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Every business seeks to provide a desirable environment, but it takes more than desire to become an award-winning workplace. High performing organizations put their people first, the leaders are consistently engaging their team members, and the employees are invested in the overall vision of the company.

The pathway to becoming a Top Workplace may look different, but some specific elements are constant within every winning organization. Below are five specific keys we have implemented to get to where we are today.

Values Based Leadership

“Our main philosophy is simple. We want people to grow with us, to be happy, and to be healthy.” -Alex Dovgal

Some think a strong visionary leader is necessary to be successful. What many don’t realize is vision doesn’t guide the momentum, values do. This is because the values determine the overall direction and the day-to-day operational decisions.

All organizations have a set of values, whether they are clearly communicated or not. Therein lies the danger of values that aren’t communicated effectively. The values need to be clearly communicated and consistently evaluated to ensure they are in line with the decisions being made by the leadership.

Our values are as follows: Diversity, Safety, Innovation, Growth, Health, Happiness.

Keep the Main Thing, the Main Thing

In a boardroom meeting somewhere right now there’s a manager being praised for saving the company money, even though they are decreasing the experience for the customer. Cutting costs doesn’t always mean the company is moving forward or getting ahead.

Our main thing is to be a place where drivers and office employees enjoy working. Therefore, we offer more compensation than our competitors, even in the midst of a trucking recession. We also built a gym and an on-site hotel for our drivers and office employees. Companies that keep the main priorities intact will prevail, regardless of the difficulties along the way. Stay laser focused on ways to move the main thing forward, whatever your main thing is.

One more note on this; if your main thing is to make money, find a new main thing.

Involved Leaders

Nobody likes a micromanager. There’s a stark contrast between a manager who is too involved, and a leader who communicates effectively. Even leaders who overcommunicate can be invaluable, while managers who need to control everything will soon have nobody to lead.

That’s why Clued-in leaders who know the pulse of their team and regularly communicate are a major asset in connecting employees with the company’s mission and vision. Here are some good self-assessment questions to find out if you are a clued-in leader:

Do I clearly promote an open-door policy?
Do I practice active listening?
Do I ask for input and feedback from everyone that I’m leading, or only a select few?
How often am I holding one-on-one or small group meetings?

If it’s Rewarded, it’s Repeated

This is known as the cardinal rule of behavior change. Progress is achieved by rewarding the right things and expelling everything else. Benefits and a competitive salary are a good start, but top workplaces don’t stop there.

One way we reward progress for office employees is with a quarterly bonus revolving around key performance indicators (KPIs). These indicators are established by the employees and managers together and reviewed at the end of each quarter. Each quarter we ask, “what do you need to be more efficient?” If an employee asks for something to help their performance, they will get it.

Drivers have a couple of opportunities each month to earn bonuses based on specific metrics made by our safety, fleet, dispatch, and accounting departments. Drivers who follow those KPIs can get a bonus. In addition, we offer our “best drivers of the month.” And lastly, we offer pay increases for drivers who have been with us for specific amounts of time and remain in good standing.

Grow Your People

Empowering employees to reach their full potential is an essential part of retaining employees. People want leaders who help them stay motivated. A top-paying company will eventually lose value-adding employees if they aren’t growing. Companies need to find ways to add value to their employees.

One way we add value to our drivers is with our training. Right now, the dry van market is very poor. A lot of dry van drivers are leaving the industry. We offer trailer change training so drivers can master driving a refrigerated trailer or a flatbed trailer. This increases the driver’s earnings, the company’s earnings, and makes the driver more marketable if they ever want to become an owner-operator or fleet owner.

All in all, everyone wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves. At the end of the day, we just want to make a difference in this life. When companies hold true to a good mission, there is no end to what can be achieved. Being recognized as a Top Workplace is an honor! But the real reward is in knowing that the people who belong to your workplace are happy to be there.

Risk management, according to Karl Wiig, Chairman of Knowledge Research Institute, is an operational approach to represent knowledge management. But, in this case, it seeks to apply organizational knowledge in order to satisfy and exceed employees’ expectations and improve talent well-being.

All executives need to be aware of how to better control risk management, which coincides with talent well-being. To do this, they should understand the mediating role of knowledge management. This may be the answer executives need but may also lack the fundamental fortitude necessary to be an all-encompassing approach to predict talent well-being within companies. Due to this limitation, the focus of this article is based upon the critical role of risk management which allows a rich basis for understanding the mechanisms by which talent well-being is influenced.

Executives see knowledge management as an employee’s capabilities in securing benefits received by joining in risk management. Therefore, talent well-being has been determined as resources accessible through knowledge management to enhance executive operational risk management. One good example, in which Victor Sino, a director of Operational Risk Management at a prominent large organization states that operational risk is a risk of loss due to failed talent well-being, processes, systems, and an external event. Some of these can be controlled by executives and others are risks that have to be factored into strategic decision-making.

Companies were assumed to be defenseless entities against threats, and opportunities happened in business environments that were serendipitous versus planned and organized. Organizational risk management was developed to offset problems before they occur and to adjust or ship resources accordingly in the event of a threat. Executives must recognize problems, and work hard to overcome them. First, executives will need to adopt knowledge management to identify the employee’s individual learning needs and become more inspired them to put extra effort into their work. This can also improve talent well-being through acquiring additional knowledge and developing better relationships with them, and providing newer solutions and creating a better workplace for them.

Operational risk of large corporations is at risk if they can be easily imitated by the competition. Therefore, firm-specific knowledge must be guarded and not shared with the competition. Any leak of such information may expose the organization and increase the operational risk. Thus, the ownership of knowledge, or what I would prefer to call knowledge management, falls under the operational risk category and must be managed and also monitored due to fluctuations in the dynamic economic environment of today. This can improve talent well-being through fostering the dynamic relationships among employees and departments, but most importantly, through satisfying employee needs. When executives have people in place to manage knowledge and embrace risk management, the organization can see better satisfaction with the most talented employees, and most importantly, enhance talent well-being.

Integrating Knowledge Management and Talent Management to Retain the Most Talented Employees

I suggest that both important factors of knowledge management and talent management constitute the foundation of a supportive workplace to reduce operational risk – two major concerns of global leaders today. Talent management is essential for business growth and prosperity while knowledge management, if not embraced, can lead to operational risk. Knowledge management can help organizations identify their inefficiencies in each process, and subsequently, recover them on an instantaneous basis, enabling executives to prevent further operational risk. Adding more manageable control of internal resources and reducing operational risk. Thus, when executives ensure the effectiveness of knowledge management they increase control and lessen operational risk.

Knowledge management utilizes modifications in order to efficiently and effectively use organizational resources, decrease costs, and control operational risk. Knowledge management also develops cohesive infrastructures to store and retrieve the knowledge to enable employees in creating more innovative solutions to problems and managing operational risks. My explanation of this is clearly within the executive span of control and potentially limits operational risk. I designed an approach for executives in large corporations to use talent management coupled with very prominent and useful construct of knowledge management so that the managerial implication is sound, justified, and operational to eliminate the gaps and serve the most talented employees in the organization that exist in the spaces between the lines of the organization.

Knowledge management enhances a firm’s capabilities to decrease the risk of imitation of organizational capabilities by competitors thus, managing operational risk. In doing this, executives that adopt knowledge management develop organizational communications aimed at providing valuable resources for organizations. They also enhance knowledge sharing among organizational members and stipulate knowledge to be shared around the organization. This process can potentially build an effective learning company in which the most talented employees can develop both personally and professionally. Knowledge management could, therefore, positively impact the most talented employee’s retention, through meeting the goals of personal development.

Additionally, executives that employ knowledge management create new ideas and knowledge for innovation through motivating the most talented employees to more innovatively solve organizational problems. Executives today realize that knowledge is the one of most strategic factors for organizations from a competitive standpoint. Knowledge management is a necessary precursor to creating new knowledge and ideas within organizations. The creation of new knowledge is a process and can be essential to identify the most talented employees’ needs and also recognize changes happening in the business environment. Through knowledge management, executives can contribute to identify and meet the most talented employees’ needs which lies at the focal point of executive success.

In conclusion, I suggest that executives embrace knowledge management. Knowledge management influences some of the spans of control of executive responsibility. My primary focus is on one factor (i.e. talent management) but there are many more important components of the managerial function that can be enhanced when knowledge management is embraced. The key here is that there are positive effects of knowledge management on talent management.

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Mostafa Sayyadi works with senior business leaders to effectively develop innovation in companies and helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders. He is a business book author and a long-time contributor to business publications and his work has been featured in top-flight business publications.

How to Become an Award-Winning Workplace

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