Editor's Letter
By Andy Cohen

Cash is king, right? Wrong.

We’ve all heard the adage so frequently that we’ve come to believe it’s true. But when it comes to employee engagement, motivation and loyalty, the greenbacks have nothing on a little pat on the back.

Sure, employees and job applicants will say that they need to earn a certain salary and money is an important factor in their motivations. But really, compensation is just the cost of doing business. Companies have to do so much more to create a workplace that people want to come to every day. They have to show they care for their people and respect their work and the efforts they put in. They have to motivate creatively – yes, a surprise day off or an outing on a riverboat can go a long way toward making employees realize that they work at a great place.

One thing is for sure, though: Money never makes people feel that way. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not naïve enough to think that people aren’t driven by making money and don’t enjoy the fruits of their success. The point is this: Money doesn’t create loyalty to a company and it’s not remembered when people receive it.

Consider a recent survey by Wirthlin Worldwide, a research and consulting company that focuses on human resource and workplace issues. The organization asked 1,010 people how they spent their last cash reward or monetary bonus. A full 40% of people said the special incentive they worked so hard to achieve was actually applied to household bills.

Very nice. Hard work well spent on water and a roof. I’m sure those people remembered exactly how they spent their bonuses because they were spent on such unique things. Yeah, right.

Even worse, 18% of people who responded to the Wirthlin study said that they couldn’t remember where they spent their most recent cash reward, and only 14% of respondents said that the money actually was spent on a vacation or a “special personal treat.”

No, companies today need to connect with their employees in ways that don’t include extra dough being direct-deposited into their checking accounts. They need to create visions and missions that employees buy into, and they need to give employees the freedom to succeed and fail on their own. It’s a management style that’s on full display in this special issue of Counselor.

Welcome to our first-ever Best Places to Work issue. To arrive at the 50 best workplaces in the ad specialty industry, which you’ll find a list of beginning on page 113, we partnered with a research company that has a wealth of experience at this. Quantum Market Research, which administers Best Places to Work programs in 40 major markets in the United States, ran the survey and data collection process for this effort. They surveyed employees of both suppliers and distributors (those with 15 or more employees) in the ad specialty industry, and after collecting mounds of data and information, handed us a list of the companies that scored the highest.

And, then we went to work on reporting about why employees of these companies rate their workplaces so highly. We came away with stories of great benefits plans, communication strategies that keep everyone involved, corporate outings for fun and for business, free-lunch-Mondays, bring-your-pet-to-work days, hiring strategies bordering on obsessive-compulsive, and stock ownership plans that Warren Buffett would envy.

It all added up to quotes like this one from Mitchell Lombard, the owner of Atlas Embroidery & Screen Printing (asi/126900), our second-ranked Best Place to Work in the industry: “Our employees will bleed for our company. They feel that they own it. We want them to feel that way.”

For iClick’s (asi/62124) Lon McGowan, the head of our top-rated workplace in the industry, a good corporate culture trumps everything when it comes to employee motivation. “I always feel that culture is one of the most important things in a company because it feeds off how you answer the phone, how you deal with customers, what our work ethic is,” he says. “It’s one of those things that we always work on.”
Smart move.

Enjoy the issue!

Andy Cohen