Best Corporate Practices 2008

Sometimes the difference between the best and worst company policies comes down to one thing: trust. Learn how to use it

Last year, we showcased some of our favorite corporate management practices in this space, and BusinessWeek.com readers responded in droves. Easy as it is to focus on the stupidest, most annoying corporate practices we encounter—from no-moonlighting policies to "stitch-level" dress code policies—it makes sense to highlight the smart moves that employers make in managing their teams, at least once a year.

As you readers told us, it's often the simple, "win-win" management practices that carry the day—whether it's a corporate fitness program or an especially smart and effective employee-referral bonus plan—because of the partnership messages embedded in them. For instance, a voluntary corporate fitness program succeeds by involving employees in their own improved health and fitness goals—which benefits employers and employees alike—while employers foot the bill or carry the bulk of the cost. How different is the message encoded in a company-sponsored fitness program from the one carried to workers via a mandatory weight-loss or maintenance program, such as the one proposed (and later revised) by Clarian Health?

A Lesson From Recruiters

In fact, much of the gap between the best and worst management practices can be described by that word: trust. At one point as a corporate human resources leader during the dot-com boom, our company switchboard was bombarded with calls from recruiters, seeking to pull away our sharpest technical talent. Our hardworking phone operators did their best to deter search consultants looking to make contact with talent by any means possible, but it wasn't always easy.

A typical ploy was for a recruiter to call the main number and say, "I was at a friend's poker game last night and met an engineer in your company, who lent me his jacket to go home—now I need to return it to him—but I can't remember his name. I think it was Mike Phillips? Mark? Mike Phipps?"

They'd try every trick in the book to be connected to a possible recruit in those pre-social-networking, pre-Google days. Eventually, we gave up trying to head the headhunters off at the pass, and developed a different strategy.

Turning It Around

We said to our phone operators, "Let the calls through." We said to our technical folks, "Talk to these guys. Write down everything they say. Learn as much as you can about the jobs they're recruiting for, the projects our competitors are working on, and the salaries they're paying. Fill out this form every time you pick a recruiter's brain, hand us the form, and we'll pay you $50." Presto—some of our folks made a bunch of money in a short time, we learned boatloads about the hiring activity around town, and most important, we enrolled our employees in helping the company meet its goals.

An approach like this is a hallmark of many of our favorite best corporate practices. View the slide show to find one you can deploy in your organization in 2008. And be sure to let us know what your company is doing that you think is smart.