Culture-Building Initiatives and Their Business Impact at 10 Diverse Small Firms
SJF Institute, July 2011
Available
online
In a large, revealing report, Employees Matter: Maximizing Company Value Through Workforce Engagement, SJF Institute identifies 10 top employee engagement strategies used by successful small firms across the U.S. to improve business results and long-term sustainability (including enhanced ability to weather economic downturns). These strategies, in use in the 24 companies the North Carolina-based institute profiles, run the gamut from human resources to broad-based involvement and ownership.
Three of the strategies fall under an area of workforce development which can be vague, especially for small firms, but is nonetheless important: culture formation and improvement. These strategies are:
- Fostering a culture of mutual respect and trust – consistently treating all employees with respect yields long term loyalty and may be valued over rewards
- Celebrating success – engaged teams work hard and spend time celebrating together when milestones large and small are achieved
- Communicating the company's core values clearly and consistently – maintaining the company culture by ensuring the core values are frequently heard and understood by all
Within SJF Institute's 155-page report, pages 27-30 discuss in detail how 12 of the 24 total firms profiled use culture-building practices to boost engagement as a means to achieve desired results including greater innovation and longer employee tenures (so they end up spending less on recruiting and training because they lose fewer employees to competing organizations). The 12 firms highlighted as examples for others to emulate when it comes to building a better workplace culture include (*denotes Winning Workplaces honoree):
Perhaps the most useful section of the report for business leaders wanting a quick guide for engagement tools and their ROI is the table spanning pages 18-20. It lists culture-specific and other employee engagement tools used by companies in the above list including Advanced Circuits, Full Sail Brewing, Namaste Solar, PrintingForLess.com, Red Door Interactive, Salvage Direct, SmartPak and Signature group; and ties them to resultant business results reported by each of the companies. For example, SmartPak's high-involvement hiring process, which saves the Massachusetts-based firm on costs spent replacing hires who end up not being the best cultural fit, contributes to the company's industry outperformance of 5-10 percent.
