Last week Business Pundit posted a chart of data provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on where 21 of the richest countries in the world stand in offering paid annual leave to their workers.  As many U.S. workers know – and surely most all of their leaders and managers – our country is alone among them in mandating zero Buy Accutane paid days off.  Canada and Japan are the next-lowest on the list with 10 days each per year.

Together with the U.S., these three countries represent 14% of the 21 countries on OECD’s list.  And guess what?  Living their values that investing in your workplace is good for the business long-term, when I dug into Winning Workplaces’ latest employee engagement research – data on our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award applicants – I found that among the majority (94%) that offer paid days off after one year of service, the average number of paid days off (18) falls between this 14% and the next countries on OECD’s list.  (A majority nine countries, including Italy, Ireland, Greece, Switzerland, and the U.K., are tied with 20 days of paid leave per year.)

And check out the table below: the 94% of our 2011 award applicants that offer PTO at one year of service earned revenues 17% higher revenues than the 6% that don’t.  No doubt the ones that do are benefiting from a less-stressed and therefore overall more productive workplace culture.

Employees who work for firms that still offer PTO should count themselves as increasingly lucky, and uncommonly treated; the continuing down economy manifested in a 4% decline of our award applicants from 2010 to 2011 who offer this benefit.

What do you make of these findings?

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Scott Shane, Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University, has an illuminating post on Small Business Trends this week in which, based on U.S. Census data of 6-year-old businesses, he shows that the typical (or median) entrepreneur’s sales are below the average (or mean) sales in 9 sectors.  Shane writes that this distinction is important for entrepreneurs as well as investors and policy makers because

if average sales are high, while typical sales are zero, then a few entrepreneurs are very successful, but most are not.  Unfortunately, this is the pattern that we tend to see.

I want to take the opportunity to focus on the better numbers – the mean, or average, sales – that are more often used, and represent the "best case scenario."  I wanted to compare this data to our own, employee engagement research on similar small firms: the applicants for our 2010 Top Small Order Generic Cialis Online without Prescription Company Workplaces award.

Because Shane looks at 6-year-old businesses, I similarly pulled out only those applicants that were founded in 2004, and were 6 years old when they applied for our award this year.  Also, to compare apples to apples when it comes to sector, I pulled out only the industries we recorded for those applicants founded in 2004 that match up with Shane’s table: Manufacturing; Transportation, Communication, Utilities; and Finance, Insurance, Real Estate.

The table below shows what I found:

The multiples of mean sales of our award applicants vs. the similar-age firms measured by the Census range from roughly 9 times (Manufacturing) to 34 times (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate).  When you average the three sectors together, our applicants report 19 times the mean sales of the companies represented in the Census data.

The big difference between the two groups of companies?  Our applicants use smart human capital strategies to drive everything from internal processes and metrics to external performance.

Related: For more evidence of the payoff of employee engagement, read this post which shows how some of this year’s award winners compare to their industry when it comes to turnover.

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Buy Accutane style=”border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin-left: 5px; border-left: medium none; margin-right: 5px; border-bottom: medium none” src=”http://cdn.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/0da1f4b5-6d49-4164-9009-9f4d0114ef86/e5cc468d-0810-41b1-89b0-87b5a2bbfb03/Image/444528be3d670f3247551cba14bdf2c6.jpg” />"Am I already a Winning Workplace?"

This is one of the most common questions we get, and it really makes sense given the economy and, by extension, companies’ ability to invest in their workplace.  They understandably don’t want to spend any more than is absolutely necessary here.

One way to answer to this question is to benchmark themselves against applicants of our Top Small Company Workplace award with Inc. Magazine.  The process I’ve outlined below will allow you to do this:

1. Click on the title of this post to ensure you’re just looking at this post by itself, and not with the rest of our blog feed.
2. Click here to print this post.
3. On the page that prints out, complete the "Your Firm" column below for each metric/practice of a productive workplace.
4. Once this is done you will get a rough* picture of how your people practices are contributing to your bottom line success.

Metrics

Organizational

Metric/Practice2010 TSCW Applicants Your Firm Average CEO Tenure11 years  Average years in business16 years  Average growth rate, 2007-2009 42% Average employee turnover 19% Average % open positions filled from within in 200922% Average employee tenure4 years  

Medical and Other Benefits

Metric/Practice2010 TSCW Applicants Your Firm Avg percentage of employee  premium paid73%  Avg percentage of premium paid for dependant38%  Average 401 K Match by employer20.6% Average paid time off26 days/year  Average tuition reimbursement per employee$2550 

*This represents only a limited view of how well your organization is doing when it comes to the payoff of employee engagement.  There are many more factors than those shown here that go into creating a Winning Workplace.  For a more detailed picture, please contact us.

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Provigil pharmacy />Yesterday and today I’ve been doing some serious number crunching to find trends in the employee engagement research Winning Workplaces does through our annual Top Small Company Workplaces recognition project – in this case, for the 2010 applicant pool that finished applying last month.

As a result, I can now tell you what a typical 2010 applicant firm looks like:

• Privately held
• S Corp
• $0-10 million revenue in 2009
• 21-50 employees
• In the Consulting industry
• In California
• In business for between 6 and 20 years (6-10 and 11-20 years, the largest segments in a range of years, have an equal number of applicants)

Benefits include:

• Medical insurance – company pays 73% of an employee’s premium
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Paid time off/vacation/holidays/personal time – for a one-year or longer-term employee, 24 days in a PTO plan

Stay tuned for more information soon on applicants’ top human capital strategies, which you can adapt for your organization.  (Do you follow our blog?  Add it to your feed reader today.)

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