“If people don’t participate, they don’t buy in. If they don’t buy in, they don’t commit. If they don’t commit, they don’t deliver!” These words can be found on page 348 of The Great Game of Business. What a simple yet powerful statement. Businesses, small and large, struggle with employees delivering on their metrics. Maybe it’s not a delivery problem, but a buy-in problem. According to Great Place to Work, Employees who find their job to have “special meaning: this is not ‘just a job’” are 4 times more likely to give extra to the company 11 times more committed to stay 14 times more likely to look forward to coming to work How can you give special meaning to their job? Get their buy-in on the plan.

You just can’t find good help these days! If you're like me, you've heard this saying and have likely said it yourself a thousand times! It has been so difficult and discouraging to find the right employees to hire in our company that, for about two years, I all but refused to grow my business. Growth meant I would have to hire and train new employees just to have them leave once we started seeing some real return from this new employee. And after twenty-five years of business, I did not want to continue fighting the with many millennials—often trouble with work ethic and frequent job-hoping. I had a choice: keep suffering or find a solution. So, I made it my mission to discover the real issue and determine a solution!

How the founders of Chillibreeze pursue their purpose: “We Start Every Day With Gratitude.” It was a Christian mission that first brought Joanna and Ralph Budelman to India in 1995. Their lives, and those who work with them, have never been the same since. The couple, who grew up in Louisiana and Illinois, respectively, share a deep belief in the power of entrepreneurship to create positive change in the world. After arriving in India, they founded the first of what would eventually become a series of businesses over the subsequent ten years that have created great jobs for people in the communities they have lived and operated in.

To overcome today’s challenges, and build a sustainable business for the long term, it’s time to transform how you get work done The biggest challenges our organization faces, like most everyone else in our post-pandemic world, is shortages of parts and people. With global supply chains snarled, we find ourselves sitting on warehouses full of engines waiting for silicon chips worth a few dollars each. Meanwhile, we were incredibly fortunate to hire 500 new associates over the past year. But, we’re still shorthanded when you subtract the 250 or so employee-owners who retired at the end of 2020. And, despite the superhuman efforts from our human relations teams, that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Liquidity options are plentiful for business owners: strategic sale, private equity, management buyout, family transfer, and leveraged recapitalization. Which path should you take? We know that 42% of the 2021 Great Game™ All-Star companies and many others walked a different path—implementing an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Apart from the fact that ESOPs can be a great exit strategy for open-book companies, here are the top five reasons why open-book management companies should consider an ESOP.

3 Principles to Retain Talent 10.9 million. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is the number of job openings in the United States as of the end of July. To add fuel to the fire, there are 4.9 million more people than before the pandemic who are currently not working or even looking for work. Then consider that 3.6 million people retired during the pandemic, and 2 million more are expected to leap into retirement. No wonder nearly 90 percent of the 1,200 employers surveyed by SHRM reported a lack of people to fill open positions, and 73% stated the application rate is declining as well. At SRC, it is no different. We have hired more than 600 new employees across all divisions within the last few months, and we still need more people. But why the shortage? That is a head-scratcher for sure. More than likely, it is a combination of many things—a perfect storm. You really can’t point the finger at one specific thing that is causing it. One thing is for sure. It has caused businesses to think differently about their people. The Great Game of Business has said it for years - People are your greatest asset. Invest in your people, and they will invest in you. That’s easier said than done, right? Yes and no. It’s not always easy, but it is simple. Recently MITSloan Management Review analyzed a total of 1.4 million employee reviews. The purpose of this study was to determine what matters most to employees. They narrowed the reviews down to around 150 topics, with 10 bubbling to the top.

The real crisis organizations face is a shortage of employees capable of thinking critically and making tough decisions. The writing was on the wall for everyone to see. There’s a mass exodus underway in the workforce as some 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 65 every single day. The result is that the number of Boomers in the workforce has dropped by 2.2 million every year since 2010—or an average of 5,900 people a day. That leak won’t stop anytime soon since by 2030, all Baby Boomers will be 65. The problem is that plenty of people missed the signs of this trend—and now they’re paying the price as the number of openings exceeds the number of available workers willing to apply for new jobs. The challenge is exacerbated for those companies looking to hire for specific skillsets.

In 2018, the executives at banking giant Wells Fargo issued a new strategy for their business: the overall goal was to create long-term banking relationships with their customers. And to measure how well the company was executing on that strategy, they began tracking “cross-selling.” In other words, employees would be measured, and rewarded, based on the number of different accounts—from deposits and credit cards to auto loans and mortgages—a customer opened with the bank. The CEO at the time even coined a slogan: “eight is great” to illustrate the optimum number of accounts a customer might have with the bank. On paper, you could argue that the more accounts a customer had would likely equate with a longer-term relationship with the bank. But, if you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past few years, you know that things went spectacularly wrong.

For nearly four decades, SRC has been perfecting its approach to strategic planning, and every year it keeps getting better. Here’s the proven step-by-step approach to building good, accurate plans employees love to execute. People Support what they help to create. That is why at SRC and The Great Game of Business®, building a strategic plan is about involving ALL employees in the planning process. That means planning is a year-round event, and it begins with what’s happening in the real world. Twice a year, in June and October, SRC brings the marketplace to its people so they can accomplish two goals: Develop business-growth plans they can own. Help employees answer the questions: Are we confident and energized about the direction of the company? Having a strategic plan is more than putting on paper what you plan on doing over the next year. It is about setting a strategy, building a plan, dealing with market changes, and most importantly, enabling everybody to contribute. This is what we at The Great Game of Business call High-Involvement Planning™. Big picture — High-Involvement Planning can be broke down into clarifying your strategy and building your plan. If you zoom in, you will see that there are really ten steps to having a successful strategic plan.

One Sentence Engagement? Is it truly possible to condense the science of employee engagement into a single sentence? It is and I’m about to convince you of that. But first I need to explain why I’m taking this extreme exercise in reductionism. Studying leadership and employee engagement has been a passion of mine for the last couple of decades. As an entrepreneur, I used engagement to chase and eventually catch a Best Place to Work award. As an author, one book on engagement somehow turned into three. One speech turned into a global tour. And this article on engagement is number one hundred and something. <> I know of no topic that is more important to the long-term success of a business than engagement.