Thursday, August 12th, 2010 | Posted by Team Building Activity Tips

Evidence Employee Engagement Helps Companies Expand Instead of Close?

This new post on the Business Pundit blog caught my attention: Citing data from Wall St. Cheat Sheet, it contains a map of the U.S. showing the scope of business closures in FY 2009. The number of closures are given for states suffering from the highest number of them, including New York, California, Texas, Georgia, and Florida.

This is across-the-board data, representing all businesses, large and small. But what about just small businesses? And more specifically, as a point of discussion relative to the findings from Wall St. Cheat Sheet, how many of them are expanding or planning to expand in this environment?

Our employee engagement research from our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award sheds some light here. We asked our 497 applicant firms about their future organizational goals; 101 of them, or 20.3%, used terms describing expansion in the immediate future including "new location," "new office," and "new facility."

I thought it would be illuminating to juxtapose the map of U.S. business closures from Wall St. Cheat Sheet with a map I created showing the breakdown of our 101 small business award applicants expanding or looking to expand soon:

Click on our map in blue to view a larger version.

Besides company size – our applicants have no more than 750 employees – what else is different in the survey samples comprising these two maps? We know that our award applicants understand the payoff of employee engagement and team building on their bottom line, and Buy Cialis accordingly develop people practices to leverage this. This enhances their ability to invest in the business, including expansion – even in a tough economy.

Can we say that about the much larger company sample in Wall St. Cheat Sheet’s research? Not necessarily.