They had a ball with all five events (especially the physical challenges).   Read more about The Invincibles – their team name – and see their pictures and video here.

http://themissendengames.co.uk/2011/the-invincibles/

The brand new teambuilding event I’ve created is called The Missenden Games.

It’s named after the location of my office in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire (that’s in the UK).

The teambuilding event has its own separate blog / website.

Please visit
http://themissendengames.co.uk/

Apparently a German company rewarded its best salesmen by hosting a prostitute-filled sex party.  I count myself as reasonably open-minded and quite creative in terms of motivational techniques, but surely this is just one little step too far, isn’t it.

It makes the old-style Employee Of The Month framed certificate or plastic trophy look a tiny bit behind-the-times.

What’s your most extravagant employee incentive scheme ?

Here’s the full story -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/19/sex-party-reward-german-salesmen

The premise is that its a self-contained event for small teams where they are challenged to complete 5 separate team activities within the space of 2 hours.  They have to decide how many of the team should tackle each task and of course who is best suited to each task.

The 5 separate events are designed to test different team traits – so it can be run as a team event with a ‘serious’ message / some learning to take back to work OR…. people can enjoy the activities for what they are, have a laugh, let off some steam and enjoy themselves.

The plan is to brand this with a product name and its own blog.  Decisions on that taken next

During May, my time will be taken up with the creative development of a brand new teambuilding activity that we are launching.  I’ll keep you up to date with progress, but thought I should let you know that content may be sparse in the next few weeks.

“I promise to try and produce more happiness in the world and less misery.”

It’s a positive movement and one I wholeheartedly support. I’m a great believer in finding time to spread a little goodwill – both in my personal life and in my professional life too.

I run a business where I offer people advice, provide information and (sometimes) sell things. All parts of my “job” bring me pleasure and enjoyment. I get a big kick from sharing my knowledge with people and helping them out of a problem they’ve been struggling with.

In your job, where do you get your “happiness kicks” from ?

+++

There’s a great blog on the BBC website all about the Action For Happiness “masterplan” – with a detailed guide about how to apply it in your life.

Just thought I should say this as I’m not sure if my Professional Liability Insurance actually covers me for claims related to providing gambling tips !

I am talking about how a bit of light-hearted gambling can help team togetherness.  This weekend is the perfect opportunity for you  – in the shape of The Office Grand National Sweepstake*

In my experience, the teams that take the trouble to arrange a Sweepstake competition between themselves are the very same teams where there is a massive sense of shared purpose and common goals.  Teams that behave in this way are much more likely to pull together and achieve results.  The money aspect of the Sweepstake is a complete irrelevance.  Often in the past, the winner in the teams that I worked in would put the money back into the Tea/Coffee fund or the Friday Lunchtime Drinks kitty.

It was the feeling of a shared experience that was the important thing here – and of course the banter that the whole randomness brings.  

• Who won last year ? (no-one can ever remember, because it isn’t important)
• Don’t let the Boss win (she’s got enough money already)
• Why have I picked the rubbish horse ?
• How come you got the Favourite, you always do ?

 And then on Monday morning… 

• Did you see that the Boss’s horse fell at the first fence !
• Mine nearly won
• Who won the money ?  Lucky thing ?
• Right, let’s get on with that project… 

Please comment below about whether your team is having it’s own Grand National Sweepstake (or joining up with another department to have a combined one).  Let me know about the effect this has on camaraderie.

++++

 * If you’re not sure what I mean, everyone pays a small entry fee and randomly picks a horse from the list (usually on a folded piece of paper).  The person who picks the winning horse, gets to keep all the money.  There are loads of ready made Grand National Sweepstake Kits on the internet.

The list of the UK’s 100 Best Companies To Work For 2011 was published recently.

Last week I dissected the list and looked at the different industry sectors that were represented in that list.  

If you haven’t read that blog post, have a quick look here: Best Industry To Work In

This post deals with the gender question

Of the Top 100 mid-sized companies, do you think more of them have a majority male employee population or a majority female population ?

Based on what I’ve learnt over years of looking at this type of information, my gut feel before I did my own analysis of the data was that there would be a male bias in terms of the companies represented here. 

I was wrong.

Of the 100 Best Companies To Work For,  51 of them had more Women than Men.   48 of them had more Men than Women (one had a 50:50 proportion).  

But I wouldn’t count a 51:48 ratio as evidence of a real bias !

So, it seems to balance itself out.

Of course, there are some massive extremes – Childbase (a children’s day nursery) has a 96% female workforce.   On the other hand, The Swansway Group (a car retailer) has a 90% male population.

However, the real interesting fact comes when you just look at the Top 10 Best Companies To Work

In 2011,  7 of the Top 10 companies have more Women than Men.

This is a revelation.  I checked back.  Men usually win out here.

• In 2010:  6 of the Top 10 Companies had more Men than Women
• In 2009:  In the Top 10, the ratio was 5:5  Men : Women
• In 2008:  In the Top 10, the ratio was 5:5  Men : Women
• In 2007:  6 of the Top 10 Companies had more Men than Women

To repeat, in 2011,  7 of the Top 10 companies have more Women than Men. 

So, for the first time in 5 years, the Top 10 list has more companies with a female workforce bias.

Remember, we’re not measuring absolute levels of engagement for Men or for Women here.  We’re talking about how the composition of your workforce appears to have an effect on how high you rank in the UK’s Best Companies To Work For.

So, based on the analysis I’ve outlined in these two articles, it appears that a female-biased workforce at a Housing Association / Recruitment Consultancy or Financial Services company is your best bet for inclusion in the upper echelons of the Top 100 list.

Are you surprised ?   Please comment below.

The list of the UK’s 100 Best Companies To Work For 2011 was published last weekend.

Since then, there have been hundreds of blog posts and thousands of tweets and other social media updates linking to the list and picking out a single fact from the process.

So, I thought I’d do something a bit different.

I took the list of the Top 100 Mid-Size companies (defined as those with between 250-5,000 employees) and dissected it myself.

I’ve had a fresh look at the list from a couple of different perspectives. 

Let’s start with a couple of questions for you…

1.  Of the top 100 companies, which industry sectors do you think have the most representation in the list ?   ie.  which industries are the ones with the most engaged employees ?

Have a think about that before you read on.

2.  Of the Top 100 companies, do you think more of them have a majority male employee population or a majority female population?

Ponder that as well

This blog post deals with Q1 only.

Part 2 (in a few days) will take a look at the gender issue.

Q1.  Industry Sectors

Of the 100 companies I the list, it’s fairly easy to group them into 11 different (wide) industry categories.   The pie-graph below shows how they are represented within the list.

 Top marks to you if you thought that  Housing/Social Care  or Finance/Insurance were the top industry categories.  Both of these had 15 entrants each into the Top 100 list (ie. they jointly accounted for 30% of the Top 100).

Manufacturing came next (13 entries), swiftly followed by Employment/Recruitment (12).

So, between them, these 4 categories made up over half of the total list (55%).

The next batch of industries includes Professional Services (legal firms, IT services) where there were 9 entries, Property/Construction (8), Retail (8) and Media/Advertising (7).  The last category here included the #1 ranked company – UKRD a group comprising a number of local radio stations.

So, that’s 8 categories – making up 87 entries between them.

The final 13 entrants came from Business Services (5), Leisure (4), Utilities (4).

+++

So what ?

I think it’s interesting that there seems to be a preponderance of Housing Associations, Recruitment Consultancies and Financial Services Companies taking up a lot of the places in the list.   These 3 categories alone account for 42 of the 100 slots. 

It begs a question.   Or a few questions…

• Are these particular industry categories prime ground for developing high levels of engagement for their employees ?
• Or are these particular industry categories just more likely to want to be part of the Best Companies Top 100 list ?

 The Top 100 list was compiled after 320 Mid-Sized companies applied to be part of it.  What I’d love to know is whether of the 220 who didn’t make the list were these same industry sectors represented (as much) there too ?

Unfortunately, we’ll never know the answer – unless one of the kind people from Best Companies would like to enlighten us…

In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think about this.  Please comment below

If you still want to see the full mid-size company list, here’s a link
 http://www.bestcompanies.co.uk/survey_list.aspx

Part 2 of this blog post (the gender difference) will be posted next week.

I’m lucky enough to work with a few organisations that have appeared and still appear in these lists.  I know that they find their inclusion in the published lists to be highly useful in terms of their recruitment strategy.  Being able to badge yourself as one of the “Top 100 Best Companies in the UK” means that people’s interests are naturally aroused – resulting in swarms of applications for existing vacancies and swathes of speculative applications too.

Unfortunately, some organisations see their inclusion (or not) in the list as the be-all-and-end-all of the process.  If they don’t make the Top 100, they feel that the exercise is a failure and perhaps they shouldn’t have bothered (or won’t bother again).

I think this is the wrong analysis and a doomed strategy.

The Best Companies exercise is in effect a massive syndicated staff survey.  Organisations use an off-the-shelf questionnaire (with a little customisation possible) to measure levels of engagement amongst their workforce.  To be fair, it is much more structured than this and the model is very neat – but that’s the crux of it.

To discount the results just because you didn’t make the (PR-generating) cut, sends out all the wrong messages.

It comes down to this one simple question.

Why are you thinking about conducting a staff survey with your workforce ?

If your answer is not “because we want to improve how people feel about working here”, then just don’t bother with the research in the first place.

Check here for the history of the lists since 2001

http://www.bestcompanies.co.uk//list_intro.aspx