Team Building Activities In The Workplace

*Hint: As Dan Bobinski wrote on Management-Issues last week, you can't.  However, you can control your communications team building culture and the mechanisms therein to greatly increase the chance that your people will choose to listen.

The key is that they must make the choice to listen.  Once you get them over this hump, employee engagement – and with it, commitment and productivity – will be much enhanced.

The three overall strategies Bobinski shares represent a good starting place.  To help you go further with specific action steps, I've compiled a list of some of the listening tools the small businesses we've honored use, which I've written about before:

• Clearly communicate departmental objectives, and solicit input from your employees on what they can do to help achieve them.
• Ask employees for advice in areas where they have expertise.

(Source)

• Create a committee of employees at different levels and areas of responsibility that has "New Ideas" in its title – and as its objective.
• Same as above, but with the title/objective of creating and implementing workplace team building activities.

(Source)

• Implement "lunch & learns."
• If your firm is small enough – have your CEO conduct one-on-one career advancement meetings with those interested in a leadership role.
• "90 percent solution" – give employees 90% ownership in each project.
• Do 10-minute daily stand up meetings in departments.

(Source)

Are there innovative ways, in addition to the ones listed above, that you succeed in getting employees to tune in to your leadership and your mission and goals?

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.

Citing Italian research which finds that random job promotion is more effective than merit-based promotion, our Top Small Company Workplaces media partner, Inc. Magazine, asks, Should job promotions be random?

The four experts Inc. brings on in its article are split – two for the idea, two against.  While I'm not of the caliber of these four folks, I can still help break the tie: it's not a good idea.

Why?  Because it goes against one of Winning Workplaces' six building blocks, or characteristics – based on leading workplace research, not just what we think – of a high-performance organization: Rewards & Recognition.  We define this building block as follows:

Employees are sufficiently rewarded and recognized, in monetary and non-monetary ways, for their contributions and accomplishments.

I also think it goes against another building block: treating employees with Trust, Respect & Fairness.  Is it respectful or fair, after all, for a promotion to go to an employee who hasn't demonstrated the skills, training, or just plain nose-to-the-grindstone chutzpah sought by leaders or managers as ideal to spurring even greater company growth?

Two other factors worth mentioning under this promotion model:

• Potential for increased turnover and recruiting/training costs if the randomly promoted employee doesn't work out.
• Potential for increased tension of employees who work under the randomly promoted employee if they don't feel he or she rose to the new position through merit.

What's your take on promoting employees randomly as part of your overall workplace team building activities?

This week Soh Yun-Huei, who lives in Singapore, said on Twitter,

Team building shouldn't start so early in the day

Indeed, I've seen a number of tweets over the past few months from employees who feel the same way.  It's understandable – we generally have different times for optimum absorption of the learning and fun that covers the gamut of most team building activities for the workplace.

For their part, the small businesses we've honored for getting employees engaged as a means to improve business results use the timeframe of lunch to after the shifts ends around 5 or 6 pm for their activities.  Here are three companies and what they do when:

• Logistics Plus offers a free weekly lunch to its HQ employees at a pub that shares space in the same historic train dept the company owns.
• Pro Motion has an all-company huddle to compare notes and celebrate successes at 2:02 sharp every day.
• Point B, which operates in several US cities but has no central office (associates work exclusively at client sites), has regular "watering holes" in the early evening for employees to gather and talk about both work and life issues.

So if your company doesn't have a regular time for team building, you can see that your options are wide open.  Why not survey your workforce and find out when the majority of your people would want to get together?

For the past few months Winning Workplaces has been working behind the scenes to bring you something big that involves and provides value to small business.  We won't be ready to announce what it is until Monday or Tuesday, but I can tell you that:

• It underscores the importance of employee engagement and workplace team building activities, and
• It offers the potential for priceless exposure for your business.

Bookmark our website using the button below and stay tuned early next week for the big announcement...

Yesteday The Delaware Employment Law Blog argued that the Nobel Committee's decision last week to award President Obama with the 2009 Peace Prize was an exercise in positive reinforcement set on the world stage.  The blog then segued into employee engagement by providing five recommendations to help companies reward and recognize workers in a way that's sustainable and ultimately more profitable for the firm because of the anticipated returns in lower turnover, greater employee tenures, and higher productivity.

I'm reposting their five tips below, followed by links to related Winning Workplaces content that provide more workplace culture insights:

1. Take the time to figure out what type of recognition best motivates each of your employees (view a web poll on what some of our visitors are doing after following this tip).
2. Make the recognition timely (see what Communispace's Diane Hessan told our conference attendees earlier this month when it comes to spot bonuses).
3. Tailor the level of the recognition to the performance (a theme of our 2008 Top Small Workplaces is that they do this for teams in addition to or instead of on an individual basis – see #4 on page 4 of this pdf).
4. Encourage your supervisors to seek out and reward good behavior (Headset.com's shipping manager: "We try to catch somebody doing something right, instead of doing something wrong").
5. Remember that a heart felt thank you given face to face can be just as powerful as a written memo, a plaque, or a party (this blog post features potent examples of thank-yous to and from various company stakeholders).

How does recognition factor into your team building activities for the workplace?

Happy early Labor Day, everyone!  I hope you have (are having/had) a wonderful, relaxing holiday.  (I hope you work for a company that actually provides paid time off on September 7!)

After you've had a chance to recharge your batteries and spend a little quality time with those who matter in your life, you can transition back to work with this set of workout tips intended for use in your workplace, courtesy of the Loyola University Health System.

Ensuring you hit the healthy nexus of cardiovascular, strength, and flexibility foci, this is one of the more comprehensive set of organizationally based workout routines I've seen.

So as you take a break, reflect on what's working and what could be improved among your workplace team building activities (did you miss our top 10 strategies from this year's Top Small Workplaces Finalists?).  Then get set to hit the ground running – in more ways than one.

Do a quick Google News search for "team building" and tell me how many industries are represented on the first three pages of results.  When I checked today I saw the following:

• Automotive
• Education
• Entertainment (sports – football and soccer)
• Healthcare
• Hospitality
• Management consulting (naturally)

Six industries!?  On the signup form for our IDEAS newsletter we list 24 industries – and this isn't anywhere near the most comprehensive list out there.

This tells me that small businesses in many other industries could be doing more – with not a lot of effort, relatively speaking – to share the workplace team building activities that reduce their turnover and increase their productivity and profitability with the world.

The incentive for doing this is twofold:

1. Greater recogntion in their local communities as an employer of choice, and
2. Greater exposure of their products and services to new audiences via their news listing on Google, et al.

This, by the way, is our value proposition for the companies we honor each year through our Top Small Workplaces recognition project.  You can expect to see plenty of search engine results for team engagement activities among this year's winners shortly after they're named in The Wall Street Journal on September 28.

So if you run a small business, do yourself a favor.  Follow the advice offered in America's Best Companies' latest series of blog posts on getting good media coverage and tell the world what you're doing to be a Winning Workplace.  What do you have to lose?

Jonathan Fields, author of the book Career Renegade, wrote on his blog of the same name on Friday,

Truth is, there is no such thing as a great company, there are only:

• Great ideas,
• Great moments,
• Great decisions,
• Great strategies,
• Great people, and
• Great execution

I won't argue that all those elements aren't important – the last three probably being most relevant and vital.  But to say great companies – the sum of those parts – aren't their own entities does a disservice to news services such as The Wall Street Journal and Fortune, which report on great companies selected with the help of employee engagement research firms like Winning Workplaces and the Great Place to Work Institute (respectively).

Once you mix all the elements Fields mentions, and more (including workplace team building activities and other people practices, which fall under various elements in the author's list), the whole that you get is indeed its own living, breathing entity that, like any of those individual parts, can be judged on its merits and shortcomings.

The secret sauce or "X" factor, I think, that helps turn the disparate elements into a cohesive whole is company culture.  This is something that is unique to each organization and serves to attract like-minded people to it and develop them once they're on board, helping boost retention, productivity, and profits.

Check out this short list of small firms we've honored the last two years as Top Small Workplaces.  Can you honestly tell me that any of these aren't great companies?

Decagon Devices (2008 winner)

• 26-year track record in the analytical instruments industry
• Over $9 million in revenue from 73 employees
• Average employee tenure of over 4 years
• Practices in place that support their motto of "Think like scientists, work like farmers, dream like children" – for instance their wellness program, driving down decision making, and encouraging risk taking

The Rainforest Alliance (2008 winner)

• 22-year-old environmental nonprofit that attracts business from the likes of Kraft and Nike
• Over $25 million in revenue from 260 employees
• Average employee tenure of 3.5 years
• Predating the rise in consumer preference for sustainable practices used in the products they buy, the organization has used its certification programs to transform land-use and business practices in industries as diverse as forestry and tourism
• International mentorship programs are well received and drive recruitment and keep turnover low

Gentle Giant Moving Company (2007 winner)

• 29-year-old moving and storage business started with a $17 newspaper ad and a borrowed truck
• $28 million in revenue from 240 employees
• Average employee tenure of 5 years
• Filled a niche in Boston and across New England for unparalleled service in the industry
• Uses its business success to fulfill its true mission, developing leaders

Point B (2007 winner)

• 14-year-old professional services provider serving 7 U.S. cities with no formal offices
• $80 million in revenue from 375 employees
• Average employee tenure of 3 years
• Probably the best example of using new-school (technology) in combination with old-school (staff get-togethers) employee engagement best practices to boost camaraderie and cultivate new business ideas; attrition rate is also below half of industry average
• Cultural selling point is allowing associates to "define their own Point B" through both personal and professional goal planning – this has enabled the company to fill all leadership roles from within

What do you think – are great companies a fallacy?

Photo credit: The German Car Blog

Our office is buzzing as we await the arrival here later today of our judging panel that will select the 2009 Top Small Workplaces from the 35 Finalist organizations.  These firms were paired down over the last few months from the hundreds that applied earlier this year based on their exemplary team building activities for the workplace.

While you'll have to wait until September 28 to read about the 2009 Winners in The Wall Street Journal – click here to subscribe to it if you don't already – I will be updating here in the meantime with video interviews of our judges, which we will also shoot today.

Following is a list of this year's judges.  We thank them for their time, talent, and concern for the leading-edge people practices that show that investing in your workplace can lead to stunning business outcomes.
 

Colleen Barrett

• President Emeritus, Southwest Airlines
• Years as a TSW judge: 3
• Other TSW affiliations: Keynote speaker at our 2008 annual conference
• For more information: Read our interview with Barrett on our website

Peter Cappelli

• Director, Center for Human Resources, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
• Years as a TSW judge: 3
• For more information: Watch this interview with Cappelli we shot in 2008
   

Judith Cone

• Vice President of Emerging Strategies, Kauffman Foundation
• Years as a TSW judge: 3
• Other TSW affiliations: Workplace session moderator at our 2007 annual conference
• For more information: Read our interview with Cone on our website

Timothy Feddersen

• Director, Social Enterprise Program, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
• Years as a TSW judge: 1
• For more information: See Feddersen's faculty/research page on the Kellogg School website

Bart Houlahan

• Co-founder, B Lab
• Years as a TSW judge: 1
• For more information: Read Houlahan's bio on Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner
   

Nancy Kramer

• Founder and CEO, Resource Interactive
• Years as a TSW judge: 1
• Other TSW affiliations: Resource Interactive is a 2008 Top Small Workplace
• For more information: Get our 2008 TSW DVD containing an interview with Kramer

Ken Lehman

• Founder and Chairman, Winning Workplaces
• Years as a TSW judge: 3
• Other TSW affiliations: Ken participated in a panel entitled "60 Ideas in 60 Minutes" at our 2007 annual conference
• For more information: Watch this video that features Ken on our website

Kevin Trapani

• President and CEO, The Redwoods Group
• Years as a TSW judge: 1
• Other TSW affiliations: The Redwoods Group is a 2008 Top Small Workplace
• For more information: Get our 2008 TSW DVD containing an interview with Trapani

A number of our judges will be at our ROI of Great Workplaces Conference in Chicago on October 1 and 2.  Join them – register to attend today.

If you haven't checked out Corporateinklings, the blog of our 2007 Top Small Workplace Corporate Ink, a Massachusetts-based PR firm that specializes in the technology industry, I urge you to do so today.  There you'll find honest voices of most employees of this small business – including the Founder and President, Amy Bermar.  I tweeted earlier this week about a post that employee Corinne Federici wrote about converting social media pessimists with some new Google data on executives' use of the Internet and search engines.

Yesterday Bermar wrote about the importance of thank-you notes for job applicants – especially recent college grads and other Millennials – who feel they're the best fit for a company.  She makes a great point, particularly since a handwritten note has become somewhat of a lost art with the advent of 24/7 connectedness via technology.

Bermar's post got me thinking about other ways that thank-yous are used – not just to acknowledge or recognize, but to impact organizations' bottom line in tangible ways.  I remembered this article that appeared in Inc. magazine last fall, in which Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group (one of Inc. editor Bo Burlingham's Small Giants) said that one of the time- and cost-efficent and yet powerful ways he caters to existing customers is to write them personal thank-you notes.

But thank-yous can be used in other ways, and can go in all directions across various stakeholders.  They can be powerful tools for building employee engagement and a more satisfied customer base.  Consider these examples from our website:

• Supervisor to reports.  In a recent guest feature, workplace consultant Allison O'Neill talked about turning all those times you merely think, "I must remember to thank so-and-so" into reality.  She advises on how you can do this one-on-one and in a group setting.
• Employees to other employees.  One of our first Success Stories, on Wisconsin-based Sargento Foods, illustrates one of their employee engagement practices – workers using "praise cards" to thank fellow employees for helping to remedy production issues or otherwise going above and beyond.
• Employees to leadership.  One of our most recent Success Stories, on 2008 Top Small Workplace Decagon Devices in Washington state, relates how the company's explanation of their debt-free standing in a down economy prompted an employee to praise management's operations strategy.  While impossible to predict in terms of frequency, leadership should use this valuable feedback to gauge progress against the firm's mission and goals.
• Customer to company.  I wrote our Success Story on iRobot, whose CEO, Colin Angle, we named a Best Boss in 2005, and one of my favorite moments in it is where we heard the joy from the employees we talked to as a result of soldiers' emails and letters to the company thanking them for their products that literally save lives – their PackBots in use in the Middle East.  In your business, similar types of thank-yous could spur practices around customer focus groups or even user-generated marketing content.

So as you think about your employee engagement strategies, don't discount the power of a seemingly simple gesture of thanks, no matter the source or the recipient.

How do thank-yous factor into your workplace team building activities and customer relations?

This most recent post by Greg Harris on The Science of Work blog contains a simple but powerful lesson for small business owners and leaders when it comes to the emphasis they place on team building activities for the workplace.  Citing several Wall Street Journal articles, Harris writes,

[Google] is a company that sees their biggest challenges ahead as people issues....not technology issues, not government issues, not economic issues.

Go figure: one of the biggest/fastest growth stories in American business history suggests that attracting and retaining talent is the most critical factor in their strategy.

His post follows on the heels of Google's much-hyped algorithm to determine which employees are most likely to leave, which I blogged about earlier this month.  My post on this contains a comment from none other than...Mr. Harris.

Related - selected posts on this blog on improving employee retention:

• Do You Work As Hard to Impress Employees As You Do Customers?
• Family-Owned Businesses Holding on to Staff, Optimistic About Near-Term Economic Recovery
• Gentle Giant Moving Takes Its Recruiting Challenge on the Road
• LinkedIn Group Initial Consensus to Using Zappos' 'Leaving Bonus': No

Allison O'Neill, a workplace survey expert who wrote a guest article for us a few months back on tips to be a better boss and improve Your culture, shares 8 ways the workplace has changed in a new post on her blog, The Boss Benchmark.  These include:

1. More interest in career breaks
2. More definable career turning points
3. Charitable and other personal-driven endeavors blending with traditional jobs on resumes
4. More cohesive, value-driven demands from top talent
5. Lots of discussion on the three to four generations currently in the workforce
6. More active, individual (as opposed to company)-driven career planning
7. Increased focus on shaping job negatives into positives, instead of just dwelling on the negatives
8. Bosses have more, and more complex, needs, too

I think her list is spot on – and this speaks to the universality of work in a global marketplace given that Allison does her workplace assessments from literally the other side of the world: New Zealand.  Her insights tell me that CEOs and other workplace leaders should make it a priority of their jobs to be the company representative in assessing the need for and implementation of workplace team building activities.

Think this is a low-priority (and/or low-ROI) to-do item for business leaders?  Consider the bosses of the following two successful firms, whom Winning Workplaces has honored for their innovative leadership styles and practices:

• Diane Hessan, President & CEO, Communispace Corporation: Considers herself the "chief culture officer"; a favorite practice is leaving employees voicemails with updates on key goals.  Her 10-year-old firm is one of the fastest growing social networking companies in the country and has "a Blue Chip client list that would make a Madison Avenue giant jealous," according to Advertising Age.
• Jeffrey Hollender, President and CEO, Seventh Generation: Frequently refers to himself as CIO, which in this case means "chief inspiration officer," and hears regular feedback that supports their goal to be employees' best working experience.  The 21-year-old company continues to experience strong growth, with its environmentally responsible household products on the shelves of Jewel-Osco, Whole Foods, and many other retailers.

So my bottom-line message is, as workplaces have changed, so should leaders.  You have people who keep track of your balance sheet and income statements, right?  Don't be afraid, then, to loosen your reins on those somewhat and get back to basics – MBWA and other time-tested employee engagement best practices that will help inspire your staff for the long-term.

What would your list of how workplaces have changed in recent years look like?

This article I came across today, from The Rancho Cordova Post (named for this suburb of Sacramento, CA), demonstrates that employee engagement activities to create a winning workplace are not just "better for people and better for business," as our tagline suggests – see our logo at the top of this blog – but better for communities as well.

In yesterday's article Michelle Ventress reports that the City of Rancho Cordova has been named a Sacramento Workplace Excellence Leader in the seventh year of this competition that recognizes Sacramento-area organizations for their "unique and exceptional human resources practices."

As with our Top Small Workplaces, the city's returns from exceptional employee engagement start with a clear vision and long-term support from leadership.  Ventress describes how Rancho Cordova's City Manager, Ted Gaebler, was an asset here with his expertise in "transforming governments from outdated bureaucratic organizations to flexible, customer-focused organizations."

Exemplary practices Ventress points to that made the city stand out include:

• Mechanism to solicit and take action on employee ideas, which they literally call the Office of New Ideas
• Committee created last year to cultivate cost-savings and revenue-generating strategies
• Another mechanism, the Employee Advisory Team, that brings people together from different departments to help build skills and implement workplace team building activities

Ventress' quote from the employee who nominated Rancho Cordova is short and sweet, and yet it speaks volumes about the city's impact on retaining and satisfying not just its employees, but its whole population: "I enjoy coming to work and being allowed to make a difference."

Congrats to the City of Rancho Cordova for showing that the building blocks of a winning workplace can be applied to governmental entities and not just private or public firms.

What does your city or town excel at, and how do people make the difference in that?  What could they improve upon, and how can people be better leveraged to make that happen?

Image credit: City of Rancho Cordova website

For our upcoming May IDEAS newsletter I recently interviewed Graham Weston, Chairman of Rackspace Hosting, the world leader in web hosting.  Graham, a 2006 Winning Workplaces Best Boss, will be a keynote speaker for our ROI of Great Workplaces Conference in early October.

We spoke about many things, including Rackspace's gradual move-in from their second headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, to their third and probably last one for a long, long time: San Antonio's old Windsor Park Mall, where Graham went as a child.  (Visit this section of Graham's blog to see a video journal of their transition into what the company calls "The Castle.")

As you'll hear in the following audio from my interview with Graham, they hope to have all of their roughly 2600 employees fully moved over within a year.  Our discussion of their new home, where Graham is installing his office in the old Orange Julius space, led to me ask him about what they're doing or hope to do when it comes to employee engagement in a particular workspace configuration.  Would they go Google – with their now oft-copied workspace pods or clusters – or would they do something else?

Here's the clip:

mp3 - 2.7 MB - 2:56

The answer to my question is essentially "TBD" because they're waiting until everyone is moved in.  However, it did spark Graham to compare Rackspace's employee engagement best practices to those of Google.  Graham feels that Google has been guilty of structuring its perks and pay to bring employees pleasure.  But this is not the same thing as long-term satisfaction, and the Chairman explained the difference.

For more on Graham's thoughts on everything from their still-evolving service model of "Fanatical Support" to what he will speak about at our conference this fall, click here to get our newsletter – it's free.  See also our Success Story on Rackspace.

When it comes to your own workplace team building activities, how do you strive for employee satisfaction over merely pleasure?

For our April newsletter, which went out yesterday, I was scouring the web looking for new workplace research, and I found this study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) on eight skills essential to today's senior HR leaders.  While I was on SHRM's site I came across this PowerPoint of another study they did last October on a sample of their membership.

Out of 17 areas where the sampled organizations said they had cut discretionary spending in the last 12 months and would likely do so over the next 12 months, morale and team building activities came in at numero uno on the chopping block.  Six in 10 respondents said they had cut budgets for these practices in the last year, and the same proportion said they planned to do so in the near future.

Keep in mind that this snapshot was taken in October.  As I alluded to in our new article on how our small business honorees are handling the econmic downturn, much has changed since then.  If a snapshot were taken today of these same HR professionals, I'm guessing the percentages would be a good deal higher, perhaps 10-15% higher.

If cuts to these practices keep climbing, morale will go down – just look at slide 5 in SHRM's study findings: respondents' cuts in HR discretionary spending have negatively impacted workforce morale by 67%.  The end result of low morale is something employers, especially small firms, can ill afford in this economy.  We've already seen that low morale in this recession has contributed to an increase in workplace theft and coworker backstabbing.  You do not want to be responsible for a mutiny brought on by bottom-of-the-barrel workplace team building and employee engagement.

BTW: team building does not have to be a budget drain.  I wrote a recent post with 20 proven workplace team building activities you can use or adapt, and many of them are low or no cost.

So let's keep team building off the workplace endangered species list!

In our forthcoming February IDEAS newsletter, you'll read how at 2008 Top Small Workplace ATA Engineering, nearly all major business decisions are made by consensus.  Although this has been applauded as a great workplace team building activity and a powerful tool for increasing employee enagement, it remains a mystifying process to many in the business community.  Certainly, as any of ATA's associates who have been with the California-based consulting firm for most of its 9 years will tell you, it's a process that needs time to develop, and active effort to maintain.

Last month on Salon.com writer and environmentalist Dave Pollard outlined the value that consensus decision-making plays in the workplace.  With flowcharts and links to educational materials to assist those who may want to experiment with increasing consensus in their workplace, Pollard walks the reader through some basic tenets of the process and benefits that can come from its implementation.

Below are Pollard's "10 reasons why consensus decision-making will be one of the most important capacities for people to develop and practice in this turbulent century."  Visit his original post to dig deeper into the mechanics of each of thesee reasons. 

1. It focuses on differences as learning opportunities, not 'problems.'
2. It achieves buy-in and willingness to act, from everyone in the group.
3. It is non-confrontational and non-adversarial.
4. It builds connection.
5. It encourages and facilitates listening skills.
6. It is a collaborative process, focused on achieving agreement.
7. It is an emergent process, enabling discovery of a shared direction.
8. It requires and encourages honesty, not posturing or rhetoric.
9. It is a creative process, enabling us to practice imagining what's possible.
10. We cannot afford any more of the old, unworkable decision-making processes.

How do your (or do your) employee engagement activities encourage consensus decision-making?  What impact does (would) this have on your business results?

Jason Ticus