This list of 10 steps to building a successful workplace comes from the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation:

• Flexibility: Offer telecommuting, shift exchanges, and compressed work weeks.
• Diversity: Diversify by race, age, gender, orientation, disability, religion.
• Equity: Promote equity in pay and access to positions and promotions.
• Sustainability: Reduce carbon footprint by working “greener.”
• Care giving: Allow for flexibility and compassion.
• Wellness: Provide sick days to allow the sick to be sick.
• Multigenerational. Promote a diversity of generations.
• Social spaces: Engage consumers through social media and revenues grow 18%; don’t, and revenues drop 6%. Read the study.
• Retention: Provide mentoring, professional development, career advancement planning, and continuing education.
• Practice: Everyone, top to bottom, follows policies.

The article in which this list appeared (“The Work-Life Tip Sheet: 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace,” by Deborah Frett, Huffington Post, October 22, 2009) quotes a Harvard Business Review article that cites a study from the University of New Mexico (patience, we’ll get there) that measures the stock market’s response when a Fortune 500 company announces a work-life program: The stock goes up 4.8%. Just on the announcement. And then, when you actually implement the program, employee satisfaction typically improves, which bumps up customer satisfaction, which increases revenues, which can also boost the stock price.

That’s a pretty good business case for creating an organizational culture that values employees—a core value of the Baldrige model.

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