Blogs

2012 Small & Medium Business Conference

As we prepare for the 2012 Small & Medium Business Conference, I wanted to take a moment to introduce some of our featured speakers. As leaders of Best Companies, they will be sharing the Best Practices that transformed their company into an award-winning workplace.

The Best Small & Medium Workplaces are becoming increasingly more flexible, with 42 of this year’s 50 Best offering flexible scheduling, 39 allowing for telecommuting and 20 compressed work weeks, and finally 21 companies providing phased retirement plans. Additionally, we see the following Best Practices to help employees enjoy a better work/life balance:

While more and more companies implement programs attempting to engage their workforce and increase productivity, Great Place to Work® knows that the secret to employees investing into the success of the company for the company to first invest in its employees. Here are a few Best Practices the 2012 Best Small & Medium Workplaces use to engage their employees:

As we gear up to announce the 2012 Best Small & Medium Workplaces, we find ourselves knee deep in original and highly effective workplace practices. Some so effective, in fact, that we've started to see some trending. I thought I would share a few of these best practices, and what better place to start than hiring and welcoming?

Last week’s article in the Huffington Post, (Almost) Everything We Think About Employee Engagement Is Wrong reviewed recent research that found that the majority of U.S. employees are not fully engaged. This indicates a disconnected workforce, as well as less than ideal levels of productivity for employers.

How to Promote Women Leaders

Susan Heathfield of About.com interviews our very own Susan Lucas-Conwell, CEO of Great Place to Work^® on How to Promote Women in Leadership Positions and what organizations can do to help women utilize their strengths.

(Re) Building Trust in the Workplace

I recently participated in the Summit on Restoring Trust in Business at Fordham University. Participants ranged from leading academics studying the implications of trust in organizations, to business leaders affected by stakeholders’ trust, or lack of it, to MBA students trying to determine the right path to follow and best employer to join up with. Everyone agreed that yes, there is a trust problem facing businesses and society.

Lead with your heart, not a calculator

Many of the great joys of writing my book came during the interviews I conducted with leaders at great workplaces. It was always refreshing to hear leaders speak so passionately about the people for whom they worked – all the people throughout their organizations.

The Constantly Evolving Workplace
"Biomimicry is a way of emulation and learning from nature's tried and true methods of design. It can be seen as a constantly evolving learning process as innovations in design, sustainability, and thinking shift from a top-down approach to a more collaborative, bottom-up system."

Creating a Great Workplace
People managers are the ones who manage people in organizations, not HR managers or top management. A vast majority of them are line managers with little or no expertise in how to manage people in organizations. Almost all senior managers seem to agree that developing line managers as good people managers is one of the top three people related challenges for an organization, yet only few have tackled this challenge successfully.