Did you hear?  Yesterday Winning Workplaces and our media partner, Inc. Magazine, announced the winners of our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award.  Inc. has several feature articles on the winners in its current, June issue, which you can read here on their website.

The 2011 TSCW landing page on their website also has a fun feature where you can click on a company photo to get a snapshot of it, and see where it is currently ranked in terms of popularity among the 50 winners by Facebook users.  And if you visit our website, you can also see a list of our 31 finalists this year, including their location, industry, and 2010 employee count.

Winning Workplaces’ May IDEAS newsletter, which will be available to our subscribers tomorrow, will have even more on several of the winners, in terms Provigil online No prescription of their team building and employee engagement best practices, and their impact on the bottom line.  If you don’t currently get our newsletter, sign up for it here (it’s free!).

These firms are small; none have more than 330 employees.  But don’t let their size fool you – they are doing great things and competing with much larger peers in their marketplace.  Here’s a snapshot of what some of our 50 winning firms for 2011 are accomplishing based largely on the success of their leadership approach and people practices:

First and foremost in the minds of the nearly 14 million unemployed – they’re hiring!

• Wall Street Journal on Akraya
• Tweet from Firespring CEO/Founder Jay Wilkinson

Winning contracts and other project bids:

• Kitware Wins NASA contract
• Symmes Maini & McKee Associates selected as architect for largest manufacturing facility for human cells in the world

Growing and expanding:

• Box.net sees record quarter (1Q 2011)
• Dyn adds a record number of new clients (1Q 2011) 
• One Call Now announces its seventh acquisition, and third in a year
• California-based The FruitGuys to expand in Arizona

Receiving company awards and honors for executives:

• ImageSoft earns AIIM award
• Linhart Public Relations wins three PRSA Gold Pick awards
• rbb Public Relations gets fifth PRSA Silver Anvil nomination in a row
• Skullcandy President Jeremy Andrus named to SportsOneSource’s 40 Under 40 list

Congratulations to our 2011 award winners and finalists!  A number of them are set to attend our joint Leadership Conference with Inc. next month in Dallas.  Go here for more info on this event.

View full post on Winning Workplaces

Incoming search terms for the article:

• 2011 Best Practices for Team Development
• journal team building 2011
• sportsonesource 2011 40 under 40

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.

View full post on Winning Workplaces

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

For more information: click here to find related articles on our site.

View full post on Winning Workplaces

Last week I shared the first of several one-pagers we are preparing to provide you with a benchmark for how successful small businesses across North America – the over 300 applicants Buy Cialis for Winning Workplaces’ 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award – set up their people practices to deliver maximum productivity.

Click on the chart image below to access our new one-pager pdf on the flexible workplace practices that all but 4 (98.8%) of our 342 applicants this year are using, in decreasing order of popularity:

I hope this helps you assess, or reassess, your own related employee engagement strategies.

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

View full post on Winning Workplaces

Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI), a software firm in Exton, Pennsylvania, is a great place to work.  So say Great Place to Work Institute insiders Jennifer Robin and Michael Burchell in their book The Great Workplace, which was published on January 4.

Winning Workplaces agrees: we named AGI as one of our Top Small Workplaces in 2009.  A profile on the company, including their payoff of employee engagement practices, appears on our website.

Leading Blog tipped me off to AGI’s inclusion in The Great Workplace.  They shared an excerpt from the book which reveals President Joseph Sheehan’s practice of compiling weekly accomplishments and sharing them at an all-company lunch each Friday.  This helps the firm maintain a spirit of team building through the weekend, so their workers return on Monday more motivated to keep driving ahead than those at competing firms.

And guess what?  In keeping with an overall workplace culture of progressive people practices, this weekly celebratory lunch helped drive revenue growth of almost 6% from 2006-2008.  AGI generated just over $49 million in revenue Buy Cialis in 2008, the year before they applied for our award.

What else is the software firm doing to keep collaboration, innovation, and productivity strong?  Here are five things in addition to the practice mentioned above:

1. Incentive compensation: sales commission, profit sharing, performance bonus.
2. Pay slightly more in health insurance premium for dependents vs. employees (98% compared to 97% – near top of range for both).
3. $5200 tuition reimbursement per employee, per year.
4. It’s not just every Friday that AGI’s employees get a free meal – the company offers free breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day.  In addition, their families can eat dinner on site if staff work late.
5. In designing their current headquarters, leadership made sure that managers were intermingled with staff and that there were no corner offices.  There are also no doors in management office areas.

Does your organization use any of these practices?  Please let us know in the comments.  Thanks.

View full post on Winning Workplaces

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.)

View full post on Winning Workplaces

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.)

View full post on Winning Provigil online No prescription Workplaces

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.

View full post on Winning Workplaces

Incoming search terms for the article:

• google workplace award

The following is a guest post by Sean Conrad.  Sean is a Senior Product Analyst at Halogen Software, one of the leading providers of performance appraisal software.

Most of us are familiar with Gallup’s employee engagement research and the twelve statements they use to measure it.

When I look at the list, it strikes me that there are some basic employee performance management practices that, if done well, address most of these needs.  They include:

• Giving employees meaningful feedback on a regular basis.
• Being clear about goals and helping employees see how their work matters to the organization.
• Recognizing and rewarding employees fairly.
• Giving employees opportunities for growth and development.

Given their importance and impact, we’d do well as managers to give them our time and attention.

Give Employees Meaningful Feedback on an Ongoing Basis

Research consistently tells that employees want meaningful, ongoing feedback.  But many of us struggle to make it part of our work culture.  Here are some things that can help:

Increase the frequency of your performance appraisals
Instead of just doing annual performance appraisals, conduct quarterly mini reviews.  This helps to give managers and employees a regularly committed interval for dialogue and feedback.
 
Gather feedback from others
Feedback from multiple sources is broader and more objective, and helps the manager and employee get a more accurate view of their performance.  You can keep it simple, and just request feedback from another employee or manager who works with the employee, or conduct more formal 360 degree assessments.

Keep ongoing notes on performance
Keeping and sharing notes on performance year-round helps to better document performance, opens up the dialogue between a manager and an employee, and makes writing performance appraisal faster and easier.  Highlights, challenges and disconnects that might not otherwise be discovered until the annual performance appraisal meeting can be shared and explored in a timely way.
 
Define Clear Goals and Link Them to Organizational Goals

Employees need to clearly know what is expected of them, and understand how their work contributes to the organization’s mission and success.

SMART goals are broadly recognized as the most effective way to write clear goals.  Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound goals let employees know what is expected of them, how success will be measured, and when they must complete work.

But we should also give employees a context for their work by linking their goals to higher-level organizational goals, so they understand how they’re contributing to organizational goals.

Recognize and Reward Your Employees Fairly and Consistently

Recognition and rewards should be frequent and come in many forms.  Since we’re all motivated by different things, it’s important to know what your employees value, so you can reward them effectively.  But all programs should be tied to employee performance. And your employees should know the metrics used as measurement.

Provide Opportunities for Growth and Development

Employees need to feel as though they have a future with an organization, and a career path that helps them further develop their knowledge, skills and abilities.  Make sure you provide things like formal training, challenging work assignments, mentoring programs, etc.

Related: For more guidance on creating an effective performance management system as part of a winning set of team building and employee development Buy Accutane strategies, check out our Ask An Expert column on measuring key competencies.

View full post on Winning Workplaces

This week he shared specifics with me on exactly why he thinks business leaders should sign up for this free email (emphasis mine):

The Weekly Bottom Line-Improving People Practice email should benefit all business leaders.  The world has become commoditized.  The true marketplace differentiator is human capital.  I enjoy learning the Best Practices other companies use with their most valuable asset – their people.

An engaged workforce is typically harmonious, productive and profitable.  These Best Practices eliminate the need to manage.  We have replaced management with effective leaders armed with Best Practices, and the difference has been remarkable.

While Winning Workplaces surely plays only a small part in Tasty Catering’s success, you can’t argue that they’re not doing a lot of things right in their staff engagement that comprises their highly productive workplace culture: As we shared in the company’s Cheap Accutane award profile, in a very tough year broadly and certainly in their industry (2009), their employee leadership development and other strategies helped them earn above-average revenues.

Register now to start getting our weekly, bottom line-improving people practices email FREE in your inbox.

View full post on Winning Workplaces