Winning Workplaces

Employee Engagement Trick: Get in on the Conversation Quickly

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:36:17 +0100

Are you ready for a very short post (after my last, long one) with a very effective tip for employee engagement and manager team building?

One of my friends who's an attorney came up with this a while back to comfortably break the ice with a group of people who are talking and get immediately up to speed on what they're talking about. Instead of saying,

Excuse me, but what are you talking about?

ask,

Whose birthday is it?

My friend has found that when he does this, without fail someone responds, "Oh, it's no one's birthday. We were just talking about _____."

The uses for this trick in the workplace are many:

Owners, leaders, managers – use to encourage productivity before or after daily huddles, or any time you see groups of employees gathered in discussion.
Low- and mid-level employees – use to break into the convo with both workers at your level and even supervisors.
New hires – use as a smooth ice breaker to meet your coworkers and get a sense of the organization's pulse.

Try this as part of your employee engagement best practices, and let me know how it works for you by dropping a comment below. Enjoy!

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Sharing the Twitter Love: Follow These 10 People

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:58:04 +0100

In the July/August issue of Inc., Lorien Gabel, the Founder of Pingg, shares his Twitter strategy. It's an uncommon one – instead of focusing on volume of followers and flooding them with product or service links, he uses TweetDeck to track what's being said under 10 terms that matter to his business, which provides "free stylish online invites and announcements, worthy of print."

In other words, he's mainly in listen-only mode. As I've been reading more evidence that on Twitter, quality of audience matters more than quantity, I've focused on this, too.

This is how I came across many of the following thought leaders who are active on Twitter. These people have been kind enough to RT (retweet) one or more of my posts on our Twitter account. So today I return the love and post their IDs so you can check them out and follow them, too, if you wish.

I guarantee that each of these people will help you generate and execute employee engagement ideas as part of a strategy for investing in your workplace:

Kim Fabian (@TeamBuildingMD)
Twitter bio: Take your team to the top with Baltimore-area corporate team-building programs in golf, cooking, yoga, wine tasting, Spinning, scavenger hunts and more

Kevin Kennemer (@ThePeopleGroup)
Twitter bio: Company Culture Expert, Workplace Consultant, Speaker and Writer

Becky Robinson (@LeaderTalk)
Twitter bio: Writer. Blogger for Mountain State University, Leadership Development, Social Media, Mom, Homeschooler

Kelly Spors (@KellySpors)
Twitter bio: Freelance writer & former Wall Street Journal entrepreneurship reporter & blogger
(I've known Kelly since before we got started on Twitter but thought she was a great addition to this list.)

SBDC DaytonaBeach (@DaytonaBchSBDC)
Twitter bio: SBDC helps businesses become more successful. Starting business, buying business, growing business, selling business or looking for financing, we can help

Steve Roesler (@steveroesler)
Twitter bio: Designing success at the intersection of people and work

Ken Gaebler (@gaeblerdotcom)
Twitter bio: All about small business and entrepreneurship!

Pamela Grow (@PamelaGrow)
Twitter bio: The ultimate resource for the harried one-person nonprofit development office - and fundraising newbies. Author of Five Days to Foundation Grants.

Janet Morris (@JanetATHP)
Twitter bio: HP US Small Medium Business Marketing. The opinions expressed by me are not intended to be those of HP.

Peg Rowe (@pegrowe)
Twitter bio: I work with leaders and teams to increase their effectiveness and ensure alignment with the organization’s purpose,strategy and goals

Related: Our post on 10 specifically small business people to follow on Twitter.

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How to Ensure Telecommuting Doesn't Take Over Your Personal Life

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:25:18 +0100

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.

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What an Inspired Employee Looks Like

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:47:48 +0100

A big part of what we talk about when we discuss team building strategies for greater workforce effectiveness is recruiting and developing employees who are so inspired by the company's mission and goals that they become nothing short of company evangelists. Harder to pin down, though, is what an inspired employee looks like, or acts like.

A good example of this appears here. My colleague Jason spotted this blog post last week while wrapping up his Success Story on our 2008 Top Small Workplace The Redwoods Group, which will go out in our July IDEAS newsletter later this week. He was especially moved by this portion of what Redwoods employee Dan Baum wrote:

There's so much potential and need for [sending employees to work with Habitat for Humanity] by for-profit corporations. Non profits and NGOs are strapped, especially in this financial crisis, and governments aren’t always effective and can’t do it all. On the other hand, there’s so much untapped potential in the corporate world: money, people, brainpower, expertise, resources, etc. Today there are many companies touting their socially responsible business practices, yet there is still so much room for many of them to invest more fully, not simply financially but also in their attitude, decision making processes and goals, in making the world a better place.

...

Redwoods allows me to do what I think we all hope for: live one whole life without compartmentalization, meaning that I don’t need a work version of me and a non-work version of me, but that I can be me all the time.

Let's take a closer look at this post and examine the hallmarks of an inspired employee:

Leadership-sanctioned platform for employee engagement and communication with the outside world – in this case, Redwoods' Thoughts from Zambia blog.
Clear understanding of how the organization fulfills a need, including shortfalls/opportunities of the current marketplace.
Clear understanding of how the employee's actions help the firm accomplish its mission (for for-profits – make money).
What I like to call the culture of ownership elevator pitch. (Who can read Baum's second paragraph cited above and not want to work for Redwoods?)
Perhaps most importantly, ongoing leader or manager feedback – in this case from no less than Redwoods President and CEO (and 2009 Top Small Workplaces judge) Kevin Trapani.

Whether it's a blog or some other communications vehicle – a newsletter, wiki, or company intranet, for instance – you'd be surprised how much inspiration you can whip up among your staff by encouraging more open communication.

Related: Our July newsletter will contain results of a survey of both our registered website users and past honorees on ways to engage employees using technology. Subscribe to it here and get it as soon as we send it out.

Photo credit: 2008 Top Small Workplaces Finalist Steppenwolf Theatre Company

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Facebook's Appeal to an Older Audience is Good for Your Team Building

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:10:44 +0100

As Molly DiBianca points out today on The Delaware Employment Law Blog, Facebook is growing up – and I don't mean as a business (although that is happening too). She cites a much-reported study by iStrategyLabs which found that since January 2009, users of the ubiquitous social networking site aged 35-54 have increased 190%. More startling is that users aged 55 or older have increased 590%.

Why is this good news for your workplace team building and overall employee engagement activities to spur greater productivity? As this article, also from today in the Chicago Tribune's Red Eye paper, explains, some employers are looking past the research that says such sites are productivity wasters and are experimenting with opening employee access to them to give them more freedom to chat with their friends to solve work problems or find useful business contacts.

The other justification for opening access to Facebook, et al, Red Eye notes, is because

the rising popularity of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other devices with Web access and messaging have made it much trickier to enforce what's being done on work time, particularly on an employee's personal phone. Or often the staff uses unapproved software applications to bypass the blocks.

So leaders and owners at some employers are weighing spending more time, money, and talent on blocking access – or saving some of those finite resources, opening access, and doing a better job of training managers to look for signs of abuse of that access.

There are some key reasons why, when done within a framework of mutually agreed upon and understood communication policies and procedures, allowing employees to login to social networking sites can lead to better results for your business in the long run:

The younger generations coming into the workforce, Generations Y and Z, are accustomed to it. Choking off access altogether could give the impression that your organization is archaic, and that could adversely affect your recruiting efforts.
There have been a number of news articles lately on how technology divides different generations of workers. Allowing access for all of them in your company promotes informal learning, so older employees not in the know can get up to speed with the help of your younger, generally more tech-adept employees. With the economy delaying retirement for many older workers, a keen leadership presence here could improve your firm's rep as an employer of choice for older workers.
Restricting access completely prohibits rule-abiding employees – those that would not visit such sites during their work hours – from checking them during lunch or other breaks where they're not on "company time."
If you advocate open communication practices as part of your core values, restricting access to these sites could be seen as hypocritical, which could demoralize employees and prevent growth from within.
Monitoring what employees are saying about your firm doesn't necessarily require an equally tech-savvy manager. Just have one staff person create a Google Alert for your organization. They get emailed with any and all references, including those created from within on social networking sites. Done!
Perhaps most importantly, restricting access to these sites prevents both your sales and marketing staff, and those in other departments or areas, from extending your company brand through their personal points of contact.

What are your thoughts on this issue? I'm particularly interested in a counterpoint view in which closed access improves building trust in the workplace.

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New and Improved Supporters Wall of Fame

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:49:53 +0100

A quick anecdote that shows the value of a small workplace: Last week our chairman stopped by our office and asked if we could give the table on the Supporters page on our site a makeover so people who have given to our cause (see below) can find themselves more easily. I said sure, and the next day I changed the format to a linkable list in alpha order, reflected in the screen capture you see above.

The lesson? Nimbleness is small business' (or in our case, nonprofit's) virtue. And if small size is the engine that propels action to meet customers' increasingly agile needs, good team building and employee engagement practices are the fuel that power that combustion. (Dig into these practices by browsing the Categories listing on your right.)

My update of our Supporters wall of fame last week was more than cosmetic, however. Here are the latest individuals and groups who have donated to our Scholarship and Special Assistance Fund. We extend a grateful Thank You to them all:

Bettylu and Paul Saltzman
Chicago Public Radio
Goldman Sachs & Co.
M5 Networks
Oak Value Capital Management, Inc.
P. Schoenfeld Asset Management LP
Shirley & Dick Jaffee
The Richard H. Driehaus Charitable Lead Trust

If you would like to become a Supporter you can do so in one of three ways:

Purchase a Dinner Table for eight at our ROI of Great Workplaces Conference in October in Chicago. You can purchase a table for your employees, vendors, customers, or others you'd like to sponsor to attend.
Buy tickets to the conference. Again, these could be for you, people you work with, or others.
Donate on our website to our Scholarship and Special Assistance Fund.

Related: Previous update of 2009 additions to our Supporters wall

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LinkedIn Group Milestone - 400 Members

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:34:55 +0100

Thanks to Dennis Gibb, President of Sweetwater Investments in Washington state, for becoming the 400th person to join Winning Workplaces' LinkedIn group. Our group has grown steadily since I announced back in February that it had reached 300 members.

Go LinkedIn-ers!

Why do people join?

It's free
Networking with like-minded folks looking to implement successful team building and employee engagement strategies
Learning through member discussions and news postings

Speaking of discussions, here's what members are talking about and want your take on:

Melissa – most/least effective thing a CEO has done in a meeting
Michelle – recommended classic and contemporary business books
Hanna – access to free seminars on avoiding employee lawsuits and making effective business apologies
Anne - tips to manage four generations in the workforce

Join our group today to engage and benefit from our growing network on LinkedIn.

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Kauffman Foundation: Great Companies More Likely to Launch in Recession

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:00:39 +0100

I enjoyed this interview with Kauffman Foundation President Carl Schramm that appeared in the June issue of Inc. magazine. In it, Schramm shares this message based on their research of 2008 Inc. 500 and Fortune 500 companies: "Don't despair. Good things grow even in the darkest times."

While "great" in the context of both the Inc. and Fortune competitions typically means fast, high growth, we know by studying those annual lists that human capital strategies that encourage strong workplace team building and employee engagement not only contribute to that type of growth, but pave the way for sustained growth marked by CEO longevity, low turnover, and year-over-year profitability.

Sustained growth was one of the factors the judges for our 2009 Top Small Workplaces competition with The Wall Street Journal looked for when they met here last week. The Kauffman Foundation was represented on our judging panel, for the third year in a row, by their VP of Emerging Strategies, Judith Cone.

Once again this year, we conducted interviews with some of our judges, including Cone. Check out her segment below, where she discusses the impact the tough economy had on her picks for this year's Winners (which will be announced in the Journal on September 28):

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All Employee Recognition Roads Lead to Greater Company Productivity

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:59:10 +0100

I love the concept of a virtuous cycle. Made even more popular in business circles by Jim Collins, Rackspace Hosting Chairman Graham Weston will be putting his own small business spin on it when he delivers his keynote address at our conference in October.

If you've never heard of a virtuous cycle, it looks like this in the context of employee engagement and customer satisfaction:

The opposite of this, which your company needs to avoid to remain competitive (in both the marketplace and in employee recruiting and retention) is the dreaded doom loop. I don't think I need to post a graphic of that for you to get the concept: When employees are treated poorly, they quit or become disgruntled, your service levels go down, your customers get angry, and they then tell their friends how bad you are.

One of the main tools in your arsenal to keep your organization in a virtuous cycle of team building is a strong employee recognition program. To get you started in this, or to help you improve yours, see these links on our website:

Additionally, check out recent perspectives on employee rewards and recognition from these thought leaders:

Employee Recognition: Small Budget, Big Payback - Make Their Day Blog
Rewarded Employees Work Harder - Good Company Blog
Leadership, Happiness, and Satisfaction - All Things Workplace

Related: One of the sessions recently added to the agenda of our upcoming ROI of Great Workplaces Conference is "Engaging Employees in Building and Sustaining Strong Customer Relationships." Check it out along with the rest of the developing agenda here.

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Airline Customer Service: The Difference Employee Engagement Makes

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:07:14 +0100

If there's an angle in the story of Dave Carroll's "United Breaks Guitars" YouTube smash that's being missed, it's the difference a workplace culture characterized by team building strategies to keep employees engaged makes.

Don't believe me? First check out Dave's musical tribute to a customer service wall he ran into last year at United Airlines after they broke his prized Taylor guitar (the ultimate tragedy for a guitar player like yours truly)...

...and now check out these videos that speak to the high level of customer engagement and satisfaction delivered by Southwest Airlines – a company that, as their President Emeritus and our Top Small Workplaces judge Colleen Barrett says, is really in the customer service business, but uses air transportation to deliver that:

To learn more about what it is that Southwest does at the manager level to ensure good communication across its locations and employees, read our interview with Barrett.

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Proving That Entrepreneurship Knows No Geographical Bounds

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:47:38 +0100

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

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Find Out What Banks Are Looking for in Today's Economy

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:23:55 +0100

As I shared in April and May – thanks to the road-tested wisdom of Jim Stoynoff, President of Synthesis Solutions – investing in your workplace and improving your employee engagement strategies can have a real impact when it comes to dealing with your banker to maintain your lines of credit, or get access to new ones.

Since then, understanding what banks are looking for in their small business clients has become more critical, and as a consequence a more popular topic in business education circles. So it is with pleasure that I am able to pass along to you today an offer for a FREE online seminar on this topic that will take place on August 12.

Blackman Kallick, our source for several articles in recent Winning Workplaces IDEAS newsletters, is offering our blog readers a complimentary seat in the seminar What Are Banks Looking for in Todays Economy?, which is hosted by the American Mold Builders Association (AMBA). For more info on this seminar, see this flyer.

To register for free, visit this page on AMBA's website. Under Membership Status, make sure to select "By Blackman Kallick Invitation."

If you attend this seminar, I'd love to read your feedback. Feel free to drop me a comment below.

Image credit: AMBA

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The Golden Rule: Not Typical of B-School Curricula, But Necessary for Successful Small Businesses

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:36:53 +0100

Dharmesh Shah wrote a post on the OnStartups blog yesterday that has generated a ton of comments. Apparently the topic of things MBA schools won't teach you about startups is a resonant one. Makes sense, since due to economy-spawned layoffs many former employees are striking out on their own, contributing to an increase in entrepreneurship.

I smiled when I read #4 in Shah's Top 10 list:

It helps not to call people "human resources". They're people. And, as it turns out, people like to be treated like people. Go figure.

People do like to be treated like people, as our research into small organizations that create a culture of ownership and actively solicit and implement employee engagement ideas shows. What's more – CEOs, are you listening? – living the Golden Rule in your workplace can improve your metrics across the board, from employee to customer retention.

Here are some applications for the Golden Rule in business, culled from our website:

How does the Golden Rule play out in your firm?

Image credit: About.com

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5 Virtual Team Building Tips from Management-Issues

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:39:19 +0100

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.

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Does Foreign Workforce = U.S. Top Small Workplace?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:55:55 +0100

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.

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