Team Building

Most companies look at national holidays as simply a paid or unpaid day off for their employees – and also as top sales day, if you're a retailer and it's New Year's, for instance.

But as we noted in our Success Story on them, 2008 Top Small Workplace The Redwoods Group (TRG) is not like most companies.  Two things that make them unique, our judging panel concluded, was their significant efforts to decrease risk for their insurance industry clients, as well as their almost unheard-of commitment to funding nonprofits with approximately 50% of their pre-tax profits.

TRG is also unique when it comes to their approach to national holidays and employee engagement/team building.  As employee MJ Pearle shared with us today,

Each year, TRG holds a special Martin Luther King Jr. celebration.  This year we had a week of activities.  One activity featured performances by our Redwoods Choir (organized for the first time for this event).  There was some pretty amazing music from a bunch of insurance folks!  We also sent a group of employees to the opening of the new International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, NC (a 45-minute drive from our office), and afterward they reported on the experience to their colleagues.

Here's one of several videos of their choir TRG posted on YouTube – in this case, singing "Oh Happy Day":

Does your company do anything special on or around national holidays that emphasizes or leverages your unique workplace culture?

My friend Emily Lonigro, a Chicago-based branding and web design specialist who recently co-founded new media consultancy The Web Farm, has an upcoming event I wanted to alert you about.

On February 23, 2010 at OfficePort Chicago, Emily and her Web Farm co-founder Keidra Chaney will present Web Analytics 101.  You can read the learning takeaways of this event and register for it here.  It's only $20 to attend, which includes free wine.  A pretty sweet deal.

Related: If Emily's name sounds familiar, you may remember her from the following guest posts she's written for us, which focus on the external results of great workplace team building and employee engagement: improved vendor and client relationships/outcomes:

• A Small Business Owner on Finding and Retaining the Best Clients
• Professionals vs. Friends (or Friends of Friends) As Your Vendors
• Demystifying the Creative Process, One Brief at a Time

If you have not checked out Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Blog – one of my recommended small business/entrepreneurship blogs – you really need to click here and add his latest posts to your reading list.

In Wally's latest weekly digest of independent business blogs, he links to our post on how our employee engagement research shows that a CEO who serves a long time in a company combined with a turtle's approach to managing growth can lead to powerful long-term business results.  Here's his comment on my post from Monday:

Growth is an American business mantra.  But sometimes limiting growth is best.  Quick results are what we demand of CEOs.  But sometimes slow and steady is better.

Yes, sometimes the best approach is a slow and steady one – something to keep top of mind in this economy that demands, as the mainstream business press meme goes, lightning speed in all tasks.

I want to thank Wally for our inclusion in his weekly recommended blogs list, as well as for also urging his Twitter followers to follow us there.  Thank you, sir!

Related: Expanding the "slow and steady" narrative further, here are three of our other posts that link employee engagement and team building strategies to better long-term bottom-line results:

• Slow and Steady Wins the Race When It Comes to Hiring Interviews
• Adding to Seth Godin's Thoughts on the Pros of Slow
• What Traffic Can Teach About Doing Business

In the last few days, as the extent of the problem with the brakes on Toyota's Prius and other popular models has become widely known and finally acknowledged by the company, the media has rightly critiqued the automaker for its failures in leadership and public relations management.

What's been talked about less is how Toyota has dropped the ball in its customer service.  I found this segment by Prius owner and CNN reporter Jessica Yellin quite revealing.  It shows her struggle to first reach a real, live person to state her case, and then to get some accountability and next step recommendations.  Check it out:

As usually happens when a customer is also a member of the mainstream media, once Yellin told a manager that she was with CNN, she started getting some answers – and an acknowledgement of the problem by Toyota.

But what about the "little guy" (or girl) who doesn't have the clout that comes with a press pass?  I liken the customer service experience of regular Toyota customers in this situation to the Titanic not having enough lifeboats for every passenger.

Not having enough reps in place, and not equipping the ones that are with sufficient, actionable information for the customer – on a normal basis and especially in a massive recall situation like this – is not just Toyota's problem.  It's a persistent issue for most big companies.

Consequently, when smaller companies provide enough people or improve their processes so this hurdle is removed, they greatly increase their competitive advantage in customer satisfaction.  This, in turn, has a profound effect on new customer acquisition and revenue from repeat customers.

At our annual conference last year, the chairman of midsized company Rackspace Hosting, Graham Weston, called their main phone number to show attendees that they, in contrast to Toyota, do have enough "lifeboats" in place to keep everyone afloat, in good times and when disaster strikes.  Check out the video of this compelling demonstration:

The Bottom Line: Small businesses have an inherent workforce effectiveness advantage over their larger peers when it comes to communications team building/employee engagement innovation so that when crises hit, they're ready to continue providing excellent service.  This preparedness can mean only a negligible impact on sales and reputation.

Linking to this article on BNET, which talks about how Apple's Steve Jobs motivates his employees, SmartBrief on Leadership advises, "To fire up employees, give them an enemy."  ("Enemy" in this case refers to one of Apple's chief rivals, Google.)

I don't know if I agree with this assessment.  While it's certainly important to watch what the closest competitors in your space are doing, after taking in marketing lessons from the likes of Seth Godin I liken business much more to sports like golf, where ultimately you're competing with yourself, than to football or basketball.

Whether managers are assessing their supervisees' performance relative to their goals, or everyone comes together in a regular meeting to open up the books to see how the company is doing on expenses and revenue compared to the benchmarks leadership has set for the company, competing with yourself can be just as good a motivator.

Employee engagement and workplace team building certainly factor into this question.  For one thing, competing against yourself in the ways I mentioned above can prevent the business from having to deal with possible litigation that might arise from brand vs. brand sniping via advertising, or even from employees dropping unfounded, negative comments about their rivals on review websites like Yelp.

Next Step: Read the full BNET article on Steve Jobs' leadership style where competitors are concerned, and then drop me a comment below with your thoughts.  I'm very interested to see what you think here.

Are you looking for a (new) job?  Do you want to work for a company that places as much of a premium on building employee engagement, workplace team building, and employee leadership development as on growing revenue and profits?

Well, spurred by this post on The Talent Buzz (providing links to the job pages of the 2010 Fortune "100 Best Companies to Work For"), I revised the Google Map of Winning Workplaces' 45 Top Small Workplaces I last shared here to include applicable links to the employment pages on their websites.  Check it out:

For your convenience, here's a list of the companies we've honored each of the last three years that currently have job openings.  You can use the map to zoom in on your state and click on the "Job Openings" link provided to apply to any relevant positions.

2007 TSW Winners Hiring:

• Exactech (FL)
• Healthwise (ID)
• Restek Corporation (PA)
• Summit Aviation (DE)

2008 TSW Winners Hiring:

• ATA Engineering (CA)
• Decagon Devices (WA)
• Integrated Project Management Company (IL)
• JA Frate (IL)
• King Arthur Flour Company (VT)
• Lundberg Family Farms (CA)
• New Belgium Brewing (CO)
• Phenomenex (CA)
• Rainforest Alliance (NY)
• Resource Interactive (OH)
• The Paducah Bank & Trust Company (KY)

2009 TSW Winners Hiring:

• Analytical Graphics (PA)
• Censeo Consulting Group (DC)
• HCSS (TX)
• Mike's Carwash (IN)
• Radio Flyer (IL)
• Root Learning (OH)
• Skyline Construction (CA)
• Steppenwolf Theatre Company (IL)
• Tohono O'odham Nursing Care Authority (AZ)
• Woodmeister Master Builders (MA)

Would this post benefit someone you know who's seeking employment?  If so, click the Share button below to email it to them, or to post it on your social networks.  Here's the short permalink for this post to paste in your email or status update: http://bit.ly/bK8NP5

As someone who earned a journalism degree when the paperless office was just starting to be discussed as a cost-effective workplace/operational model (circa 2001), I read with interest yesterday's blog post by Max Chafkin, an editor at Inc. Magazine.  Inc. is Winning Workplaces' media partner for our Top Small Company Workplaces competition.

Chafkin links to a slideshow of photos of their snazzy new office space.  So why are they closing up physical shop and going virtual for a month?

He writes that this experiment is a way to walk the talk when it comes to the businesses they write about that have gone space-less and made it work.  This includes the desire to chronicle firsthand the related cost savings.

But Chafkin also says he and his fellow staffers want to find out how virtual team building affects the overall workplace culture.  With him and his staff leading a regular dialogue with Inc.'s blog readers over this month-long trial focused on their collective lessons learned (and, surely, avoided), I'm eager to see the takeaways this experiment yields.

To contribute to and learn from this dialogue, you can add the Fresh Inc. blog to your list of bookmarked websites.  If you subscribe to blogs in a feed reader, here's the link for their RSS feed (and here's our blog's RSS feed to add, too, if you don't already subscribe to it).

With all the people I talk to who are not in Southern California and are experiencing heavy snowfall or some form of bad weather right now – probably 85% of my contacts – our current Web Poll has special meaning.

We're asking how your employer handles missed work due to inclement weather.  Currently most respondents (59%) say days missed are paid as normal work days.  In this economy where employee benefits are often the biggest casualty, I find this show of respect related to pay a small ray of hope.

Thirty-two percent of respondents report that when bad weather prevents them from coming in to work, they must use benefit time.  Nine percent say they must make up the missed time.

I welcome your perspective.  Please vote in this poll today.

Does your organization use reacting when bad weather hits a jumping-off point for greater workplace team building and employee engagement?

My congratulations to Brett Farmiloe on the release, today, of his book Pursue the Passion.  The title is shared by Brett's company, a venture that for the last few years has focused on helping people – especially Millennials – "think differently about career paths."

Why this focus?  The truth is, with Millennials (also known as Generation Y) becoming the largest generation in the workforce this year – and with as many as 70% of them considering leaving their current employer when the economy improves, according to a recent survey in Newsweek – employers have an opportunity obligation to learn how best to engage employees and spur team building in this age group.  This book provides insights from their perspective on how best to do this.

I was first introduced to Brett and PTP in 2007 when I designed an ad for my brother, Dan, who speaks to young people about networking and job hunting, for placement on the PTP site.  I've been impressed with their work and growth ever since, especially their ability to whip up a crowd on Facebook.  So beyond young employee retention tips, I think PTP – the book and the company – offers social media marketing lessons for small business leaders.

Order a copy of Pursue the Passion for yourself, or as a gift for someone you know, here.

Two themes Winning Workplaces has identified among past winners of our small business award are a president/CEO who leads the firm for a long time, relative to his or her peers, and purposely keeping growth manageable by cautiously approaching such variables as product/service and facility expansion as well as adding employees.

These two themes can be (and often are) combined, invariably leading to long-term growth.  Such growth is not particularly glamorous, but it nonetheless ensures the stability of the firm and, just as important these days, the continued employment of its workers, the livelihood of their families, and the vitality of their communities.

For example, one applicant for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award with Inc. Magazine says they've implemented an employee cap – in addition to walking away from opportunities that could mean a big payday, but which could prove unmanageable and, therefore, could lead to a souring of the company's reputation, a decreased sense of workplace team building, and undue employee stress.  Here's how their account manager puts it in their application:

We aim to never grow past seventy-five people, as we appreciate the benefits that come with operating a small company.  We don't want to lose our intimacy, and at a maximum size of seventy-five employees we know we can accomplish a tremendous amount without losing the culture that has made us so unique.

The CEO of this organization has been in this role since its founding 9 years ago; the average CEO tenure among all our 2010 award applicants is almost 11 years.

Some of the business benefits that have accrued as a result of this firm's embrace of these two themes are:

• Three-year revenue growth of over 240%
• Profitable over at least the last 3 years (both of the above statistics in an especially tough economy for their industry)
• CEO-led employee engagement has contributed to a strong average employee tenure of 4 years

Related: Another benefit that comes with long-term CEO leadership is more time to implement an effective succession plan.  Two of our honorees discuss their experience here in this webinar recording.

One of the more colorful exercises I was privy to at a recent meeting of Winning Workplaces' Board of Directors was the think-outside-the-box practice of encapsulating our organization as a person as well as a car.

While group consensus on both of these is still up in the air as we do some homework on our overall strategy, one thing I remember about the person part of the exercise was that beyond his or her look, we talked about the tone that this person took when giving our elevator speech, or saying anything else.  Here we did reach some consensus: the tone is that of a trusted advisor who shares wisdom in a reassuring way – and in a manner that is not overwhelming for the person talking with us.

Since that meeting I've had this tonal quality in the back of my mind and have carried it over to my writing here.  I hope someone who is knowledgeable, trusting, caring, and eloquent comes through when you read our posts.

This endeavor got me thinking about how, at least to some extent, our honored small businesses have their own human-like tone – whether or not they're conscious of it.  A few examples from my perspective:

• 2009 Top Small Workplace Radio Flyer – a friend or neighbor who's ready to step in to encourage your child's imagination and ensure their safety.
• 2008 Top Small Workplace King Arthur Flour Company – the MacGyver of the kitchen, who's eager to share tips and also has a sense of humor.
• 2007 Top Small Workplace NRG Systems – an excellent math and science student who has grown up to use this knowledge to green their lifestyle, and who's there to help you do the same.

How does this exploration relate to team building and employee engagement activities?  Well, defining (or redefining if you've done this before) how your company would speak and come across to others in the world if it were a person is an excellent opportunity to bring your people together and learn from group consensus.  In turn, any changes to your tone that come about from this process can inform your workplace culture.

In one sentence, what's your organization's tone?  Does it mesh with your mission and products/services?

Photo credit: GuitarSam.com

I was pleased to hear President Obama in his first State of the Union Address last night devote some of his remarks to the small business job growth that is not getting a lot of attention in the media, but which is happening nonetheless.  As the President acknowledged and used as the lead-in to his proposal to allot $30 billion of the repaid TARP money to spur lending by small, community banks, it's important to monitor and promote small business job growth because they provide most of the net new jobs.

And right now, we need all the jobs we can create.

While small businesses across the board are creating jobs – the President highlighted several that have in 2009 thanks to government funding – those whose leadership practice strong workplace team building and employee engagement tend to do so at a faster clip.

Here are three sources that support this:

1. The North Jersey microsite of Monster.com currently lists six open positions at SmartPak, the provider of horse and small animal supplement packs that Winning Workplaces Best Boss Paal Gisholt leads.  Clicking on any of them shows a bio for the firm that touts 28% growth for the business in 2009.
2. Another Winning Workplaces honoree, Top Small Workplace Gentle Giant Moving, put out a press release this week in celebration of its 30 years in business.  It notes that "Despite unfavorable economic challenges to the moving and storage industry in recent years, Gentle Giant’s initiatives for 2010 include ... creating employee growth opportunities...."
3. And most telling because of the number of organizations involved, our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces applicants have had the need to fill 35% more jobs over the last two years (on average, 27 in 2009 vs. 20 in 2007).

What success stories are you hearing about when it comes to job growth of small companies where you live?

Image credit: City of Eagan, Minnesota

I was pleased to see that our blog was cited on the Event Manager Blog authored by Anne Thornley-Brown, President of Executive Oasis International.  Anne pointed to this post, where I discussed three benefits of virtual team building, as exemplified by our Top Small Workplace Point B.

Note the reference to yours truly on LinkedIn – I am a member of her group there, the International Business Team Building Alliance.  It contains some good food for thought when it comes to team building activities for the workplace.  I urge you to check out that group.

For more on using employee engagement practices to manage employees virtually, read these selected posts.

We heard that this last holiday season, while providing a much-needed year-end sales boost for retailers large and small, was still below prior years in terms of sales revenue.

That's at the aggregate level, of course, with all companies being even.  But as this research pickup by About.com's Retail Industry site shows, all companies are not created equal.  About.com shares Fortune magazine's finding, via their 2010 "Best Companies to Work For" list, that retail industry firms on this list outperformed the retail stock index by an impressive 75%.

Think about that for a second: stockholders of companies with moderate to excellent employee engagement and team building practices in the workplace enjoyed returns almost twice that of companies that lack nearly as highly engaged employees.  That kind of track record should, in an ideal world, provide an economic boost of its own, as current shareholders grab more shares and new investors jump on board.

This finding also speaks to the payoff of employee engagement – something to which more company leaders should pay attention.  Here's how About.com's Retail Industry guide, Barbara Farfan puts it:

For an industry that loves numbers as much as the retail industry, I don't think there is much more that needs to be said about why employee satisfaction should be high on the retail executive To Do list in 2010.

Related: Visit this page on Winning Workplaces' website to read about four retailers that are doing well relative to their peers thanks to their workplace best practices.

Today is the last day for applicants to Winning Workplaces' 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition to get their entries submitted.  At this stage in the recognition project, we're starting to look at trends in the data that participating organizations are providing us.

Two things we've looked at since 2008 are the percentage of women and minority employees.  Here's how this breaks down for all applicants over the last three years:

*Current application cycle – figure not final

While the number of women employees has decreased 8% on average across applicant firms for all three years, it's worth noting that, so far, among the current, 2010 applicants, they are more present than they were three years ago.  We track the percentages for both minorities and women over the last three years, and while women made up 41.1% of the workforces of this year's applicants in 2007, they made up 42.7% of them at the end of 2009.

The rise in minority employees among applicants for our award is a promising trend, as we've seen that a multicultural workforce produces its own set of employee engagement benefits – not the least of which is enhanced communications team building.

How does the representation of women and minorities in your workplace compare to our Top Small Company Workplace applicant enterprises?

Amidst troubling economic news such as the continuing saga of "Too Big to Fail" and a second straight month of job losses, I found the results of this study by Opinion Research Corporation a much welcome breath of fresh air.

The 2009 Cone Consumer New Media Study, which polled over 1,000 U.S. adults, found that business' reputation is not so tarnished as to preclude consumers from wanting to engage them in a conversation, particularly online. 

The study found that six out of 10 adults believe they can use new media tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube as well as blogs – to influence business decisions.  And eight out of 10 want companies to tell them what's in their products and explain the development process.

To me this, combined with small business' typically stripped-down bureaucracy and ability (due to their small size) to be closer to what their employees are thinking, presents a tremendous opportunity for them to use employee engagement to meet this consumer need and, as I wrote about last year, turn customers into customer evangelists.

The lesson here, which more and more firms seem to be heeding – the economy is most certainly a contributing factor – is that in this age transparency you can never involve customers too much in your ideation and development.

What thoughts do you have on this study's impact on workplace team building and employee engagement best practices?

Due to overwhelming response by interested small and midsized organizations, Winning Workplaces is pleased to announce that we have extended our original application deadline of today for 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces to Monday, January 25.

Applicants now have three additional days to tell us about the payoff of employee engagement and team building strategies in their bid to win the prize: being featured as a winner of this award in Inc. Magazine this June.

As I've mentioned here before, the process of applying has proven valuable for our current applicants.  Here's some of the most recent feedback we've received from them on how applying has shaped their approach to improving their workforce effectiveness in 2010:

The questions are ones we are continually challenging ourselves with and were on target.

The essay questions really made us give specific details, which we felt was different from a lot of the applications we have completed in the past for similar competitions.

This application really helped us to evaluate our company.  We had several meetings to discuss the questions and learned a lot about what we should be doing.  We set goals and strategies to reach them.

1. Go here to create your application login, complete the criteria pre-screen, pay (yes, there's a fee and here's why), and reach the application Table of Contents page.
2. Click here to download a sample application you can use to gather the required information offline.
3. Go back here to copy and paste your offline data into our online application.

Winning Workplaces has ties with a number of local (Chicago area) academic resources for aspiring and current entrepreneurs.  One of these is the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center at DePaul University.

This week the Coleman Center shared with us two opportunities for business owners that can help them in building employee engagement for a more productive workplace.  In turn I'm passing them along to you:

Naperville GROW Peer Roundtable
The Coleman Center’s Peer Roundtables are a place where business owners can look to their peers - other business owners - for objective points of view that are experience-based, and receive support from others who have "been there and done that".

The Roundtable meets the fourth Friday of every month, from 8-11am at DePaul’s Naperville campus, beginning January 22.  To be eligible, members must be an Owner/Founder of a business that generates $500,000 - $5 million in annual revenue.

Membership dues are $188/month for the year-long program.  More information can be found at: http://cec.depaul.edu/what/peer-roundtables.php.

Business Owner Academy
The Coleman Center presents Business Owner Academy, a curriculum of courses that are designed exclusively for business owners, and taught by current/former entrepreneurs who have "been there, done that".  Courses integrate hands-on activities and homework that immediately apply to your business, and incorporate peer-to-peer learning for students to share experiences, challenges, and accountability.

Courses starting in April include:

• Modern Marketing: Engaging New Customers with New Media & New Technologies
• Finance for the Non-Financial Business Owner: Becoming as Smart as Your Banker & CFO
• Advisory Boards:  Build Accountability, Leverage Connections, and Benefit from Experience
• Harvesting, Transitioning, and Moving On: The Five Steps to Life After Your Business

If you're in the area, think about participating in either or both of these events.  And while you're at it, contact us to schdule a visit to our Evanston offices.  We'd love to speak with you in person about your workplace culture challenges.

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!

Last week our friend Paula Brantner, the Executive Director of Workplace Fairness – a nonprofit that provides information, education, and assistance to workers and promotes public policies that advance employee rights – spoke about employee engagement when it comes to their termination on attorney Tony Reeves' show on BlogTalkRadio.

Listen to the broadcast below:

One thing I learned is that, with at-will employment being the norm in all states except Montana – and even that state only has limited protections for workers – employees who find themselves in overly stressful situations with a toxic supervisor need to take charge of their career destiny.  They need to determine if they want to stay with the company or leave, and then develop an action plan to make their chosen scenario happen.

Related: Brantner has written two employee engagement articles for Winning Workplaces.  Check them out:

• Don't Cut Legal Corners When Starting Your Business
• Preventing Employee Lawsuits