Team Building

As part of The Wall Street Journal's announcement today of our 2008 Top Small Workplaces, they produced a short video that reveals just a few of the innovative employee engagement activities of four of our 15 winners this year:

King Arthur Flour Company - food manufacturer, catalogue, retail, school - Norwich, VT
Landscape Forms - manufacturing - Kalamazoo, MI
New Belgium Brewing - beer manufacturer - Ft. Collins, CO
Rainforest Alliance - environmental nonprofit - New York, NY

Check it out:

As the moderator of the video – Kelly Spors, who attended the judges meeting here in June that's shown, and wrote the main WSJ feature on this year's winners – concludes, "Happy employees translate into happy customers."

With the economy being where it is right now, and many retail stores in a position of practically begging for holiday foot traffic far earlier than usual, this statement carries substantial weight. Smart business leaders, especially those that run small and midsize firms, are having a collective coming-of-business-age realization that a relatively small investment in their employee engagement best practices can help them hold onto their best people longer, which of course has direct implications on R&D for product and service offerings, and besting their competition when it comes to delivering unrivaled customer service.

We will have an editorial in our October newsletter, due out later today, that will make the link, in no uncertain terms, between the best practices of the 2008 Top Small Workplaces and the ability to weather a tough economy. In the case of many winners and finalists, they have stood the test of time over several generations of bad market conditions. So today's start-ups can definitely learn something here.

If you're looking for even more takeaways on this topic, I encourage you to also attend our Top Small Workplaces Conference, which starts tomorrow in Chicago. While online registration closed last week, you can still register by calling 847-328-9798 or in person at our event venue.

What do you think of the statement that is the title of this post? How have you tried to make this a reality in your organization?