The second video in our series sharing the workplace team building and employee engagement best practices of our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award applicants is below.  Today’s tips come from a Georgia-based health industry firm with 176 employees.  Buy cheap online Provigil Enjoy!

(If you can’t see the video in your RSS feed, click here.)

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The third video in our series sharing the workplace team building and employee engagement best practices of our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award applicants is below.  Today’s tips come from a South Carolina-based advertising/marketing firm with 35 employees.  Enjoy!

(If you can’t see the video in your RSS feed, click here.)

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Over the next few weeks I’ll be making a series of videos featuring home-grown people practices of some of the organizations that have applied for Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine’s 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award.  Our intention with these videos is to share the unique employee engagement strategies these innovative firms have come up with to create a more harmonious and productive workplace culture, as a means to boost job satisfaction and retention, and ultimately customer satisfaction and profits.

Here’s the first of these (if you can’t see it in your RSS feed, click here):

In addition to our blog, you can always find the latest videos in this series on our Facebook and YouTube channels.

Challenge: If you watch these videos and think, My company does something more special than that, and we get a bigger ROI from it, then you really need to apply for our 2011 workplace award, which carries a prize of being featured in Inc. next June.  Hurry – the deadline to apply is January 14, 2011.

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Incoming search terms for the article:

• google workplace award

Our past annual conference speaker Sue Shellenbarger of The Wall Street Journal wrote a blog today on a notable development when it comes to the intersection of workplace culture practices and the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).  Shellenbarger notes that with Australia now requiring their employers to offer paid leave, the U.S. is now "alone among developed nations in offering no financial support for new parents post-childbirth."

The 12 weeks of leave that our government does mandate, for both eligible new mothers and new fathers, is unpaid.

Where the government is in supporting unpaid versus paid leave is a stark contrast to what the applicants, finalists, and winners of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces competition offer.  Here’s what we see in our employee engagement research of this pool of 497 total small businesses:

• 100% of the 20 winners offer paid time off (PTO)
• 100% of the 20 finalists offer PTO
• 97.6% of the remaining 457 applicants offer PTO
• 11 (2%) of the 497 total applicants go further and specifically offer paid paternity in addition to maternity leave (above and beyond general paid leave)

Why do these organizations, which are small and lack many of the resources (including financial) of big companies, make this kind of investment as part of their employee benefits packages?  Certainly it keeps them competitive on the recruiting front.  Yet, considering their overall people practices allow them to keep workers for a long time – 7 years on average among our 2010 winners and finalists; 4 years among the remaining applicants – they see being generous in supporting time off for personal as well as family commitments as a means toward achieving industry-best retention and employee leadership development.  This in turn directly affects their ability to maintain and improve both customer and vendor relationships.

Related: This article on our website describes the push for paid sick leave legislation in the U.S., including some of the major players involved.

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On Friday Reuters’ small business site cited data from Sageworks, which compiles financial information on privately held companies, in reporting that GDP numbers are "not so rosy for small business" (compared to the reported 5.6% GDP growth of all U.S. business in the fourth quarter of 2009).

If you check out Sageworks’ full report that Reuters links to – which surveys up to several hundred thousand privately held firms with $10 million or less in annual revenue – the news is not good.  From 2008 to 2009:

• Sales fell 8%, to -6.4% at year end.
• Sales per employee fell 2%.

Naturally I wanted to see how applicants for Winning Workplaces’ Top Small Workplace award fell in comparison to these two important statistics – to compare apples to apples, those with $10 millon or less in annual revenue.  Here’s a table that shows the average sales of each year’s applicants, going back to 2007 (representing sales years of 2006-2009), sales growth vs. the prior year’s applicants, average sales per employee, and the growth in sales per employee:

I highlighted the stats that match the first two metrics in the Sageworks report: sales % change and sales per employee.  Notably, while our survey sample shows the same negative sales growth rate as the Sageworks sample – -8% in 2009 compared to 2008 – sales per employee growth was positive at 9%.  In the Sageworks survey sample, this fell by 2%.

Does this difference underscore the payoff of employee engagement, team building strategies, and generally progressive people practices?  I think so.  For one thing, as I wrote about here, our 2010 applicants have an average employee tenure of 4 years.  That’s a solid foundation for both innovation and customer satisfaction, which both lead to stronger sales.

What’s your take on this finding?  How Buy Cialis did your 2009 per-employee sales do by comparison?

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This new article on CNNMoney.com profiles six companies on Fortune magazine’s 2010 "100 Best Companies to Work For" list that have never had a layoff.

I’m guessing six is the total number on Fortune‘s 2010 list, or this article would have touted and profiled more firms.  A 6% no-layoff (ever!) rate is indeed pretty impressive, especially considering this list encompasses midsize and large companies – which due to factors such as more complex bureaucracies and, in public companies, the need to appease shareholders can be more prone to layoffs.

We have our own no-layoff stats to share among our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award applicants, which I think are equally impressive.  One disclaimer before I get into the actual numbers below: our application only assesses involuntary turnover for the last three years (2007-2009), not over all time as Fortune‘s seems to assess.

Still, here’s what we know:

• From 2007-2009, 44 (8.9%) of our 497 applicants for 2010 had no layoffs.
• In 2009, 87 (17.5%) had no layoffs. 

The following chart shows the percentage of applicant firms with 0-10 layoffs in 2009:

If you add up all the percentages here you’ll get 74% – meaning that 3 out of 4 organizations had 10 or fewer layoffs in 2009.  This data point, I think, shows that employee engagement in terms of recruiting and ongoing employee leadership development can have a huge impact on keeping "A" players at the top of their game, and making more highly engaged employees from "B" and lower-level players.

All of this, Buy cheap Accutane Online of course, increases positive outcomes such as greater productivity and profitability, and also decreases negative outcomes such as having to let someone go, which is no fun for anyone involved, in any economic environment.

Benchmark your company against our 2010 small business award applicants: How many layoffs did you have in 2009?  Over the last 3 years?

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