In today's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) their "Small Business Report" highlights their list of the top small business workplaces for 2007 - WSJ's first annual list of the most outstanding small business work environments. To come up with their 15 winners the WSJ, along with the non-profit group Winning Workplaces, collected 850 nominations of great workplaces in North American and winnowed down this group to 35 finalists. Eight industry and functional workplace and small business experts judged these finalists, selecting the eventual winners.
Although these small businesses serve different industries, reside in different geographic regions, and are of varying sizes some interesting shared themes emerged (noted below) as to why they have great workplaces:
1. Employees up and down the organization are involved in key decision-making
2. Future leaders of the business are developed internally
3. They provide generous traditional and untraditional benefits
4. They are committed to their employees having positive experiences and being engaged with the company
5. Many engage in significant profit-sharing
6. They invest in cross-functional internal training
In terms of further detail, the WSJ provided an executive summary excerpt on the key benefits their winner workplaces and nominees provide:
1. Health Insurance: The best small workplace winners offer very generous health benefits that exceed the norm for small businesses. A stunning 98.2% of these winning workplaces offer employees health insurance, paying an average of 84% of employee insurance premiums; 67% of this group pay at least part of dependent premiums. In contrast, according to the 2007 "Employee Benefit Survey by Business & Legal Reports," about 70% of small (fewer than 200 employees) and medium-size (200-500 employees) business employers offer health insurance. 57% of these pay 80% or more of health insurance premiums for exempt employees and 58% pay 65% or more for exempt employee's dependents.
2. Domestic Partner Benefits: According to Business & Legal Reports employee benefit survey, 22% of the small and medium size (SME) business employers offer health benefits to domestic partners of exempt and nonexempt employees. Contrast these figures against 31.6% of all the nominees for Top Small Workplaces offer these benefits, and 46.7% of the winners offer domestic partner benefits.
3. Paid Time Off/Vacation/Holidays/Personal Time: Universally there is the trend to "package" time off in such a way that employees determine how to use their time. The organizations in the nominee pool had 95.9% of them offering some combination of paid time off - vacation - holidays - personal time, with 83.8% offering paid vacation, 58.1% offering paid sick leave and 58.8% offering paid personal day(s). On average, a one-year employee is offered 18 days off, which entails 10 vacation days, 4 personal days, and 4 sick days.
87% of the workplace winners provide paid vacation; 66.6% provide paid sick leave; 40% provide paid personal day(s). Winners offer a one-year employee 20 paid days offs - 15 vacation days, 1 personal day and 4 sick days. The Bureau of Labor Statistics show that private industry provides paid vacations for 77% of all workers; 57% are entitled to paid sick leave.
4. 401(k) - Profit Sharing - Employee Stock Purchase Programs: The nominees and winners basically provide solid funding programs for retirement - 93.6% of the nominees offer 401(k) - profit sharing - stock programs; 100% of the winners do. While there is a wide variety in program design the emphasis is more on defined contribution plans that incorporate employee investment and reward employee performance.
Shivonne Byrne, Innuity CMO
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