I wanted to share with you two upcoming events for which Winning Workplaces is a promotional partner.  You will surely gain valuable insights at both of them to help you implement employee engagement and team building activities for a more productive workplace – especially at the latter event, whose programming is all about that.

SJF Summit on the New Green Economy: Early Bird registration ends this week

What: SJF Summit on the New Green Economy
When: September 14-15, 2010
Where: Durham Marriott Convention Center, Durham, NC
Event Website: www.sjfsummit.org

Register now for SJF's second annual Summit on the New Green Economy: Accelerating Growth and Impact.  The SJF Summit will be a dynamic gathering of entrepreneurs, investors, government and community leaders  sharing inspiring successes & practical tools and exploring strategic partnerships to build the green economy with opportunities for all.  The event will feature keynotes from Bruce Usher, former CEO of carbon trading firm EcoSecurities, and David Orr, distinguished professor at Oberlin College describing the innovative Oberlin green economy initiative, as well as many more.  There will also be a Cleantech CEO panel and concurrent sessions on the latest in cleantech investing, emerging capital market innovations, green jobs and green economic development strategies, and carbon markets.

Creating Competitive Cultures: Register by August 31 and save $300

What: Creating Competitive Cultures: New Leadership Strategies for Building Great Companies
When: October 27-29, 2010
Where: Denver Marriott City Center, Denver, CO
Event Website: www.competitivecultures.com

Inc., the magazine for growing companies, has partnered with Winning Workplaces to discover and recognize private companies with exemplary workplaces that motivate, engage, and reward employees. Honorees will appear in the June 2010 issue of Inc., and the achievement of these companies will be commemorated at the 2010 Inc. and Winning Workplaces Conference on Creating Competitive Cultures (C3).  At C3, you'll learn about innovative approaches from award-winning companies and extraordinary entrepreneurs, the inspirational tools and processes they deploy to build teams and workplace environments that have a lasting impact on financial results and personal satisfaction.  Creating Competitive Cultures presents the newest leadership strategies for developing the best possible company culture, one that results in a loyal, motivated, inspired, and focused team.

What workplace improvement events, in person or virtual, have you already attended this year?

I've been telecommuting for Winning Workplaces, which is based in the Chicago area, from a home office in Los Angeles since last August.  Until a few months ago, we connected for staff meetings every two weeks or so via phone.  Since then, we've used Skype and it's been great in terms of communications team building.

We actually held a staff meeting today – here's a screen capture I took of it:

Because everyone's time is more valuable in a down economy, and because growing organizations must increasingly manage well over distances, it's extremely important that virtual meetings deliver ROI.  But what goes into making them successful?

Based on my own experience, I have five general/employee engagement practices to share:

1. Double check your Skype or other software connection before the meeting starts.  This includes testing your webcam, as well as settings in Skype (or other programs) such as microphone and computer speaker connection/volume, webcam view of your office or workstation (you may need to zoom in or out with your webcam), and Internet connectivity level.
2. Dress appropriately.  This might go without saying in an office setting, but it's a more important consideration for folks like me who, in working from home, dress more casually during other times.
3. The meeting leader should make a point to check in with the one or more people who are connected virtually if they have not been given a chance to speak up.  This can happen if the group in the room together gets going on a tangent and the discussion quickly veers in a different direction.  Sometimes audio quality issues coupled with this can hurt productivity if they lose the chance to contribute at an appropriate point.
4. The leader should also be clear at the end of the meeting about next steps for virtually connected employees.  The tendency can sometimes be to do this for people on site, and then simply say goodbye to those connected via Skype, et al.
5. As with other tools and processes, don't assume that the virtual meeting solution you have in place now is necessarily the best one moving forward.  The meeting leader or another senior person in the company should check in with the appropriate team members twice a year, at a minimum, to assess whether the solution you currently use is delivering maximum effectiveness for all parties.  You may find this leads you to evaluate new communications tools that will save your business money.

Related: One of our most popular posts is this one, which shares three benefits of virtual team building.

Has email run its course?  For some time a chorus of voices has made this case when it comes to engaging customers.  More recently, though, this case has been made for when business leaders engage employees.

Sue Shellenbarger, a one-time speaker at our annual conference, writes on this topic today in her Wall Street Journal blog The Juggle.  She says drawbacks to communications team building via email include the time needed to review and act on " one-on-one email strings."  She also cites employee engagement research from the Journal of Applied Psychology which suggests that email "may also make users feel less responsible for telling the truth."

A few small businesses in our network have taken the impactful step of barring email communications, whether just on Fridays as Shellenbarger notes she addressed in a past blog post, or always among employees as our Best Boss and Board member Michael Mulqueen did shortly before he exited his leadership role at the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

I think the impact of leaders and managers communicating with employees via means other than email would have a palpable effect on their workplace culture and productivity levels.  The three that I'd most like to see include, in decreasing order of adoption:

1. In person.  Obviously even with great strides in communications technology this still happens – I'd just like to see more of it.  Leaders can accomplish this by continuing to practice MBWA.
2. Phone – specifically CEOs taking a cue from Diane Hessan at Communispace and leaving regular voicemails with relevant and timely information for all employees.
3. As part of a robust company intranet.  Why not tack on messaging to this technology that has proven to greatly improve employees' knowledge and customer response times, particularly for companies concerned with maintaining virtual team building like our honoree Point B?

What's your top three list of alternatives to email?  Or do you think email ain't broke for your business, so there's no need to fix it?

Image credit: Basex Blog

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).

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.

What have your fellow readers found most helpful when it comes to the workplace culture strategies covered here?  On the last day of 2009, I can share with you the following posts, in descending order of popularity.  Enjoy, and see you in 2010....

1. 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies
2. Friday Nugget: Transparency is a Business Model
3. Three Benefits of Virtual Team Building
4. Google Employees Can't Get No Satisfaction?
5. Inclusiveness, Multiculturalism, Employee Engagement the Norm at Phenomenex
6. 12 Ways to Save on Your Holiday Party This Year
7. 30 Reasons Jack Welch is Wrong on Work-Life Balance
8. 10 Ways to Motivate Employees
9. Top 10 Influential Small Business Thought Leaders
10. 10 Small Business People to Follow on Twitter
11. Six Ways to Measure the ROI of Employee Engagement
12. 30 Employee Development Strategies to Boost Productivity
13. Fair Treatment of Employees Counteracts Fear of Pro-Labor Bill
14. Two Inspiring Stories of Team Building
15. Toyota Leads Again, This Time in Team Building During Down Times
16. 10 Best Practices: Offering Vacation Days
17. 10 Company-Building Lessons Learned by a Successful Entrepreneur (Plus 2 Bonus Lessons)
18. Rackspace's Graham Weston: 'No Voicemail Jail for You!'
19. The Crisis of Employee Engagement Among Top Performers
20. 10 Team Building Strategies of the 2009 Top Small Workplaces Finalists

Most, if not all, small businesses are using this quarter to evaluate what worked well this year and where they can improve to retain customers, continue to remain as profitable, and hold on to their best employees heading into 2010.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share what your peers are finding most insightful among our library of articles on investing in your workplace with the goal of building employee engagement – both on this blog and on our website.  So here's a Top 20 list split by site:

Most popular in Q4 2009: winningworkplaces.org

1. Ask An Expert: Representing a Department or Team to Management
2. Feature: Ways to Engage Employees Using Technology That Deliver ROI
3. Success Story: Integrated Project Management (IPM)
4. Ask An Expert: Employee Opinion Surveys
5. Success Story: The Redwoods Group
6. Feature: How Small Businesses Are Increasing Sales in a Recession
7. Feature: Blue Jeans Day
8. Editorial: The Power of Communication
9. Q&A: LifemeetsWork President Kyra Cavanaugh
10. Feature: Michelle Obama Delivers Address at Best Bosses Conference

Most popular in Q4 2009: blog.winningworkplaces.org

1. Top 10 Influential Small Business Thought Leaders
2. Rackspace's Graham Weston: 'No Voicemail Jail for You!'
3. 10 Company-Building Lessons Learned by a Successful Entrepreneur (Plus 2 Bonus Lessons)
4. 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies
5. The Crisis of Employee Engagement Among Top Performers
6. Three Benefits of Virtual Team Building
7. 10 Ways to Motivate Employees
8. Stanford Prof Reinforces Theory: Poor Employee Engagement Will Lead to Talent Exodus
9. 12 Ways to Save on Your Holiday Party This Year
10. 10 Best Practices: Offering Vacation Days

If you find value in any of these links, I encourage you to share this post with your colleagues and contacts using the button below.

Remember the phrase "knowledge worker" that Microsoft and Intel coined back in the '90s?  Tim Keenan, who leads IT services firm High Performance Technologies, Inc. (HPTi), based in Virginia, doesn't like that term.

He prefers "knowledge leader" instead.  In fact, one of his key employee development strategies at HPTi is a comprehensive training program to create knowledge leaders.  Keenan says his leaders have improved HPTi's bottom line through:

• More employees generating ideas
• Problems tackled faster because employees start their questions with "What if we..." instead of "What's wrong with..."
• Fewer employees who pass the buck in dealing with customers, which results in faster service at lower levels and fewer negative customer comments

Ultimately, Keenan says he wants to engage employees to create leaders because they "take ownership of an issue and drive it to its best possible conclusion."

In the following interview clip with Keenan, he details how HPTi's knowledge leader training works for four distinct groups of employees:

mp3 - 6.1 MB - 6:41

Related:

• Our Success Story on HPTi
• Access our webinar recording on virtual team building, in which Keenan is a co-presenter

As I've mentioned previously, I am now doing my writing, web content management, and marketing duties for Winning Workplaces in a home office environment in sunny Los Angeles (our headquarters is in the Chicago area).

It's been a somewhat rocky road getting here – or at least not as smooth a transition as I had anticipated.  So I thought I would try to illuminate the way forward so those undertaking this change in work arrangement (or considering it) will be better prepared for it.

Here are 10 best practices from my own experience.  Feel free to add to this list by sharing your own thoughts or experiences below.

1. To have a better chance of getting buy-in from leadership, explain how service levels will be maintained, and/or costs saved.  I do 98% of my work on a computer, so I knew I could be based anywhere.  I was also able to identify cost savings as a result of not needing to take public transportation to work and have that be reimbursed (a company benefit).
2. You can't over-communicate to your coworkers as far as when you're leaving.  Make sure they have ample lead time to be able to wrap up any standing projects before you hit the road, Jack.
3. Whatever amount of time you think you'll need to pack up your workspace, double it.  Trust me, you'll run short on time here if you make a conservative or even middle-of-the-road estimate.
4. Another note on packing: it's a great opportunity for spring cleaning!  Which files do you really need?  (How many are already stored electronically?)  How much space do you envision in your home office?  That will help dictate how many boxes you'll need.  This is another opportunity to demonstrate a cost savings to your employer if, like me, you need to have your files shipped to you: "I thought I would need eight boxes, but I did some consolidating and I only need five."
5. If – again, like me – you're not merely moving your office to where you live now but are relocating to a new city, don't forget to think about how your new 'hood will affect your work environment.  Arrange multiple on-site visits if possible at different times of the day so you can get a sense of anything that might be an external distraction, such as traffic or construction.  On a related note, could your work activity annoy your neighbors?  (Maybe you like to blast music while making sales calls.  I don't know.)
6. Your new home office space shouldn't be an afterthought.  Especially if you have a family, you need to be intentional about the workspace.  Draw up a floorplan (a crude, napkin-quality one is fine) and map out the dimensions of your space.
7. When doing the above step, think about the work environment you've been used to and what you'd like it to be.  Are you the kind of person who works best with a general din going on around you?  You might not need a room all to yourself in this case.  If you're worried about pets or kids disturbing you, though, and feel you need to isolate yourself to do your best work, make your own room – or at least a cordoned-off area with the help of tension rods and curtains – a priority.
8. High-speed Internet is an absolute must.  Shop around for an ISP in your area that can provide both Business Class Internet and a static IP address.  You'll need the latter to set up a virtual private network (VPN) with the help of hardware like this.  (Yet another cost savings opportunity for your employer: if you think you'll use your work PC for both business and home, offer to split the monthly cost of the Internet connection with them.)
9. You will undoubtedly miss that person-to-person contact you had in your regular office environment.  Your phone and a webcam can be vital tools to help you feel as connected as you were before.  When communicating via email, be clear about project expectations and deadlines, and encourage the same from your coworkers.  You'll find that minutes of staff meetings, especially those you may miss while transitioning, are as good as gold.
10. It is even more important when working from home to learn and put to use this time-tested business lesson: know when to say no.  Make it a habit to under-promise and over-deliver.

Working from home can improve your virtual team building skills to enhance employee leadership development.  From a management perspective, because it promotes work/life balance, it can be a great way of investing in your workplace.  If you have questions about how work-from-home arrangements can help your business, give us a call at 847-328-9798.

Could we have cut the Obama Administration's economic stimulus package, signed into law earlier this year, from close to $800 billion down to $500 billion based solely on leaders' and managers' better behavior toward those they supervise?  Could we have saved taxpayers a good deal of this burden?

That's my take after reading this summary of a new book out called The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It.  In it, the co-authors, from two management schools, review various workplace research and find that:

• 4 out of 5 employees who were victims of insults or bullying in the workplace lost valuable work time worrying about the incident
• Virtually the same percentage said their commitment to the organization declined as a result of this incident
• Even more troubling, if a customer witnesses workplace incivility, that customer decides to not re-patronize the business 50% of the time

When you multiply numerous incidents like this in one organization across the over 25 million small businesses in the U.S., you can see how this quickly morphs from an individual problem affecting a firm's competitiveness to one of national concern with regard to our rebounding, albeit fragile economy.

It's worth noting that the suggestions the authors of this book provide to help with building trust in the workplace are ones that you'll find scattered throughout the Success Stories we write on small firms that have good team building strategies down pat:

• Zero tolerance for bad behavior expectations communicated early and often
• Establish norms (core values) for all employees to live by
• Weed out trouble early in the employee hiring process
• Support of the leadership team is instrumental

How conscious are you of the costs that bad behavior adds to your business?  What are you doing to reduce them?

One of the reasons why 93 folks have already registered for our ROI of Great Workplaces Conference in October in Chicago is because the ones who are past attendees know that this event attracts good people.  The kind of people you'd like to know, who check their ego at the door.

Why is this important when it comes to gearing up on best practices in employee engagement to help your bottom line?  A new study by researchers at the Florida State University College of Business finds that narcissistic bosses destroy morale and, as a result, drive down the bottom line.

Says Wayne Hochwarter, a professor of managment at FSU,

Having a narcissistic boss creates a toxic environment for virtually everyone who must come in contact with this individual.  The team perspective ceases to exist, and the work environment becomes increasingly stressful.  Productivity typically plummets as well.

Sometimes, if you're working in a startup with the founder, CEO, and funder (all wrapped up in one person) you can't get around an ego that can sometimes – or even often – damage workplace team building.  However, when the business has moved beyond startup, demonstrated a path to financial success, and has a diverse management team in place, a leader's destructive ego should be next on the chopping block.

Two great people who I can personally vouch for, as I met them at our 2008 conference, Tamsin Jolley of Decagon Devices and Tim Schultz of Lundberg Family Farms (both Top Small Workplaces) will address this in their session Leading Through Growth and Expansion at our October conference.

What is your experience with bosses whose behavior leads to deficits in employee engagement?

The UK has been an innovator when it comes to fashion and pop music.  Now we can add employer-employee relations to that list.

According to UK site Management-Issues, the government of the country that brought us that televised crystalization of productivity gone bad, The Office,

yesterday called for a "nationwide discussion" to better understand the effect of employee engagement on performance.

When I considered this news with the Obama Administration's affinity for "czars" to oversee such policy areas as healthcare, the economy, energy, and urban issues, I came to the conclusion that we need a czar focused exclusively on helping organizations better understand how making good use of everything from employee retention tips to virtual team building practices (enquiries on the latter, after all, have risen steadily over the past year, according to one recent study) can decrease absenteeism and turnover and boost productivity to grow revenues.

It goes without saying the effect this would have not just on a micro, company level but on our GDP.  Did you know, for instance, that parents who are too stressed out at work cost organizations (and thus our country) $300 billion annually in lost productivity?

Too bad, given her popularity, that this czar can't be Michelle Obama.  She gets small business' potential for employee satisfaction and customer and community enrichment – in 2006, when she was still VP for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, she spoke at our annual conference.

Do you agree with me that we need a czar focused on fostering employee leadership development at U.S. firms?  Why or why not?  If yes, who would be your pick for this post?

It's no secret, from companies' perspective, why telecommuting – arranging employees' schedules so they're working from home or otherwise outside the office one or more days per week – is becoming more popular.  The LA Times reported last week that virtual assistants cut overhead costs.  Cisco Systems has added to this dialogue by announcing it has saved over $270 million in productivity costs by allowing some of its workforce to telecommute.

But from the employee's perspective, while often their initial impression of this arrangement is sipping coffee while lazily working in their pajamas, the reality is often starkly different.  Many at-home or outside-the-office workers worry that their progress on projects is not meeting supervisor expectations.  This worry can extend to phone and email communications – "What did my boss mean when he said that in this way?"

I addressed this aspect of employee engagement and virtual team building recently with Kyra Cavanaugh, President and Founder of LifemeetsWork.  For our Q&A with her that will appear in our forthcoming July IDEAS newsletter, I asked her what employees can do to manage work/life balance in a telecommuting situation and not feel they need to be overworking in order to show decent returns to their managers.  Here's what she advised they do:

mp3 - 3.5 MB - 3:51

Briefly, her tips for telecommuters include:

• If you're a top performer based on regular manager feedback, don't worry that you'll be the first to be cut if jobs are on the line at your organization.
• Use transparency to your advantage.  For example, your company can host a project-tracking website for a nominal expense that logs your projects and reports on it to your supervisor as well as issues encountered and supervisor feedback.
• Ask specific questions about your performance expectations, and be clear about your own limitations or boundaries.
• In the absence of nonverbal cues that can be taken for granted in an in-person setting, when you communicate with your supervisor via phone and email, pay close attention to the cues that do emerge.  For example, if you're accustomed to getting multi-paragraph emails from your boss while in the office with good feedback on your performance and those stop or slow down when you're out of the office, it's up to you to bring that up and get to the bottom of why the nature of communications have changed.
• You can't over-communicate!

To read our full interview with Kyra when our newsletter goes out, subscribe to it here.  It's free.

I grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota.  Both states have taken a cultural beating through movies like Fargo and, more recently, New In Town.  Even in Winning Workplaces' home base of Chicago – which is not that far flung from those states – I run into people who don't know where those states are and, even if they do, think the population up there is basically zero.

Given this mindset, I'm happy when I can do my part to follow in the footsteps of resources like Small Biz Survival and show people that, yes, entrepreneurship is alive and well in rural areas.  The latest proof of this is this article in my old hometown paper, the West Fargo Pioneer, that talks about how a retired teacher at my former high school is heading up a local entrepreneur challenge.

Here's the skinny of this program according to the Pioneer:

As project consultant for the fledgling program, [Paul] Tefft hopes to help develop a network of innovative marketing and business opportunities for students at the eighth and ninth grade level.  Four goals of the program will be to work with the DECA program to help expand the development of marketing opportunities for eighth and ninth graders, create a youth mentorship network with area businesses, develop an annual innovation competition to promote technology-based career opportunities, and to create a virtual entrepreneurial challenge to help engage students as they learn about business and marketing strategies.

This sounds like a fantastic program – the model for which, if successful, could be copied elsewhere.  As Tefft and company develop their program and prepare students to tackle business challenges, I hope they will also focus on people practices such as daily huddles, virtual team building, and other measures designed to bring out the commitment and productivity of the employees the students may one day supervise.

Thanks to another emerging voice in rural entrepreneurship, Greg Tehven of Students Today Leaders Forever, for pointing me to this story.

What are your thoughts on the availability and effectiveness of rural programs to encourage entrepreneurship?

Photo credit: The Montana Journalism Review

If you haven't checked out Management-Issues, what are you waiting for?  Longtime readers of this blog – and our followers on Twitter for that matter – have seen me reference them often, and for good reason.  Of the entrepreneur and business sites I follow, this is one of the most consistent for team building stories and actionable employee engagement best practices.

In their most recent post, for instance, Nic Paton shares five tips for keeping virtual teams on track, based on a recent study by corporate training provider VitalSmarts.  They are:

• Talk before problems start.
• Praise early wins.
• Never raise individual concerns publicly.
• Start by clarifying what you DON'T want to say.
• Gain allies before raising problems with a group.

Along with work issues concerning Millennials, I have taken a particular interest in this topic as I will soon join the telecommuting workforce.

For other Management-Issues posts I've commented on, type "management-issues" into the Search box on the right, just above the Categories listing.

Several of our applicants for Top Small Workplaces 2009 are based in the U.S., and yet have some or most of their workforce in countries such as India and China.  So the question arose in our judges meeting here last week: Does a foreign-based workforce that results in fewer jobs for a struggling, jobs-thirsty American economy – a workforce that's treated the same as the company's U.S. workers are treated – prevent that company from being named as a Top Small Workplace?

You'll have to wait until September 28 to find out the answer our judges gave, which will no doubt be part of the coverage our media partner for TSW, The Wall Street Journal, provides in their Top Small Workplaces 2009 Journal Report that will go out that day.

In the meantime, I want to know what you think about this.  Besides providing your answer to the question above, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the impact a globally diverse workforce has on virtual team building and other measures for investing in your workplace.

Please add a comment below with your thoughts.  Thanks.

I remember reading this statistic by Forrester Research back in March: 43% of U.S. workers will telecommute by 2016.  I circled back to it today after reading this new post by America's Best Companies (ABC).  It talks about how Washington (particularly Rep. James Himes from Connecticut) is working on legislation that would remove tax penalties for employees who live in one state but work in another.

This is a topic I'm actively researching because in August I will set up Winning Workplaces' first home/satellite office – mine.  I look forward to serving as a guinea pig on this emerging trend so my successes and pitfalls can inform your employee engagement and communications team building strategies for those workers who may telecommute to your office.

I agree with the reasons that Forrester Research's Ted Schadler states as to why telecommuting will be more widely adopted:

• More broadband pipes to homes, work laptops, and secure VPNs.  Schadler's point is strengthened by the progressive views on broadband access advocated by President Obama's pick to head the FCC.
• Employees are making more, and stronger, cases to their bosses that telecommuting will save the company time, and thus money.
• Business leaders benefit from an ease-in approach: Forrester found that "The number of full time telecommuters today is small compared with 'regular telecommuters.'"
• "[M]anagers and other high-influence employees ... are most likely to work from home regularly or occasionally.  And that means their growing comfort with the ability to monitor and manage employee productivity will spill over into their support for a telecommuting workforce."

The newer ABC article digs deeper, addressing people practices that lead to a more productive workplace as a result of greater telecommuting:

• Improved productivity
• Personnel retention
• Reduced office overhead
• Reduced absenteeism
• Wider recruiting pool
• Stronger continuity plans

All of this said, I predict that the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act of 2009 sponsored by Rep. Himes will not be the last, nor the most sweeping legislation that will come out of Washington and the states to help companies benefit from the reduced costs and increased productivity potential of this emerging trend.

Stay tuned as I relate my experiences on my journey toward telecommuting full-time from Los Angeles....

Related: Our interview with Intelligent Office Founder Ralph Gregory that addresses virtual team building.

As we get ready to host Mike Foley, CEO of 2007 Top Small Workplace Reflexite Corporation, for a webinar on "Two Perspectives on Succession" on May 27, I'm looking over my notes of a webinar that Mike presented for us a year ago, "Building an Ownership Mentality Among Employees."

In that session, in which Bill Marshall of fellow 2007 winner Phelps County Bank also lent his time and expertise, Mike revealed six elements that make up their ownership culture at Reflexite, a Connecticut-based manufacturer of optical components and film with over 500 employee-owners spread across 22 locations worldwide and over $80 million in annual revenues.

Here they are:

1. Share ownership with all employees, worldwide – employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) started in 1983; average ESOP account of $120,000; "international ESOP" phantom plan mirroring U.S. plan
2. Participative management – open-book management with training on the financials and monthly updates at all sites; engage employees on key decisions including Board elections and managing change
3. Specialized communication techniques – In addition to open-book: frequent meetings, monthly meetings at all sites by business leader, quarterly meetings in person at larger sites by CEO, web simulcasts, town meeting approach to major decisions, goal to answer all questions
4. Share rewards – includes both short term such as on-time delivery and reducing customer returns (continuous improvement) and long term: ESOP allocation tied to annual business performance
5. Confidential employee opinion surveys – leadership especially watches voluntary participation rate (historically at 90% or above) and comments for firm-wide improvement
6. Specialized training at average of 40 hours/year/employee – on areas including company quality system, personal financial management, effective communication, stress management, negotiation, and team leader skills

Notably, with the exception of the ESOP and open-book components necessitated by Reflexite's nature of ownership, virtually all of the above elements can be adopted by businesses that don't want to implement an ESOP, but yet still wish to enjoy the benefits of having employees think and act like owners.  And isn't that every company?

For more employee engagement strategies from Mike Foley at Reflexite, tune in to our webinar next week on succession planning.

Photo credit: Reflexite

With the combination of a recession and ever more technological tools to help HR folks and recruiters select the best candidate for an open position, it may be tempting to treat the inevitable in-person employee interview almost as a formality.  If someone looks great on paper and they have the collegial/communication chops to back it up, they're a fit, right?

Not so fast, say many of the small organizations we've highlighted as having both great workplace team building and sound businesses.  One of the ways these firms are a differentiator in the marketplace is their patient, measured approach to hiring.

Why are they more like the turtle than the hare in this regard?  As 2006 Best Boss Mike Faith put it when we wrote a Success Story on his company, Headsets.com, "Each employee is really a key hire for us."  Virtually all of our honored small firms feel the same way because they've worked hard to create highly specialized workplace cultures and they don't want a wrench to be thrown into the machinery, so to speak.

With that in mind, here are some articles on our site that will give you a sense of how you might slow down and reevaluate your processes to make better hiring decisions (meaning getting employees who are more motivated and productive and who stay longer):

Headsets.com Success Story mentioned above
Takeaway: All candidates go through 7-8 interviews

Profile of 2008 Top Small Workplaces Finalist Menlo Innovations
Takeaway: "extreme interviewing" in which how the person acts in small group settings is evaluated

Success Story on 2007 Top Small Workplace Corporate Ink
Takeaway: CEO asks potential supervisors of new hires, "Would this person have your back?"

Success Story on 2008 Top Small Workplace ATA Engineering
Takeaway: New hires meet with all levels of employees including the president; all employees involved have an equal vote on whether the candidate is the best fit

Summary of "60 Ideas in 60 Minutes" session from our 2007 Top Small Workplaces Conference
Takeaway: Pair candidate with "someone who they might perceive to be a peon and see how they react to and respect that person"

Do you use any of these as part of your employee engagement activities?  What additional "long horizon" hiring tips would you add?

If you're new here, you're probably wondering what's good – just as you would if you were visiting a new city.  Well, I've listed our 10 most popular posts ("points of interest," if you will) below on workplace team building and getting employees engaged since we started this blog last June.

Check out what your fellow readers have found most helpful and inspiring:

1. Friday Nugget: Transparency is a Business Model
2. Three Benefits of Virtual Team Building
3. 20 Proven Workplace Team Building Strategies
4. Fair Treatment of Employees Counteracts Fear of Pro-Labor Bill
5. 10 Small Business People to Follow on Twitter
6. Toyota Leads Again, This Time in Team Building During Down Times
7. Inclusiveness, Multiculturalism, Employee Engagement the Norm at Phenomenex
8. Google Employees Can't Get No Satisfaction?
9. Two Inspiring Stories of Team Building
10. Friday Nugget: 15 More Blogs for Small Business and Entrepreneurship

What piques your interest most from this list and why?