1. One of our 50 winners, TRX (health industry, based in California, 132 employees), shared with us in their award application that, to use people practices to improve organizational performance, they sent their Director of Education to several, week-long athletic training mentorships to learn best practices in running athletic education courses.  At these workshops she gained a better understanding of running an incubated business, management and team development, and industry standard benchmarks.  As a result of this investment TRX's Education business has thrived, especially internationally.
2. I also found a noteworthy account from one of our applicants, Starmount Life Insurance Company (insurance industry, based in Louisiana, 176 employees), that they submitted in answer to our question on employee leadership development training for new and existing managers and supervisors.  Starmount says a key priority is at their Team Leader level, the first level supervisory role in their organization.  Not only are they typically new to a leadership role, but they may encounter challenges shifting from a peer to supervisory relationship.  Team Leaders participate in a "Management Incubator" program which utilizes competency-based leadership assessments, experiential learning, leadership coaching, and development planning.  This program appears to have had a big impact on Starmount's success post Katrina and Rita: their relocation-related initial turnover quickly stabilized, in 2009 they broke ground on a new headquarters in Baton Rouge, and in 2010 they launched two new major product lines.

A key building block of a Winning Workplace is people practices supporting a focus on Teamwork & Involvement (more about the other 5 building blocks we believe in, and have seen in practice among the great small firms we've studied and recognized, here).

This involves team building strategies, of course, but it also relates to the extent that an organization acts as a means to empower its employees to improve the communities in which they live, and supports them during crises.  Our recent Success Story on Van Meter Industrial, a 2010 winner of our Top Small Company Workplace award, addressed this in detail related to the historic flood that hit its headquarters city – Cedar Rapids, Iowa – in 2008.

We've just weathered an even larger-scale natural disaster – Hurricane Irene, which devastated many East Coast states this past weekend.  True to form, many of the small businesses we've honored with both of our awards are offering assistance to individuals and businesses that were affected by it.  Here's a snapshot of what they're doing:

1-800-GOT-JUNK? (2005 Best Boss - Brian Scudamore)
As their business is based on junk removal, they're doing what they do best and clearing out flooded basements and storm debris.  Their call center and website have been slammed, and their northeastern U.S. franchise partners tell them that their schedules are packed.  Luckily, they work directly with insurance companies, so it takes some stress out of the process of mopping up after such a destructive storm.

Bersin & Associates (2011 Top Small Company Workplace)
Since many of their employees work remotely from the East Coast – they're based in California – they've helped them out in several ways: 1. Paying for one employee's monthly rent increase while they move into a new neighborhood 2. IT staff is helping people get their computers back up and running 3. Offered to help each employee financially with power outage issues.

Dealer.com (2010 Top Small Company Workplace)
This Burlington, Vermont-based firm shared on their Facebook page (which as over 2,200 fans) that much of Southern and Central Vermont has been hit hard and is in desperate need of help.  They also shared a link to a blog that's been set up to help Vermonters assist their fellow citizens.

Dyn Inc. (2011 Top Small Company Workplace)
Tom Daly, President and CTO of this Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company, provided a checklist on their blog to help ensure that company data centers are prepared for major weather events.  They then shared this on their Facebook page, which has over 4,700 fans.

Firespring (2011 Top Small Company Workplace)
Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Firespring, a comprehensive marketing solutions provider, instituted a policy allowing any client to essentially "freeze" their account and suspend payments until they were able to get back to business as usual.  Yet, by their own admission, they failed to recognize that many clients were utilizing their online file transfer and job submission utilities that automatically purged old data.  Since many of their clients went without power for several months, they lost valuable data when Firespring's system did its job.  When Hurricane Irene hit last week, it affected hundreds of their clients.  For the past several days, they have been closely analyzing data to ensure that all of them are still able to access their files and are actively engaged using their other web tools.  They were prepared this time.  Their support staff is also reaching out to clients to see if there is anything else they can do to help them.

Northeast Delta Dental (2005 Best Boss - Tom Raffio)
This dental insurance provider has invited employees and their families without electricity to use their facilities, and they are prepared to initiate fundraisers through their Helping Hands program as they learn about employees whose homes were damaged.  They have also activated their ListServ capabilities for their board members, resulting in an exchange of offers to help one another within the tri-states, which has proven immeasurable for their colleagues in Vermont who experienced extremely high flood waters and washed out roadways eliminating access to even basic services.

One Call Now (2011 Top Small Company Workplace)
This Ohio-based enterprise, which delivers automated phone messages to improve communication between and among organizations, has emailed their customers in the states affected by the hurricane. They offered them free upgrades to their existing service, ranging from free texting for 30 days free weather alerts until November 1, when hurricane season is over.  In addition, organizations who coordinate relief for the affected areas can get free call credits added to their accounts to help with their work.

Seventh Generation (2006 Best Boss - Jeffrey Hollender)
The marketer of environmentally responsible household products is donating some of them to make 1200 green cleaning kits for hurricane victims.  They've partnered with the Vermont Foodbank to build and deliver the kits to communities most in need. And they shared news of this on their Facebook page, which has over 260,000 fans.

Next Step: Review the above examples – is there anything you can do or adapt from them to provide better value to your employees, customers, or local communities/states?  (Or get set to do for a future disaster affecting your area?)  And how can employee engagement be a catalyst, or improved, through these efforts?

The two videos below provide about as stark a contrast as you could imagine between what constitutes a poor workplace culture in the carwash industry, and one that relies on the Winning Workplaces-approved notions of strong team building and investing in your workplace to boost customers and their satisfaction for a healthier bottom line.

First, here's the "bad" example.  I found this in a Huffington Post article published this week highlighting extreme practices in play in a number of car washes in the Los Angeles area.  Warning: at times the video is graphic in its depictions of how workers are treated.

Substandard – even inexcusable – people practices mentioned include:

• Beatings
• Sexual harassment
• Manager threats
• Pay at half the minimum wage, or less

Now here's what a workplace looks like in the same industry with the polar opposite approach to employee engagement.  This is our interview with Jerry Dahm, Executive VP of Mike's Carwash.  Based in Indianapolis, Mike's is a 2009 winner of our Top Small Workplace award.

Here's what Jerry mentions as features of how they treat their workforce, which includes over 200 full-time employees at more than 30 locations:

• When new hires emerge from their rigorous hiring process, their on-boarding includes 40 hours of job training
• Grooming leaders from within; while they invest $3,500 per person, per year, on tuition reimbursement, they see a great ROI since about 50% of job openings are filled from within
• Open book management with financial literacy training to help workers see how their efforts influence the bottom line – and improve their pay, since they also have profit sharing

Also, while Jerry doesn't mention this in the interview, I think it's noteworthy to point out the further contrast involving wages.  When Mike's Carwash filled out their application for our award in 2008, only 8% of employees were earning $20,000 per year or less, and none of them were (or are today) getting below the minimum wage.

Thinking about the "bad" example above, I find it not only sad that some carwash owners and leaders are fostering such poor workplaces, but counterproductive to their financial best interests!  The Huffington Post article notes that the car washing services industry today is a $23 billion enterprise, and new research released this month shows it's a rare one that, over the next 5 years, is actually set to experience healthy growth of about 19%.  So doesn't it make sense that those who run these operations would want to adequately pay and fairly treat their workers to in turn deliver the best service, to earn the biggest piece of that pie?

Related: Read our Success Story on Mike's Carwash to learn even more about how the company creates a competitive culture of ownership which translates to better business results.

I've written before sharing some company core values templates you could consider using and internalizing in your organization to improve employee engagement and create a more productive workplace.  However, it's the internalizing part that can prove difficult for organizations.

Just how do you "operationalize" your values so they pervade your culture, promote company pride, and – most importantly – contribute to the bottom line in the form of productivity growth so they're not just words to your accountant?

In answer to a question about this I posed on LinkedIn last week, Rich Sheridan, CEO of our 2011 Top Small Company Workplace Menlo Innovations, quickly replied via email and shared with me 7 posts they had already penned and posted on their blog which show how this successful, Michigan-based business software developer has made this work in their organization.  Here's what he shared, and what they have done:

1. Rethink and retool your interviewing phase so it becomes new hires' most exciting day with your company
2. Build an intentional culture
3. Elevate the person sitting next to you
4. Celebrate stories of joy – even when visitors are around
5. Take note of how others see your workplace culture
6. Use your product/service quality as noted by your customers, as a source of energy and motivation for your team
7. Look at implementing a "babies in the workplace" benefit for new moms and dads (an expert in how these practices are achievable and their business benefits is profiled on our website)

Some of the business results Rich and his company have seen from how they've operationalized their company values include:

• Profitable all of the last 4 years
• 2010 voluntary turnover less than half the industry average
• Average employee tenure of 6 years
• A long line of top talent who want to go through Menlo's unique recruiting process and join their team
• A long line of CEOs who want to tour their business to learn and adapt their processes for their own enterprises (helping to build buzz and forge new relationships for business development)

Next Step: What do you do currently to operationalize your company's core values?  Click here to add your answer to my LinkedIn question.  Hurry – it closes in 4 days.

This is a little late coming, but I wanted to supplement the takeaways I've shared on Twitter from our Leadership Conference last month with Inc. Magazine (see these five recent tweets) with a post here with even more on what I learned and got a refresher on when it comes to investing in your workplace for greater employee engagement, team building, and other profitable people practices.

I'm also happy to share some of the great photos Inc. took of the sessions.  My thanks to Rachel Kovar, Inc.'s Events & Conferences Manager, for supplying them.  Rachel and her team are busy getting ready for the 2011 Inc. 500/5000 in September.

Back to the June Leadership Conference...

June 16, 2011

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Patrick Lencioni of The Table Group gave a rousing review of the successful business practices he puts in a real-world context in his book of the same name.  He gave all attendees a copy of it – it's a great, short read, which I finished on my flight from Dallas back to Los Angeles.

His premise was that all the company smarts that CEOs care about and work to improve from day one – strategy, marketing, finance, technology – are only half the equation for successful firms.  The other half is creating a healthy workplace culture, with minimal politics and confusion, but high morale and, thus, productivity.  "Healthy is the multiplier of their smarts," Lencioni said.

A Top Workplace One Year Later: The New York Jets

Some of what Matt Higgins, EVP for the Jets, shared in this session – which took place just over a year after the team was named one of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces – was reflected in the Success Story we wrote on the company last July.  This includes the inclusionary leadership of the owner and head coach and the pervasive focus on listening to lower-level employees.

What was new here, to my ears at least, was how the Jets are being productive in their version of a particularly "down" time – the NFL lockout.  Higgins said they've taken it as an opportunity to send some of their staff to shadow people in other professions, ranging from firefighters to politicians, to promote continued employee leadership development.

June 17, 2011

How to Get Ferocious Commitment from Your People

I hadn't previously been exposed to the speaker of this session, Stan Slap, author of Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Committed Managers.  He spent a good deal of time explaining the differences between leaders and managers; while both work hard on consistency and passion, Slap said, what distinguishes managers from leaders is that the former can get away with faltering on these qualities, but the latter simply cannot afford to do so.

Also, based on what I've seen and written about in terms of the highly specialized, tight knit cultures of many of our award-winning small workplaces, I liked that he emphasized family as a core value that helps create more open, honest communication – which, of course, promotes better business results.

Creating a Culture of Customer Service

Since Winning Workplaces previously enlisted the expertise of one of our honorees, Headsets.com's Mike Faith (who moderated another session at this year's conference), to speak on this topic in one of our webinars a few years ago, I didn't think I would pick up many new tips.  Boy, was I mistaken.

Christopher Zane, founder and president of the wildly successful Zane's Cycles, said one of his main areas of focus is improving and leveraging relationships with his business customers in between sales by surveying them on potential new product features.  He also shared the story of how he fired one of his customers after the person unnecessarily berated one of his employees.  This made clear his belief in the long-term good of working with quality folks in all parts of their product lifecycle – not just employees.

Related: This conference was the culmination of our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award process.  We're gearing up now to launch our 2012 competition.  Click here for the latest news on it.

With passionate, and necessary, discussions going on now in Washington, DC, about how to trim national spending, one of their small businesses, Turner Consulting Group (TCG) – a Winning Workplaces 2011 Top Small Company Workplace award winner – has a relevant story to tell.

Founded in 1994, this 35-employee firm, which provides IT-based grants management and budget formulation and execution solutions to federal agencies, has saved U.S. taxpayers over $265 million by helping government improve its operations.  It aims to save taxpayers $1 billion by 2016.

How does TCG succeed so well at helping itself as it helps us?  The company practices internally what it preaches to its customers: leadership's encouragement of flex arrangements and avoiding burnout due to overwork has led to an almost 0 percent absentee rate, boosting productivity.  (Our media partner, Inc. Magazine, has more on this.)  In addition, since 2010 new business has increased as a result of an intentional practice of seeking employee feedback on customer problems, and acting on the most viable among their proposed solutions to them.

Stay tuned to our blog for more exclusive stories of the payoff of employee engagement and team building, for both our honored small firms and their customers and other stakeholders.  We share more in-depth stories like this in our free newsletter, IDEAS – get it by going here.

A year ago, after Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine announced the winners of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award, I began a series of posts sharing data on how the winners, finalists, and other applicants performed on some key business metrics:

• Average employee tenure and turnover
• Estimated annual turnover costs per company (and how the winners and finalists outperformed their fellow award applicants)
• Revenue, proftability, employee tenure, and turnover among all applicants who fund a retirement plan, vs. those that don't

Now that both organizations have announced the winners and finalists of our 2011 award, I think it's time to give you some updated stats.  As you'll see, they continue to support our thesis – and those of many of the other firms out there that study employee engagement and team building within productive workplace cultures – that investing in your workforce pays being dividends over the long term.  That includes an increased ability to anticipate and weather tough economies like the current one.

Employee Tenure and Turnover

As you can see, part of what distinguished the 2011 winners from the finalists was higher average employee tenure and lower turnover.  But to me the real story is how much improvement in these metrics the winners had over the finalists, vs. last year's winners compared to the finalists.  This is represented in the chart below:

While one might argue that the continuing down economy, and particularly the stagnant job market, is keeping people from leaving who otherwise might jump ship – increasing average tenure while keeping voluntary turnover low as a share of total turnover – our data seem to indicate that something else is going on.  Otherwise the winners' improvement over the finalists from 2010 to 2011 would be more gradual and not so steep.  I suspect that more leaders of small firms are having frank, "We're all in it together" conversations with their workers, and at the same time are doing a better job of linking individual to company performance and providing attractive incentives to encourage more top-level work and innovation.

Turnover Costs - Winners and Finalists vs. Other Applicants

Most definitely there is a mixed-results story going on here.  On the one hand, while among our 2010 pool the winners and finalists had about half the turnover of other applicants, in 2011 the winner and finalist turnover was two-thirds the level of other applicants.  That was the driving factor behind the average, annual turnover cost of winners and finalists representing 89% of the cost of other applicants (in 2010, winners and finalists experienced only 40% of the cost of other applicants).  Still...

...as this chart shows, you can also look at it as a testament to the current winners and finalists that they were able to keep turnover at essentially the same low level (considering the variance in industry, geography, marketplaces, et al) as 2010, which allowed them to still have lower turnover costs than other applicants.  This is particularly noteworthy since the 2011 winners and finalists represent a greater share of the total applicant pool (24%) than they did in 2010 (8%).

The Link Between Retirement Plans and Revenue

While there are obviously many, many other factors involved, it's hard to ignore the business metrics that tend to increase – among all our award applicants, not just winners and finalists – when companies show their long-term commitment to their workforces by investing in their retirement, as I discussed last October.  As the table above shows with the 2011 applicant data added, we continue to see a link between funding these plans and the tendency toward greater revenue and increased likelihood of being profitable.  However...

...take a look at the difference in revenue for companies who funded 401K, 403B, IRAs, or other plans in 2011 vs. those who do not, compared with the same groups in 2010.  (Also note that the ratio of those who fund these plans vs. those who don't stayed essentially the same both years, 9 to 1.)

Is the difference a fluke?  Or do you think there's something going on related to benefits and incentives within a framework of progressive staff engagement activities?  I'd love to read your thoughts – on this trend and anything else I've shared above – in the comments.

As I have written about several times here, including in this post last May, undue employee stress costs companies, big time.  A figure that is often cited is that the lost productivity as a result of it adds up to over $300 billion a year.  Not the kind of backtracking we want to have happen as we work to further our economic recovery.

As many a CEO and HR director know, one of the biggest sources of undue employee stress is bullying, or harassment.  In fact, one incident of bullying can do double damage to the workplace culture; Catherine Mattice has an insightful new post on the No Workplace Bullies blog in which she cites a study finding that 15% of respondents who reported misconduct were bullied as a result of their actions.

Clearly, companies can do themselves the most good in terms of maintaining a good team building atmosphere – and save on related costs of staff time for investigation and resolution of claims – if they're proactive in creating an environment in which it's taboo to engage in such behavior in the first place.  Hiring for attitude and fit is a good start.  But beyond that, here are some approaches for curbing workplace harassment used by applicants for Winning Workplaces' 2010 small workplace award that you can adapt for your organization, once people are on board:

1. Buffalo Exchange - 38-year-old, Arizona-based retail trade firm with 672 employees: "We are serious about having a harassment-free workplace, resulting in a happier, more stable and more productive workforce.  The Predictive Index is a development tool we use that measures the natural talents and motivating needs of employees.  Managers can use the Predictive Index in determining effective methods of management and motivation for individuals based on those needs."
2. Duro Textiles LLC - 9-year-old, Massachusetts-based textiles firm with 239 employees: "We have a learning initiative in which we provide our supervisors and managers training in documentation of employee records and harassment.  We have provided computer training to employees through a Workforce Training Grant."
3. EthicsPoint - 12-year-old, Oregon-based software provider with 128 employees: "In 2008 we launched an online based training platform consisting of two base modules, Code of Conduct and Insider Trading.  In 2009 we incorporated additional modules to be deployed on a monthly basis, including Diversity Training, Preventing Workplace Harassment, Integrity and Careful Communication.  These modules were customized for EthicsPoint and are therefore more engaging to our employee base.  All new employees are provided the two base modules upon hire and then are integrated into the annual training program.  The training supports our core values and culture of compliance and makes ethical conduct an integral part of everyday company practice."
4. Hammer Packaging - 99-year-old, New York-based printer/publisher with 392 employees: "Every three months an outside corporate attorney or consultant is engaged to train associates on a number of potentially incendiary issues.  Over the past year, some of the topics disccussed included Problem Solving, Violence in the Workplace and Sexual Harassment."
5. Harvest Investments, Ltd. - 20-year-old, Illinois-based financial advisory firm with 62 employees: "Harvest provides numerous management and supervisory training programs throughout the year.  These programs focus on goal and objective setting, performance management, open communication, team building, conflict resolution, and diversity and anti-harassment issues."

If you excel in ridding your workplace of bullying and harassment as a means to keep your bottom line strong and maintain competitive advantage, we'd like to hear from you – tell us your story and at the same time apply for our 2011 Top Small Company Workplace award.  Hurry, our 2011 application period closes on January 14.

...you may have experienced some days in December and again this month where you saw a bunch of "new" blog posts which were duplicates of previously new posts.  For that we apologize – we certainly don't want to take any more of your time than necessary, ideally to update you on our truly new content on workplace team building and employee engagement best practices, news, and trends.

We are working on fixing the problem.  We've checked and we know it's not an issue with our outstanding blog provider, Compendium.  It's an issue with FeedBurner, which used to be its own service and is now under Google.

I've tried investigating this issue by visiting the FeedBurner Help page, as well as their real-time status blog (everything's been fine for all users since December 2, 2010, apparently).  I've even looked in the FeedBurner Help Group, where some people have reported the same issue, but there seems to be no one-size-fits-all solution.

I have to say, with a company that has been so innovative when it comes to creating a productive workplace environment, as we discussed here on our website, and has been a financial success story (mainly through its AdWords program), I am disappointed that Google can't budget for at least one full-time person to provide live FeedBurner support during the work week.  Why else is there no "Contact Us" or "Live Chat" link on the main, FeedBurner Help page?  With thousands of bloggers using this service, this seems like a no-brainer to me.

Rackspace, our website host and a 2006 winner of our small workplace award, has live chat and it has been invaluable to me, enabling me to get the status of a problem, or in most cases fix it on the spot, and get back to work.  Google could benefit by following some of the pointers Lisa Barone recently offered in this article on Small Business Trends.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with us as we work to resolve this issue.  One thing you could do if you find the duplicate old posts annoying to wade through is to bookmark our main blog page, or the feed content page.  If you do that, you should create a reminder to check back to either of these links every day or two, as you won't be notified of new posts like you are with our email and RSS subscriptions.

As happened with Tabatha's Salon Takeover on Bravo, more recently I've started watching – and am now hooked on – the TLC show Cake Boss.  I also like the reality sister show to this, The Next Great Baker.

In my opinion, part of the reason the ratings have taken off for these shows – which have propelled yet another sister TLC show coming soon, Kitchen Boss, as well as a Cake Boss book and tour – is the time-honored and effective workplace culture practices used by the star of all of the above shows, Buddy Valastro.

Valastro's story, as told on the website for his 101-year-old company, is similar to that of many family businesses.  He is the fourth generation baker born into the business owned and operated by his parents in Hoboken, New Jersey.

What has taken his business "to the top," as he articulates at the start of every Cake Boss episode, elevating Carlo's above their peers – beyond his mind-boggling baking skills, of course – are his employee engagement best practices.  Here are my takeaways along these lines from watching Cake Boss:

1.  Employees are "mia famiglia" (his family).  This includes not just his mother and sister who work at Carlo's alongside him, but his other employees.  If you search on our website for "family" you'll quickly see the extent to which company leaders treat their employees like they treat their own relatives is a big factor in the financial success of small firms.
2. He tells it like it is.  Accidents and other workplace incidents happen that hamper the ability of Carlo's to deliver their cakes to clients on time.  Valastro's skill here is showing "tough Italian love" to his employees, clearly showing what they did wrong, but then being supportive of them to do the right thing next time.  An example of being frank with workers among our Top Small Company Workplaces award honorees is 2007 winner Corporate Ink.
3. He celebrates successes, even little ones.  There are many moments on Cake Boss where, after 5 or more employees have been involved in building one of their more difficult cakes, Valastro says, "OK team, gather 'round and look what we made."  This is a quick – and free! – practice that you can tell makes his workers feel good about their contributions.  Over the long term, this no doubt keeps Carlo's costs low in terms of turnover and retraining.  Here's more on this on our site.
4. Team building happens off site, too.  On a recent episode, Valastro made a cake for a king at a local Medieval Times location.  When a knight from Medieval Times challenged Valastro to a jousting, he brought his employees to the venue to watch.  There are other examples in the show's run of the Cake Boss taking his team off site which serve as opportunities for building trust in the workplace.  For a related practice, check out #10 in this post on our blog.

Have you seen Cake Boss?  What are your employee leadership development takeaways from it?

Lots of the business blogs I follow have spent part of this last week of 2010 sharing with their readers the posts that most resonated with them.  I'd like to do the same today in terms of what you found most useful this year that we've published on staff engagement activities to create a more productive workplace culture.

Below are your 10 most popular posts.  In addition to those of you who found us from a search on Google, Bing, Chrome, etc. (59% of readers), I'd like to thank the remaining 41% of you who arrived here directly, or based on a referral from another website.  We are grateful to all of our readers, as we think there's much more to be done to get the word out that great workplaces are "better for people and better for business," as we say in our tagline.

1. Top 10 Workplace Trends for 2010
2. 10 Best Practices: Offering Vacation Days
3. All Employee Recognition Roads Lead to Greater Company Productivity
4. 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies
5. 10 Small Business People to Follow on Twitter
6. Team Building Improves Hospital's Productivity
7. Toyota Leads Again, This Time in Team Building During Down Times (written prior to their brake recall mess this year)
8. Three Benefits of Virtual Team Building
9. Two Inspiring Stories of Team Building
10. Top 10 Performance Bonus Practices of Our 2010 Small Business Award Finalists

Happy New Year!  Here's to a safe, healthy, and productive 2011!

"You CAN Manufacture in America," claimed the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program in a blog post last week.  They're right – but unfortunately their narrative was dwarfed this week by stories from the Associated Press and others that show more jobs were created overseas this year than in the U.S.

Manufacturing factors prominently among the industries hit by this trend.  As the AP writes,

American jobs have been moving overseas for more than two decades. In recent years, though, those jobs have become more sophisticated — think semiconductors and software, not toys and clothes.

This is underscored by these news bits I found, all published this week:

• Detroit fell from 29th to 45th place in a list of cities with the most manufacturing jobs (source)
• The Philadelphia, PA region lost 107,000 manufacturing jobs over last decade (source)
• The state of Kentucky lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs just since the start of the Great Recession (source)

What can we do to turn this trend around?  One solution is to support small, U.S.-based manufacturing firms.  As we have seen with applicants from this industry for our Top Small Company Workplaces award, the fact that they're so small and typically have one or only a few facilities – all or most of which are based domestically – and, just as important, their focus on innovative team building strategies and other people practices – can mean help for our economy in terms of their growth leading to more tax revenue.  Their financial success also means their workers have stable employment and a paycheck from which to purchase goods and services, supporting their local communities.

My evidence to back this up is derived from this section on the Bureau of Labor Statistics site; specifically the October 2010 data for all-employee employment, mass layoff events, job openings, and separations.  I compared this data to Winning Workplaces' employee engagement research as part of our 2010 award.  The table below shows what I found:

Now granted, the sample sizes are nowhere near similar.  But other than that, you're looking at apples-to-apples: the BLS data is for one month, and for our 2010 TSCW award applicants, I divided their total annual job openings, and openings as a percentage of their workforce, by 12 to get average, monthly data points.

The Job Openings as % of Workforce column is most revealing: across-the-board among BLS firms, it was 1.7%; among our sample of firms with productive workplace cultures, it was 2.7%.  That's 58% more job openings – and again, typically many more jobs as a share of total new jobs created and filled right here in the U.S. of A.

Dig Deeper: Want to learn what these great small workplaces are doing to engage employees and reap better results in everything from recruiting to less repeat work?  Check out the Manufacturing section of the Profiles of Success area of our website.  We recently added 6 new case studies that we wrote for the Hitachi Foundation – 5 of which are our award honorees.

I recently attended a friend's wedding mass, and the priest's sermon contained a bit of wisdom for engaged folks and married couples alike: when love is nurtured it grows, but when it's not it doesn't just remain static – it withers and dies.  In other words, love is perishable.

The same term – perishable – showed up in the title of one of the latest blog posts by our friend, executive coach Wally Bock.  He tells the story of "Dan," a talented technician who, after finding a new job, is de-incented to work to his full potential and take risks because of a lack of employee engagement by his boss.

Leaders and managers: consider the above when planning your activities in 2011 for building trust in the workplace.  Think of your role as a gardener: the strength of your team and the productivity of your workplace culture may well hinge on your willingness and ability to be a "green thumb" in your organization, finding and nurturing those who become tangled in obstacles to growth (especially if those obstacles are in their upward hierarchy).

While we're on the topic of gardening, click on the photo above to read our feature on company-sponsored employee gardens and their workplace benefits.

In 1985, Paul Silvis founded Restek Corporation in Bellefonte, PA, as a manufacturer of chromatography tools for the analytical sciences industry.  Silvis, who has spoken at our annual conference in the past and is set to speak again next week at our joint event with Inc. Magazine in Denver, has been candid about having the technical know-how to fulfill his infant company's mission, but needing to learn business management skills as he went along.

As we shared in our Success Story on Restek, however, one basic but powerful tenet set Silvis apart from many other entrepreneurs of the time: he knew that bureaucracy and "management by intimidation" was the death knell of many small businesses.  He therefore set a different path for Restek, instilling a workplace culture of trust, respect, and fairness.

Some leaders might consider the people practices that formed from this philosophy as "soft," but Restek has seen amazing results from them:

• Silvis was able to promote a successor to him as Head Coach (CEO) two years before his original target date of 20 years from the company's founding.  This has allowed him to transition to run another, related venture, SilcoTek.
• When we wrote our Success Story on the firm, it had achieved annual sales of over $47 million.
• It has recently used its capital to expand into Japan and for acquisitions, such as Glastron Inc. earlier this year.

According to a press release, Restek celebrated its 25th anniversary, appropriately, with a team luncheon on October 15th.  As it reaffirmed publicly in the release,

Restek attributes its success to its unique culture, which has been modeled by other businesses and recognized by numerous local, state, and national awards....

One of these awards is Top Small Workplace, which Winning Workplaces bestowed on the firm in 2007.

Learn more about Silvis' profitable team building strategies – hear him speak at next week's Inc. Leadership Conference.

Yesterday I wrote about the underreported story of how more states enacting hands-free driving laws for public safety is having the side effect of helping sales for headsets and other electronic retail businesses.

Another story I feel has gone largely under the radar in the national media is how employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) have helped organizations – especially small ones – insulate themselves during tough economies like the current one.  I've explored this in past posts like these two, as well as this more recent one from April where I show that among Winning Workplaces' 40 finalists for our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award, the 7 that are ESOPs have posted greater average 2009 revenue and 3-year revenue growth, and a greater share of them are profitable, than the 33 that are not.

As October is Employee Ownership Month, I thought I would help celebrate the payoff of employee engagement and team building that's associated with these programs by sharing the following 5 videos we shot of leaders from some of our award-winning small businesses that are ESOPs.  Be sure to have your notepad handy as you watch them – the subjects offer tips that you can use to implement or improve upon an ESOP in your organization for a stronger workplace culture of ownership.

(If you are viewing this in an RSS feed, you may need to click here to see the videos.)

Bill Loskutoff, Jackson's Hardware - Retail - California:

Sarah McGinley-Smith, King Arthur Flour Company - Manufacturing, Retail - Vermont:

Wally Bateman, Paducah Bank & Trust Company - Financial Services - Kentucky:

Bill Marshall, Phelps County Bank - Financial Services - Missouri:

Mike Foley, Reflexite Corporation - Manufacturing - Connecticut:

Related: Longtime ESOP expert and speaker Corey Rosen of NCEO hosted a webinar for us on options for transitioning ownership.  Access it here.

Image credit: ESOP Association/Entertainment Partners

A perennial political issue, and one that has become even more of a hot button this year in the run-up to the midterm elections in the midst of a tough economy, is the extent to which government creates the conditions for business growth.

I found what amounts to an underreported story about how government is inadvertently helping to improve sales in one particular industry: headsets, a $2 billion market as of 2007, when we wrote our Success Story on Winning Workplaces Best Boss Mike Faith of Headsets.com.

How is government helping the headsets industry?  According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, currently 9 states including the District of Columbia prohibit drivers from using handheld cell phones while driving.  As more states put hands-free driving laws on the books, companies like Headsets.com benefit – not to mention general electronic retailers large and small.

Faith – who will speak at our October 27-29 event with Inc. Magazine in Denver – said as much in a recent article in The Baltimore Sun (Maryland's hands-free driving law just took effect October 1): "Whenever there's a [hands-free] cell phone law passed, we see quite a spike in business in that state immediately before and then a continued uptick in business afterwards as people get pulled over," he told the newspaper.

While more new customers are a great thing, especially in this economy, it's what you do with them that can make the biggest impact on long-term revenue potential and business sustainability.  Using a solid foundation of employee engagement best practices, Faith built a highly successful enterprise channeling them into his philosophy of "Customer Love" well before rampant cell phone driving necessitated state action for public safety.

For leadership insights on everything from growth strategies to stronger team building for a more productive workplace, don't miss the Inc. Leadership Conference.

I enjoyed this post by Jim Estill on his CEO Blog - Time Leadership.  Estill shares a story told by Freakonomics author Steven Levitt about a "lowly IRS clerk" whose idea, once implemented – to start requiring the Social Security Number of children on tax forms to rid the system of kids that were added for the exemption savings but which don't actually exist – resulted in an "overnight" vanishing of 7 million kids.

I hope the clerk, John Silage, got one heck of a raise, as his foresight saved the government (and us, ultimately) billions of dollars!

Estill's takeaways from this anecdote are that data can be as good as gold, and that there is always opportunity to better mine it using the "right analysis."  I agree with him, but I also see a theme shared by many of Winning Workplaces' award-winning small businesses: that employee engagement focused on drawing out the best ideas from low- and mid-level employees (especially) can result in both cost-reducing and revenue-enhancing measures.

We see the benefits of designing organizational strategy from the bottom up again and again as we look at our award winners, as well as our applicants and others in our network.  For example:

• Our Best Boss Michael Lacey's company Digineer saw an additional six figures in revenue from the generation of ideas resulting from its low-cost team building activity of organizing lunches around random groups of employees – a practice they call Lunch Around.
• Our September 15 bottom line-improving people practice email to our subscribers (sign up to start receiving it) revealed how our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award finalist LoadSpring Solutions grew customers 500% from 2006-2009 while decreasing technical support expense as a percentage of revenue over the same period almost exclusively by empowering workers at all levels to make and act on their own decisions.
• This recent post features similar accounts and results from four more applicants for our 2010 award, all in varying industries.  Common among these case studies is that they heavily engage employees from the bottom up, and they have all been profitable in the last three years.

Related: One of our highest-rated Executive Learning Series Webinars to date, which featured CEOs from two more of our award-winning small businesses, addressed best practices in designing strategy from the bottom up.  Check it out here.

Photo credit: TheRecord.com

Selina Lo's story is one that all who are or who aspire to be serial entrepreneurs should study.  The president and CEO of Ruckus Wireless, which she co-founded in 2004, Lo was the company's third employee.  The business has grown to over 200 employees over the past 6 years, reaching close to $33 million in revenue in 2009, when it was named the top telecommunications company and the 26th company overall on the Inc. 500 list.

The Ladies Who Launch site has a great profile on Lo, who will speak at our October 27-29 event with Inc. Magazine in Denver.  It recounts how she has quickly taken very small tech companies and turned them into job and wealth creation centers:

• She co-founded Centillion Networks in 1993 and took it from $6 million to a value of $145 million when it sold just six quarters later.
• In 1995 she joined Alteon WebSystems when it had 20 employees; 4 years into her 6-year tenure with the firm it was purchased by Nortel for $7.8 billion, having grown to over 500 employees.

Clearly, Lo is extending her successful track record with Ruckus.  CXOToday's reporting this week of her debut on Global Telecoms Business' list of the 100 most powerful people in the worldwide telecoms industry says as much.

But for fans and practitioners of people practices that produce a payoff of employee engagement, it is also clear that Lo is a mover and shaker here, too.  Ladies Who Launch quotes her as working on being a workplace culture beacon while loosening her control and encouraging communication and decision making from her employees in her executive career.

For leadership insights on everything from growth strategies to stronger team building for a more productive workplace, don't miss the Inc. Leadership Conference.

I like to reference this statistic that appears on our website when I see folks argue that there is no such thing as a payoff of employee engagement on the bottom line:

From the period of 1998 to 2006, the stock of the companies identified in FORTUNE Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work for in America” list outperformed that of the Standard and Poor’s 500 by over 230 percent.

This 2007 study was cited earlier this month in an article by executive coach Debbie Robins on The Huffington Post.  Since there has been a discussion lately in the business press on whether CEOs should be authentic and swear at work if they feel so inclined, Robins makes the case that these leaders should add one more 4-letter word to their communications bag, but not a profane one: love.

"Fear based, top down cultures aren't going to cut it anymore.  People want to connect.  They want to be a part of a community.  They want to feel loved," she writes.  This is where Jeffrey Hollender – a Winning Workplaces Best Boss and a headlining speaker for our October 27-29 event with Inc. Magazine in Denver – comes in.

The highly successful company Hollender co-founded, Seventh Generation, became a small business success story and household name – and outperformed the S&P 500 – largely by hiring the right people and creating an inviting, inclusive workplace culture within a flat organizational structure.  It's a recipe for success that has been copied (to the extent that any culture strategy can be duplicated) by most of our award-winning small and midsized businesses.

For leadership insights on everything from growth strategies to stronger team building for a more productive workplace, don't miss the Inc. Leadership Conference.

As Julie Urlaub discusses frequently on her Taiga Company blog, creating a green team within your company brings many benefits.  These range from cost cutting and eco-themed PR to better resonate with your customers (or to resonate with more customers) to an increased ability to attract and retain like-minded employees.

In addition to following Julie's blog, I recommend the resources below to help you in your quest to engage employees in green team building strategies, for greater company ROI:

1. 5 Steps to Building an Effective Green Team by Kelly Spors for Small Business Trends (Spors wrote the bulk of the material for the Wall Street Journal Reports on our 2007-2009 Top Small Workplaces when we partnered with the Journal for our award program)
2. Why Should Your Small Enterprise Go Green? on our website
3. 'Greening' Your Firm and Maximizing Profits Not Disparate Goals on our website
4. Success Story: Seventh Generation on our website
5. Success Story: The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) on our website

How does a green focus currently factor into your staff engagement activities?  And how does that help your bottom line?