Winning Workplaces

You read that right. As I monitored our various Google Alerts on Monday this week – the day our media partner, The Wall Street Journal, announced our 2008 Top Small Workplace winners – one of the more "left of center" articles (sorry, I couldn't resist) to come across the digital transom was this piece on Fort Collins Now, a website serving this Colorado city that's about 60 miles north of Denver.

Let's just say that Colorado Governor Bill Ritter has a keen press person working for him, because on the same day he toured one of our 2008 winners, New Belgium Brewing – our only winning firm in that state – as part of an energy tour the Democratic governor is on in support of Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, the remarks he delivered at the 17-year-old, 320-employee craft beer maker "echoed" the comments our panel of judges made about the firm, according to reporter Rebecca Boyle.

FCN reported that the governor toured several "new energy" businesses that fit with the Obama campaign's proposals on this topic on Monday. Certainly an emerging core element of these companies is the extent to which they're sustainable businesses, and New Belgium exemplifies that. They've been a champion since their inception of the "triple bottom line" approach to doing business, and their employee engagement best practices include:

Giving each employee a red bicycle – in line with their distinctive branding – after one year of service
Encouraging coworkers to recycle: they can bring their recyclables from home to the brewery
Maintaining a voluntary program where employees pledge to leave their cars at home and instead commute to work via bicycle

If you'd like to learn more about how New Belgium works sustainability into its mission and employee engagement activities – and how this has translated into enviable bottom line results in 2007 including a 2% voluntary turnover rate and $96 million in revenues – you should check out our hot-off-the-presses 2008 Top Small Workplaces Benchmarking and Best Practices Report.