of discussing issues, and receive retraining when necessary."

Pro CNC Inc., Washington State:
"Being very thorough in our hiring practices has also led to extremely low turn-over which certainly has an effect on profitability and revenue.  We don't spend a lot of time retraining new hires and can focus on the business of serving our customers."

*I should note that a few firms we've come across – as part of our workplace award as well as our consulting and speaking engagements – don't view retraining as an if-needed effort.  These rare enterprises actively budget for this as part of their staff engagement activities, looking to help those who want to continue working for the company, but in a different area.  They see retraining as a means to hold onto this talent and keep using them to drive results.

Related: Read our review of A Manager's Guide to Coaching, which is aimed at helping organizations decrease their time and money spent on recruiting in addition to retraining.

When the six building blocks of a Winning Workplace are in place and supported by a company's leadership, the results are magical.  I spelled out some of these results in this post, and even more are summarized from leading research studies here on our website.

These results are possible when a workplace culture is not based on fear.  Scott Eblin has a new post on his Next Level Blog for executives that describes, in almost scary detail, seven factors that can come together to create a "perfect storm" of fear that can cripple the camaraderie and productivity in your organization.

Of course, Eblin's post is an exercise in what to avoid when you work to better engage employees and execute effective team building strategies.  For the opposite perspective – tips to get and keep fear out of your workplace – see this Ask An Expert column on our website.

How have you worked to keep fear from becoming a cancer in your business?

Last July, when Amazon.com was on the verge of acquiring Zappos.com, I questioned if the move would lead to the demise of the unique – and uniquely powerful in terms of buzz and sales – productive workplace culture Tony Hsieh built within his retail business.

A year later, I'm happy to note that just the opposite seems to be true.  Hsieh has remained in place as CEO and, more importantly from an employee engagement perspective, he's become even more visible as a "chief culture officer": I was one of many bloggers and reporters to pick up on his New York Times Q&A in January in which he shared the benefits of attracting and retaining offbeat workers.  Last month, Hsieh went even further in sharing his workplace culture beliefs, practices, and successes with the release of his book Delivering Happiness.

Through it all, Zappos continues to wow customers with its incredible service, helping to maintain sales in a tough economy.  What's more, the company serves as a beacon of hope to job seekers and a vital source of tax revenues in hard hit Las Vegas.

Honest Tea, a finalist for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award, appears to be following in Zappos' footsteps.

After seeing this post last week on the Triple Pundit blog, which spells out the dilemma for the 12-year-old, Maryland-based organic tea bottler – staying true to its "no high-fructose corn syrup" label, and thus its customer base, with a Coca-Cola minority stake that's set to become more significant next year – I decided to dig into Honest Tea's application for our award for clues to their next moves.

Here's how they answered our question on their key long-term strategic goals for the organization and the workplace (my emphasis is in bold):

A critical strategic goal is to maintain our mission-driven, entrepreneurial culture as we grow alongside the world's largest beverage company, and to mentor other mission-driven companies.  We will continue our tradition of including all employees on crew drives, a vital way of instilling the Honest Tea culture.  Rapid expansion in 2010 will demand participation from everyone in the company.  Crew drives enable employees from every department to experience selling and marketing our beverages and directly invests them in our business fundamentals.  Another key goal is to maintain and build our position as a leading, innovative organic beverage company.  In 2010 we introduce Honest Kombucha, a unique, sparkling tea beverage based on live, organic cultures.  Even as we grow nationally, we are determined to sustain our role as a leader in the local community.  Honest Tea is a founding sponsor of a local environmental non-profit, Bethesda Green, supporting a healthy economy and sustainable living.  The company's visibility in the community is a source of pride for our employees and a key part of our identity.  Finally, the company's commitment to transparency, the accessibility of our President and TeaEO and the rest of the management team, are important ways in which Honest Tea will continue to be steeped in its entrepreneurial, mission-driven culture.

Like Zappos, Honest Tea is placing a premium on maintaining its human capital strategies and core values that have contributed to its massive success while it negotiates with a much larger company that has a sizable interest in it.

Related: For more on how Honest Tea's employee development strategies led it to become an industry leader, read our award profile on the firm.

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.

The person I write for here each day, and occasionally tap great guest writers for, is a small business president or CEO looking to see a payoff of employee engagement.  But based on the depth that we often go into exploring practices that help sustain a productive workplace, I know that many HR professionals also read this blog.

So I was honored to learn last week that we were named a 2010 Top 40 Human Resources Blog by AwardingTheWeb and Online MBA.  You can view the other 39 honorees here – I am humbled that we join the company of blogs that I follow and admire such as All Things Workplace, Bob Sutton's Work Matters, and Leading Blog.

My thanks to AwardingTheWeb and Online MBA for this honor; it is truly appreciated.

Related: View other awards our blog and our website have won over the past few years.