Making Sports Activities a Family Pastime

You will want to be able to demonstrate to your child that you really support them in their playing sports as a team. Although it is certainly not necessary to attend every game or practice, you should put forth every attempt to go to as many as possible. Make a family activity out of going to the games if possible, since that will help your young sports player develop a sense of pride in his or her abilities. It is also a great idea to take plenty of photos at the game. You could even devote a shelf or wall in your house to sports pictures, displaying some of the best shots of your youngster in picture frames. Make sure you include a wide variety of photos such as single pictures, group team photos, and maybe even some candid photographs of the other members in the family cheering on your child.

Preserving Family Memories

You are certain to accumulate sports pictures quite rapidly, especially if you have more than one kid participating in team sports or if your one child participates in multiple sports. In some cases, you might even possess a few professionally taken shots, since little league teams frequently have picture packages taken of all of the team players. You might also want to start a scrapbook in addition to all those great picture frames. Some wonderful things to put in a scrapbook might be newspaper articles about your child’s team, team rosters, some ticket stubs from their games, play books, or even any other mementos you might have. Besides being a great way to preserve their memories, these pictures will also be an excellent reminder to your child of your love and support for him or her in playing the sport they enjoy, and of the fact that you really care about preserving their memories of their youth.

Both you and your youngster will be glad when you put these suggestions into action and help your kid to do well and enjoy their sports.

Shop Your Picture Frames online and take a look at our double picture frames and mats in assorted styles and colors. Browse through our gallery picture frames today or call 800-780-0699.

The historically high unemployment level gets discussed often in the media lately, but an under-the-radar trend is that voluntary employee turnover is currently at a three-year high, according to the Department of Labor.  Clearly, even with continued rounds of layoffs at some of the best-known companies and a weak hiring outlook, greener pastures are luring away top talent.

Still, through our employee engagement research, Winning Workplaces sees a vehicle for both increased job satisfaction and commitment (helping to keep in check and even reduce voluntary turnover) and innovation, productivity, and service improvements to boost the bottom line: employee ownership.

One of the measurements we did as part of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award application was to see what percent of employees, whether management or lower-level staff, own stock in the company.  As you might expect, in a vast majority of the 342 private and not-for-profit organizations who applied this year – 252, or 74% – no employees own company stock.  In the remaining 90 firms (26%), 1-100% of employees do.

But check out what I found, as illustrated in the charts below, in terms of how annual revenue, 2-year revenue growth, and employee turnover are all impacted by how many employees own stock.  I added trendlines which show that as more employees are part of the workplace culture of ownership, these all-important metrics tend to be stronger.

Employee ownership may not be right for every organization.  Yet, as our coverage of our 2011 workplace award winners shows, those that make it work set themselves up for long-term success.  In some cases, in perhaps an ironic twist, those that come out way ahead of downturns like the one we’re in now and need to create and fill more roles to meet demand use it as a selling point to attract top talent from their competitors.

Winning Workplaces

As longtime readers know, I’m a big fan of webinars.  Not just because Winning Workplaces has produced our own series of them for small business executives, but also because the barrier to entry on the technology side has become much more manageable, meaning that more business executives, researchers, and other experts can attract more attendees to sessions that address ever more niche topics.

As a result, there are more great webinars arriving every day.  And because many presenters offer at least some information for free (it’s a great lead generation tactic if you put access to them behind a registration wall, as our blog provider, Compendium, has done well), you can get helpful new tips, or a refresher to help you reexamine how you’re doing something, for virtually no investment other than your time.

If you are looking to not just do a one-off session, and instead record it for sharing or future sale, at a minimum you need to tell your attendees that it’s being recorded.  For our own series, this announcement was handled by our great webinar vendor, ReadyTalk.  (Incidentally, part of what makes this firm great is their workplace team building and employee engagement practices; they won our Top Small Company Workplaces award earlier this year.)

However, you can, and should, go further.  From a tip I got from Small Biz Survival, I recently subscribed to Australia-based Des Walsh’s monthly social media strategy improvement webinar series.  I listened to his recording from July today, and here’s what he said as "housekeeping notes" before he dug into his topic, participation and engagement:

1. This webinar is being recorded.
2. Your attendance on the call signifies your acceptance that the recording may be published electronically, in print form, or on websites.
3. This webinar offers education for informational purposes only.  Opinions and suggestions expressed by the host, any guest presenters, or webinar participants are just that – opinions and suggestions – and should in no way be taken as business or financial advice.

You can do as Walsh did as the host and just read the disclaimers, or you can check with your service provider and see if they will cover all or part of the announcement (depending on your package or session needs, they may provide you with a moderator who will take care of this so your staff representatives or other presenters don’t have to).

Does your business already use webinars?  If so, for what purpose – growing sales leads, adding customer value, to keep employees engaged, or something else?  I’d love to hear in the comments.

Winning Workplaces

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Although we consider ourselves extremely vocal when it comes to promoting the link between staff engagement activities and long-term company growth, Winning Workplaces is by no means the only organization shouting this from the soapbox.  Just last week, SJF Institute (with whom we’ve previously collaborated to produce content to help you improve your people practices) released a massive, 155-page report exploring this link in stunning detail.

While this report, Employees Matter: Maximizing Company Value Through Workforce Engagement, would be noteworthy in any case, we appreciate that over a third of the 24 companies profiled are Winning Workplaces honorees.  They include:

• Advanced Circuits
• Dancing Deer Baking Company
• Graniterock
• Namaste Solar
• New Belgium Brewing
• PrintingForLess.com
• Red Door Interactive
• SmartPak
• The Redwoods Group

Before delving into the full report, I recommend checking out page 3 of SJF’s 4-page Executive Summary of the report.  There you’ll find a breakdown of 10, Winning Workplaces-approved worker engagement strategies which fall under the areas of HR practices, culture formation, and broad-based involvement and ownership.

We congratulate SJF Institute for undertaking the research, writing, and production to make available this valuable report.

What are your takeaways from the report, or other thoughts on it?  Let us know in the comments.

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One of the hallmarks of a harmonious and productive workplace culture is little to no litigation initiated against a company by current or former employees.  Winning Workplaces looks at this as part of a larger question about government, civil, or criminal complaints in our annual Top Small Company Workplaces competition.  In 2011, only 2% of winners and finalists and 3% of the other applicants for our award had had employees bring forth litigation.

We evaluated our 2011 award applicants for the year 2010, so this means a total of 5% of all firms were the subject of related complaints or investigations.  This is consistent with what we saw for our 2010 award applicants (for the year 2009), as I wrote about here.

An yet, as Jason Carney, Human Resource Director for WorkSmart Systems, an Indianapolis-based PEO serving clients in 37 states, shared with me, complaints filed in 2010 by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) grew 7% over 2009, to just shy of 100,000.

What are the companies who apply for our workplace award doing to safeguard against employee litigation (and legal trouble in general)?  They are largely following these steps that Jason outlined, which speak to these firms’ exemplary people practices:

1. Policy development: Have good policies in place and regularly update employee handbooks.  Policies should including one addressing social media participation, specifically mentioning that the terms of the policy are not intended to interfere with concerted protected activity.
2. Ongoing informal education: Guide your employees to changes in federal labor laws.
3. Formal training: Ensure that your employees are well versed in company policies and federal guidelines, such as unlawful harassment prevention and wage and hour law proficiency.

One additional insight related to these steps Jason shared is that while many companies might view their implementation as routine in terms of forms creation and updating, or just doing the right thing as any company would strive to do, the reality is that they are a powerful set of trust building activities that promote better communication and, ultimately, greater productivity.

Related: If you didn’t see this article when we first published it, check out guest columnist and attorney Paula Brantner’s checklist to help startups avoid cutting legal corners which could prove costly later on.

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This week winning Workplaces added some new research summaries to our website which speak to how investing in your workplace can improve your competitiveness and bottom line.  One of these, a study released last month by the leading online employment platform oDesk, traces the steady growth in contractors used by companies – both because they have continued to find it challenging to find locally based top talent to fill positions, and because they can engage and disengage these workers more quickly than permanent employees to meet the real-time needs of their businesses.

A consequence of this phenomenon (which has no doubt also been driven by the tough economy since 2008 and rising health care costs) is that company investment in traditional benefits package items has declined somewhat in recent years.  I came across this press release on Small Business Trends this week, which shares the results of MetLife’s 9th Annual Study of Employee Benefits Trends among firms with 500 or fewer employees.

As the table in the release shows, the share of firms who invest in medical, dental, and life insurance has decreased.  It stayed the same for disability, while it rose slightly for vision.

I had this other addition to the Research Studies section of our site in mind when I thought about what this benefits erosion looked like among a set of small organizations that have typically, and purposely, kept their own packages robust in order to attract, retain, and leverage employees to maintain competitive advantage in their marketplaces – firms that happen to match the size criteria of the ones surveyed in MetLife’s study.  I’m talking, of course, about our Top Small Company Workplaces.

Below are graphs I created comparing the samples’ inclusion of five of the six benefits from the MetLife study (I couldn’t include Prescription Drugs because our award applications didn’t include this option for firms to check as part of their total package offerings).  I should also note that I looked at our honored firms from 2008 and 2011, because the years in which we evaluated their benefits were 2007 and 2010, respectively – aligning with Metife’s sample.

By a wide margin in most cases, our survey sample of small companies with great workplaces invest more heavily in the five benefits offerings.  And in 2010, our current honorees realized significant ROI through these and a whole host of other people practices, including:

• 80% have increased revenues over the past 3 years
• 96% were profitable in 2010
• 88% have increased their number of employees over past three years

Related: I mentioned above that we added some new research summaries to our site for your reading pleasure. If you have 2 minutes (literally!) I’d love if you’d take this survey to tell us under which workplace areas you’d like to see us add summaries in the future. If we’re not currently covering a topic you’d like to see, you can add it. Thanks in advance!

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Business owners attribute competitive advantage to their business model, value proposition, innovation, as well as the "smarts" I mentioned in this post on Patrick Lencioni’s session (among others) at our conference last month with Inc. Magazine.  But as a new special report by Workforce Management makes clear, employee engagement is just as much a driver of competitiveness – and thus, revenue growth, market share, and other desired results.

One of my key takeaways from Garry Kranz’s great report is the two graphs he shares on the most and least engaged workers by sector, as researched and reported last month by GfK Custom Research North America.  Sectors with the highest levels of engagement, based on GfK’s survey of over 5,000 employees, include:

• Construction
• Professional/Business Services
• Information Technology

And those with the lowest engagement (or, conversely, highest disengagement) include:

• Retail
• Real Estate
• Education
• Manufacturing

Is your sector among those above?  (If it is, hopefully it’s in the high-engagement group.)

I was curious as to how the sector representation of the recent winners and finalists of Winning Workplaces’ 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award, and the remaining applicants – some 350 firms in total – compare to GfK’s high/low engagement sector findings.  Comparing apples to apples (the same sectors in both surveys) here’s what I found:

Undoubtedly, part of what made this year’s award winners and finalists competitive was that they came from more sectors with typically higher engagement, and fewer sectors with lower engagement, when compared to the remaining applicant pool.

Here’s the really interesting thing, though: despite our company research sample’s small size relative to many of their marketplace peers – firms eligible for our award have no more than 500 workers – and, therefore, their more limited budgets for employee development strategies, in many cases they are still outperforming their often larger competitors.  For some people practices insight into how they accomplish this, see what Kenexa Research Institute Exeucutive Director Jack Wiley says in the Workforce Management report:

[S]ome organizations say they have managed to sustain engagement levels during the prolonged recession.  Typically, those employers systematically gathered feedback from employees, analyzed responses and implemented changes as needed, Wiley says.  "They measure engagement with the same rigor they apply to customer service or financial data."

This tendency is definitely in effect among the small firms that rise to the top of our award evaluation process each year – not just based on their engagement activities, but on the bottom-line results they bring, including lower turnover and higher average employee tenures.

One more thing: As I discussed in this post based on new university research, spending to cultivate more highly engaged employees is not truly working for you unless it is used to build a career path for them, especially for your top performers.  You should check out this revealing, related research I came across today via WorldatWork.  They share Right Management’s new survey finding that 75% of organizations lost high-performing employees they did not want to lose during the past year.

Pay special attention to the last paragraph of the WorldatWork write-up: a Right Management senior exec cited supports the case of providing a career path for top talent to avoid losing these critical assets (at this critical time!).

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Did you know that when it comes to the newest and best research on investing in your workplace for better team building and other desired outcomes, we have a repository on our website?  That’s right, it’s here, it’s free – and it’s significant: 40% of the total educational content (some 500 articles) we’ve provided since 2001 on building a more productive workplace culture is our research study summaries.

You may be interested to learn what your peers who have Cheap Cialis dug into this section of our site have found to be the most pertinent and insightful summaries.  So here’s a list of our Top 10 by visits:

1. Work-Life Balance a Key to Job Acceptance
2. Four Out of Five Workers More Likely to Stay at Firm with Low Stress and Good Work/Life Balance
3. ‘SHRM Fun Work Environment Survey’
4. ‘Overwork in America’
5. Workers Link Company Culture to Organizational Success
6. ‘The Employee-Customer-Profit Chain at Sears’
7. Most Employee Recognition Programs Do Not Meet CEO Expectations
8. ‘Linking Organizational Characteristics to Employee Attitudes and Behavior’
9. Bad Bosses Tolerated if They’re Productive
10. Empowering Leaders Not Always Best for New Business Ventures

Next Step: Now that you’ve seen some of what we offer here, I invite you to take this 2-minute survey to tell us under which of 10 workplace areas you’d most like to see Winning Workplaces summarize the latest research in the future.  Thanks in advance for your time!

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Among the nearly 350 small and midsize organizations that applied for our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award earlier this year, 96% have a strategic plan.  No surprise there, right?  (In fact, I find it more surprising that in this tough economy, 4% are getting by without one.)

However, when I looked at the vast majority that do have a strategic plan guiding their customer service, sales/marketing, technology, and other investments, I found a big divide in revenue and likelihood of being profitable between those whose plans go further and include a strategy for improving company performance specifically through their employee engagement, workplace team building, and other people practices – and those whose do not.

Check out the charts below:

Cheap Accutane and share profitable in 2010″ alt=”2 charts – average revenue and share profitable in 2010″ width=”500″ height=”539″ style=”border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-top: medium none; border-right: medium none” src=”https://cdn2.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/0da1f4b5-6d49-4164-9009-9f4d0114ef86/e5cc468d-0810-41b1-89b0-87b5a2bbfb03/Image/05c94a0c0cbe08ea8303108efcbb091d/2charts.jpg” />

I wanted to bring this to your attention since our 2011 small-workplace award application was the first to dig deeper and ask about people-powered performance as a key element in company strategic plans.  This is further evidence that investing in your workplace makes business sense (as opposed to merely increasing employee satisfaction).

Does your firm’s strategic plan rely on people-powered performance improvement?  I’d love to hear about your experience, including lessons learned.

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I love LinkedIn.  I’ve blogged before about its value, especially considering it’s free except for your time (though there are fees if you want to post jobs there).  In the past I’ve used the business-themed social networking site to gather opinions on Zappos’ "leaving bonus," and I referenced its Group feature as a lead-driving tool.

One of the best ways to use LinkedIn is to ask and answer questions.  I particularly enjoy going to the Small Business and Organizational Development sections and seeing what company leaders, managers, and other employees are talking about – and occasionally offering my opinion.  I did so last month in response to organizational culture consultant and speaker Marcella Bremer’s question asking why building a productive workplace culture is often not on the agenda of CEOs, company board members, and other top executives.

My response sparked an email conversation in which Marcella and I compared notes on our Provigil online No prescription respective firms devoted to leveraging employee engagement and team building strategies to improve companies’ bottom-line results.  The enterprise she co-owns, OCAI online, is based in the Netherlands (people practices advancement is truly a small world!).

When I went to her site I learned what OCAI stand for: Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument.  Developed by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn, the OCAI operates based on what’s known as the Competing Values Framework.  Here’s what this looks like:

As you can see, as you go up on this graph you transition from core values supporting stability and control (some would say, command and control) to flexibility and discretion.  From left to right, the focus changes from internal and integration to external and differentiation.  Where a company lands on this graph determines its balance among four Organizational Culture Types: clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, and market.

What I find amazing is that when I go to OCAI’s page explaining these culture types in greater detail, I find that, generally speaking, Winning Workplaces’ Top Small Company Workplace award honorees fall within the area of the graph I highlighted below:

That is, they have:

• workforces who say they feel like a family;
• leaders who see themselves, and are seen by their people, as mentors;
• strong emphasis on teamwork, participation, and consensus; and
• employees who take risks, within a culture that promotes individual initiative and freedom.

However, I think our honorees are also a hybrid – they might have cultures which generally fall within the area of the graph I indicated, but when you read their applications for our award, they have succeeded in using staff engagement activities representative of a clan or an adhocracy to propel their business squarely in the market sector of the graph.  This is another way of saying, they don’t just treat their people well because it’s the right thing to do – they integrate these practices into the "vaue drivers" OCAI talks about of increasing market share, goal achievement, and profitability.  I discussed this a bit more in posts in January and June.

So…where does your company’s culture fall on OCAI’s graph?  I think leaders would find it an insightful and useful exercise to survey their management teams and other employees on what they think, and see how it compares to their own assessment.

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