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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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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In April I mentioned that one of our small workplace honorees, Headsets.com CEO Mike Faith, would be speaking at our 2011 Leadership Conference with Inc. Magazine.  I’m getting ready to pack my bags for this jam-packed, three-day event, which will be held next week in Dallas, Texas.  Go here for more info.

I took a look at the updated agenda and I was happy to see that three of the just-announced winners of Winning Workplaces’ 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award will be joining Mike’s panel for the session which – naturally – will address what it takes to be a small business that has an ultra productive workplace culture Provigil pharmacy of ownership and accountability.  Here are Mike’s co-panelists:

• Heather Leanne Nangle, Co-owner, Director of Marketing, Communications & Social Responsibility, Namaste Solar
• Mark Sammons, Ownership Thinking Coach, n-Link Corporation
• Tania Binder, Vice President of Global Sales, TRX

According to the conference program, these four experts on impactful people practices will help their fellow small businesses in attendance:

1. Ensure their companies are places where the best and brightest are clamoring to get hired,
2. Get their employees to buy in on a deep emotional level, and
3. Learn what they need to change in order to make a real commitment to grow and develop their talent.

Now I’m even more excited for the conference.  If you haven’t yet registered and you can make it to Dallas next week, go here to join me.  I’d love to meet you and learn what you do to attract, retain, and excite your workforce as a means for growing your business.  (Who knows, your story could appear 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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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.

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I have written recently about some of the reasons why you should make plans to attend Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine’s joint 2011 Leadership Conference, which will be held next month in Dallas, Texas.

We hosted this same type of event with Inc. in Denver last year.  What did the small businesses who attended take away from it, in terms of tips and strategies to improve their organizations?  The following is feedback that several key executives from PortionPac Chemical Corporation recently shared with us about their experience at our 2010 conference and subsequent actions taken in their firm:

Two examples from the conference stood out to us as being the most impactful: the employee fitness testing at Gentle Giant Moving Company and the entrepreneurial culture at Tasty Catering.  We have incorporated elements of both approaches in our work.

Gentle Giant Moving Company stands out for testing both the physical fitness and the psychology of potential employees with the famous stadium run test.  We appreciated the advantages of evaluating a potential employee who struggles to complete the stadium run but who takes responsibility for completing it thoroughly.  Since learning about Gentle Giant, our own company has evaluated our onboarding process and made some changes that better measure a person’s spirit in addition to their technical skills.  Buy Cialis After all, it is not just the competence that matters – it’s how the person meshes with our culture and whether they demonstrate in subtler ways the degree to which they  take responsibility for their actions.

Tasty Catering inspired us with the way the company cultivates employee-driven ideas.  We applaud Tasty Catering’s culture of identifying and fostering entrepreneurship in its company.  Since the leadership conference we have begun to have regular check-ins with our customer service staff to uncover employee-generated solutions to everyday challenges.  Tasty Catering has demonstrated the value of having a motivated workforce whose ideas are heard, and we have taken their example to heart.

As one of the few manufacturing companies at the conference, we enjoyed comparing challenges and solutions with companies that were so different than us.  Our commitment to producing environmentally responsible, user-centric cleaning products gave us a strong connection to the values held by Winning Workplaces, Inc., and the other conference attendees, and we enjoyed the opportunity to find our common ground as well as identify exciting opportunities for growth.

If you’d like to get value similar to what PortionPac got, and you’re free on June 15-17, click here to register for our Leadership Conference.  I’ll be there and I’d love to meet you and learn about your firm and how you’re investing in your workplace for greater workforce effectiveness.

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One reason why many business leaders who don’t subscribe to egalitarian workplace people practices have stuck to their autocratic (or other) employee engagement systems is because they think it will slow down decison making and action, and thus impede revenue growth.

Yet, as WorldBlu CEO Traci Fenton aptly notes on her website, workplace democracy isn’t about being slow – it’s about knowing when to be fast and when to be slow.  This distinction can work in tandem for great results.

The 52 companies on WorldBlu’s 2011 List of the Most Democratic Workplaces support this: as Donna Fenn notes in her interview with Fenton this week on BNET, from 2007 to 2011, the companies on their list have grown revenues 400%, from $3 to $15 billion.

Of course, that’s with the Great Recession factored in.  Score a big one for the ROI of investing in your workplace culture!

WorldBlu’s page listing their 2011 companies notes that they have some pretty large organizations, with up to 80,000 employees.  Their list includes private as well as public and non-profit firms from North America and six countries in Europe and Asia.

By comparison, Winning Workplaces’ Top Small Company Workplaces – our award program which is also in its fifth year (for 4 years previously we did the Best Bosses award) – has sought and evaluated organizations from North America exclusively, with no more than 750 employees, whose growth has relied on many of the same principles as WorldBlu’s honorees.  This includes for-profits and non-profits, but not public companies.

Given this much smaller demographic, have we also found strong 5-year revenue growth?  Yes, we have: from 2007 to 2011*, our winners’ combined total revenue has grown from $484 million to $1.25 billion.

Think about that: In an era in which the SBA says about half of all new firms fail, and in recent years in which it has been difficult for small businesses to maintain access to credit or be approved for new credit lines at favorable rates, our honorees have not only stayed in the black and kept their doors open – their revenue now vs. 5 years ago is as if they opened another company and a half, on average (their overall revenue growth is 160%).

This growth is cause for celebration, and is most certainly a catalyst for study by business leaders who would like to emulate it.  There is an opportunity for the latter coming up in June, when Winning Workplaces will team up with Inc. Magazine to once again host our joint Leadership Conference, this time in Dallas, Texas.  So far, two leaders of our honored firms will be speaking: Mike Faith, CEO of Headsets.com, and Matt Higgins, SVP of the New York Jets.  Stay tuned to our conference agenda for updates.

Related: Read this new article on our site for egalitarian employee practices that have helped 10 applicants for our award grow their bottom line.  What can you use or adapt for your company?

*Our 2011 award winners have been selected but won’t be revealed until June 2011.  Look for coverage of them in the June issue of Inc.

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I am continually amazed by the huge increase in workplace team building, camaraderie, productivity, and ultimately profits that business leaders can enjoy Cheap Cialis by doing small, workplace culture-specific things for their employees. 

In an industry with historically among the highest turnover rates – hospitality – Winning Workplaces has reported on several restaurants that have grown competitive advantage largely by following this approach.  These include Emmett’s Tavern & Brewing Co. in Illinois and Union Square Hospitality Group in New York.

Without a doubt, Zingerman’s Community of Businesses in Michigan fits this bill (pun not intended even though we’re talking about restaurants).  From when we wrote our Profile of Success on the collective enterprise back in 2003, to 2010, CEO Ari Weinzweig managed to grow his seven Ann Arbor-based businesses 185%.  (Paula Gardner details their milestones and notes their revenue last year of $37 million on AnnArbor.com.)

As we covered here on our blog, Inc. Magazine included some of the employee engagement best practices Weinzweig uses as part of its recommended "ultimate business tune-up" tips list in an early 2009 issue.  As is the case with the other above-mentioned firms, at the end of the day practices like these are effective not just because they show leadership respects employees’ commitment, but because they’re inclusive and indicative of a well-thought-out, strategic company vision.

As it happens, Weinzweig will be speaking on how creating a vision of the company you want makes good business sense as part of our Leadership Conference with Inc. in Dallas, Texas, June 15-17, 2011.  Attendees will find value in learning about, and adapting for their organizations, his step-by-step guide to imagining – and then creating – success.

Go here to see the current and evolving agenda for this event.  Register at the early bird rate through May 6.

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I was stunned to read The Huffington Post‘s headline last week that "Great Companies Don’t Require Good Management."  The site was referencing a May 2010 interview with billionaire investor Warren Buffett, picked up by Bloomberg on February 17, 2011, in which the Berkshire Hathaway CEO said he weighed companies’ pricing power more heavily than their management effectiveness when considering whether to invest in them.  He sometimes "doesn’t even consider the people in charge," Bloomberg reported.

Maybe you could make the case that with large, public companies this investment approach holds – although personally I think the management team and strategy are important no matter the size and type of business entity.  However, with smaller, private firms – which as we have often written based Provigil pharmacy on our own employee engagement research, must compete on quality rather than on price – not only is good management a required element of great companies, but these companies’ long-term sustainability and growth hinges on it.

The small firms that apply for Winning Workplaces’ Top Small Company Workplaces award are quite conscious of the equation through which investing in your workplace to improve the training and development of folks at management level helps the bottom line.  There is a causal relationship, as the five examples below show.  They represent selected 2011 award applicants’ responses to our application question "Describe a management development or training strategy that has been particularly effective." 

Note the varied forms of ROI a focus on strengthening their management have yielded (which I’ve bolded):

Related: Our profile of success on Merkle Inc., the database marketing agency run by our Best Boss award winner David Williams, shows how they use learning-oriented team building strategies to increase management effectiveness.  Read it here.

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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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