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.

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A snippet of a boss putting the screws to an employee in the employee improvement film Painless Performance Improvement. Like it? Buy it here: www.media-partners.com

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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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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As Newswise reported two weeks ago, a University of Iowa study found that a good portion of the $134 billion that businesses spend annually on employee development strategies "could be wasted if companies don’t assure their employees that they have a promising career with the company."

That’s a huge chunk of change – savings that struggling small businesses, especially, would love to see back on their balance sheets.  To it in perspective, Standard & Poor’s said Sunday that the U.S. bond market could lose roughly that amount if our economy loses its triple A rating as a result of the debt ceiling not being raised by the Treasury’s August 2 deadline.

According to the study’s authors at the UI Tippie College of Business, spending on professional development is most effective when it’s tied to career advancement opportunities.  In fact, they argue, when it’s not, turnover actually increases.

They also say that in addition to employee engagement activities like career counseling, "programs like mentoring and job rotations as well as good relationships with their immediate boss can create the feeling that career opportunities are available."

In fact, tying professional development dollars to career counseling is a practice the small firms that applied for Winning Workplaces’ 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award earlier this year have used to great effect.  And by "great effect," I mean keeping their workers longer, so they end up spending far less recruiting and training new hires to replace those who’ve left for jobs where they see more long-term career potential.  This, in turn, helps maintain the knowledge base and facilitate the kinds of quality customer and client relationships which generate businesses’ favorite revenue, repeat business and referrals.

Check out the charts below.  Among our sample of nearly 350 firms applying for our workplace award this year, those providing career counseling experienced better employee tenure on average than their peers with no professional development approaches.

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We also saw that companies providing mentoring programs and/or job rotation – which the study authors also pointed to for the most "lean" spending on employee training – in addition to career counseling earned more average revenue in 2010 vs. who don’t fund professional development practices.  And firms providing mentoring and job rotation, but not career counseling, were more likely to be profitable than those who don’t fund professional development.

Related: For more workforce effectiveness tactics that are low-cost but high-impact, read this article on our website.

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With passionate, and necessary, discussions going on now in Washington, DC, about how to trim national spending, one of their small businesses, Turner Consulting Group (TCG) – a Winning Workplaces 2011 Top Small Company Workplace award winner – has a relevant story to tell.

Founded in 1994, this 35-employee firm, which provides IT-based grants management and budget formulation and execution solutions to federal agencies, has saved U.S. taxpayers over $265 million by helping government improve its operations.  It aims to save taxpayers $1 billion by 2016.

How does TCG succeed so well at helping Buy cheap Cialis Online itself as it helps us?  The company practices internally what it preaches to its customers: leadership’s encouragement of flex arrangements and avoiding burnout due to overwork has led to an almost 0 percent absentee rate, boosting productivity.  (Our media partner, Inc. Magazine, has more on this.)  In addition, since 2010 new business has increased as a result of an intentional practice of seeking employee feedback on customer problems, and acting on the most viable among their proposed solutions to them.

Stay tuned to our blog for more exclusive stories of the payoff of employee engagement and team building, for both our honored small firms and their customers and other stakeholders.  We share more in-depth stories like this in our free newsletter, IDEAS – get it by going here.

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Buy cheap Accutane Online medium none; border-left: medium none; margin-left: 5px; border-top: medium none; margin-right: 5px; border-right: medium none” src=”https://cdn2.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/0da1f4b5-6d49-4164-9009-9f4d0114ef86/e5cc468d-0810-41b1-89b0-87b5a2bbfb03/Image/d13f20e87512b8aadb2603a47c8b780e/2011tscw_vs2010.jpg” />A year ago, after Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine announced the winners of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award, I began a series of posts sharing data on how the winners, finalists, and other applicants performed on some key business metrics:

• Average employee tenure and turnover
• Estimated annual turnover costs per company (and how the winners and finalists outperformed their fellow award applicants)
• Revenue, proftability, employee tenure, and turnover among all applicants who fund a retirement plan, vs. those that don’t

Now that both organizations have announced the winners and finalists of our 2011 award, I think it’s time to give you some updated stats.  As you’ll see, they continue to support our thesis – and those of many of the other firms out there that study employee engagement and team building within productive workplace cultures – that investing in your workforce pays being dividends over the long term.  That includes an increased ability to anticipate and weather tough economies like the current one.

Employee Tenure and Turnover

As you can see, part of what distinguished the 2011 winners from the finalists was higher average employee tenure and lower turnover.  But to me the real story is how much improvement in these metrics the winners had over the finalists, vs. last year’s winners compared to the finalists.  This is represented in the chart below:

While one might argue that the continuing down economy, and particularly the stagnant job market, is keeping people from leaving who otherwise might jump ship – increasing average tenure while keeping voluntary turnover low as a share of total turnover – our data seem to indicate that something else is going on.  Otherwise the winners’ improvement over the finalists from 2010 to 2011 would be more gradual and not so steep.  I suspect that more leaders of small firms are having frank, "We’re all in it together" conversations with their workers, and at the same time are doing a better job of linking individual to company performance and providing attractive incentives to encourage more top-level work and innovation.

Turnover Costs – Winners and Finalists vs. Other Applicants

Most definitely there is a mixed-results story going on here.  On the one hand, while among our 2010 pool the winners and finalists had about half the turnover of other applicants, in 2011 the winner and finalist turnover was two-thirds the level of other applicants.  That was the driving factor behind the average, annual turnover cost of winners and finalists representing 89% of the cost of other applicants (in 2010, winners and finalists experienced only 40% of the cost of other applicants).  Still…

…as this chart shows, you can also look at it as a testament to the current winners and finalists that they were able to keep turnover at essentially the same low level (considering the variance in industry, geography, marketplaces, et al) as 2010, which allowed them to still have lower turnover costs than other applicants.  This is particularly noteworthy since the 2011 winners and finalists represent a greater share of the total applicant pool (24%) than they did in 2010 (8%).

The Link Between Retirement Plans and Revenue

While there are obviously many, many other factors involved, it’s hard to ignore the business metrics that tend to increase – among all our award applicants, not just winners and finalists – when companies show their long-term commitment to their workforces by investing in their retirement, as I discussed last October.  As the table above shows with the 2011 applicant data added, we continue to see a link between funding these plans and the tendency toward greater revenue and increased likelihood of being profitable.  However…

…take a look at the difference in revenue for companies who funded 401K, 403B, IRAs, or other plans in 2011 vs. those who do not, compared with the same groups in 2010.  (Also note that the ratio of those who fund these plans vs. those who don’t stayed essentially the same both years, 9 to 1.)

Is the difference a fluke?  Or do you think there’s something going on related to benefits and incentives within a framework of progressive staff engagement activities?  I’d love to read your thoughts – on this trend and anything else I’ve shared above – in the comments.

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What are successful small and midsize businesses doing to recognize and reward workers who consistently go beyond the call of duty?

You may be surprised to learn that, at least among our employee engagement research sample, the 342 firms that recently completed an application for Winning Workplaces’ 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award, the tendency is to put money and resources behind length-of-service and team-based practices before ones aimed at helping people transition more easily into retirement.

Click on the chart image below to access our new one-pager pdf on seven common recognition practices, in decreasing order of popularity among this year’s applicant pool for our award:

I hope this one-pager helps you in creating a more productive workplace culture.

If you find it helpful, I encourage you to share it with others using the Facebook and Twitter links in the pdf.

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I always enjoy hearing about how small businesses think outside the box in their marketing strategies to create buzz and, through so doing, win the business of customers or clients that might not otherwise have known about them.

Toilet Paper Entrepreneur author Mike Michalowicz shares an example of this he came across today on his blog.  Almost two years ago I shared another example here, implemented by the president of one of our profile of success companies.

To create a more memorable, harmonious, and productive workplace culture, you might think about how you can do the same with your internal, employee engagement strategies.  Some of our 2011 Top Small Company Workplace award applicants have done this type of thinking, and have acted upon their decisions as part of an overall organizational strategic plan that includes performance optimization through people practices.

Two examples follow, based on their response to our award application question "Which employee recognition initiative have you found to be most effective?"

Company Stats: 8 years old, IT services, 58 employees
Initiative: "Service Awards (length of service) always create a buzz and are a good retention tool.  We also get great comments on our award dinners that we do twice a year for those that have been recognized by their customer for great service."
Results: 2010 revenue of $9.1 million; average employee tenure of 3.2 years

Company Stats: 14 years old, Marketing/Advertising, 30 employees
Initiative: "While our Champagne Thursday events serve as monthly reminders of the great work we do and the great people we have here, the awards that inspire the most reaction each year are the MVP and Teammate of the Year awards.  Employees are genuinely excited for the colleagues who win at the end of each year, and we think that speaks to how much our employees truly care and like to celebrate one another.  It’s a meaningful award, speaking to a whole year’s body of work, that ends up with each of the employees immortalized as a bobblehead.  There’s always a buzz (or a loud guffaw) when the bobbleheads arrive each year as everyone gathers to compare the bobblehead likeness to the real deal of the MVP and the Teammate of the Year."
Cheap Cialis />Results: 2010 revenue of $3.7 million; average employee tenure of 3.5 years

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Yesterday I shared the extent to which organizations in government services that applied for Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine’s 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award use some employee development strategies to create a more knowledgeable and productive workplace culture.  Today I’d like to expand on this to cover ALL learning tools we surveyed, used by all 341 applicants for our award this year.

I’ve created a one-pager that contains a chart with 11 learning and development tools, in descending order of their use by our applicant firms.  Click on the chart image below to download the one-pager pdf.

You can use it to benchmark Order Generic Cialis Online without Prescription against adoption of similar approaches by your organization.

If you find it helpful, I encourage you to share it with others using the Facebook and Twitter links in the pdf.

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