When you hear the words “cheap and easy”, you might not automatically think of rewarding and recognizing the folks on your team. However, that’s exactly what your employee recognition program should be: an affordable, habitual pattern. While there is value to an occasional blow-out celebration, your employees will feel just as appreciated with frequent, small reminders that they are important. Take a look at some of these super-simple ways to show appreciation to your employees.

Creating an informed and engaged workforce doesn't happen overnight...and isn't sustainable without the dedication and focus of the whole team. To help get your Game off on the right foot in the new year, here's a list of must-know tips from our best blogs to help The Game excel at your company.

You wouldn’t drive your car while only looking in the rear-view mirror…why run your business looking only at the past? This is the method many businesses have used for decades: close the books, review the numbers, repeat. While reviewing and analyzing company financials is an important process, you can’t change history. Forward forecasting is a way of communicating your company’s financials while keeping all eyes on the target. The purpose of forward forecasting is not to predict the future, but to influence it. This process minimizes surprises by having employees estimate or offer an educated opinion on what to expect.

At the Great Game of Business, we hope to not only transform businesses but also change the lives of the individual employees within those companies. Our goal is to transform the lives of 10 million people in the next 10 years. In this blog series, we are striving toward our 10-million-person goal by sharing stories of personal transformation resulting from the Great Game of Business and open-book management. Here, we feature Rob and Rachel Kelsey from King Maintenance Management in Springfield, Missouri, and how they brought the Great Game home to tackle their personal debts and reach their goal of starting their own business. 

At any given time in your business, there is one thing, an operational or financial number that represents a weakness or vulnerability that, if not addressed and corrected, will negatively impact the overall performance and long-term security of the business. This one thing is known as your company’s Critical Number™.  Ultimately, the Critical Number defines winning. It rallies people around a common goal and directs a focus to what’s most important to the company’s success.  From this definition, it’s clear to see why identifying a Critical Number is valuable to your business, but the Critical Number is also very important to your employees. If they do not understand and buy-in to the Critical Number, it is likely that this number will continue to go unnoticed. Here are three key ways the right Critical Number will strengthen your business:

It's simple. You cannot successfully implement open-book management and the Great Game unless every employee understands the financials and drivers of the business. But what puts the "best of the best" in open-book management above the rest when it comes to financial literacy training? We asked this year's All-Stars how they transformed their businesses to create a financial literacy focus that promotes engagement and accountability from top to bottom in their organization. 

For more than 25 years, we’ve helped thousands of companies implement open-book management to its fullest capacity. Along the way, we’ve developed a list of common mistakes companies make while using transparency and open-book management in their organization. If you think you are not executing open-book management correctly, or are not seeing the results you expected, then you may be making one of these four common errors:

Yup. It’s that time of year. We gather the family, light the fire and watch Christmas Vacation. And it’s hilarious…until you remember that you still haven’t finalized your company’s bonus plan for the New Year. Yikes! You don’t want to end up like Frank Shirley (Clark W. Griswold’s boss), do you? As you design your organization’s bonus plan for the New Year, I want you to keep in mind a few things about designing what we call a Stake in the Outcome. For those who play the Great Game of Business, the Stake in the Outcome is one of the most important parts (and least understood) practices of the entire business operating system. And it goes way beyond the bonus! 

  At the 26th Annual Gathering of Games, we had the opportunity to host Gregg Stebben from ForbesBooks Radio as he interviewed participants from this year's conference. In this interview he highlights Process Triage, a business process improvement system founded by Joseph (Rosey) Rosenberger.  "Triage is a way to deal with a high volume of problems with the objective to assess the type of solution quickly so scarce resources focus on the most valuable good first." Check out this interview with Rosey below to see how his company has applied this methodology in businesses ranging from start-ups to Fortune® 500 companies.

 When it comes to learning financials, it may seem overwhelming for those who don’t have a background in accounting or business. At first, nearly anything you say about the financials will sound absolutely foreign. So what can you do to break down this communication barrier? There are a number of techniques you can use when communicating the numbers to ensure everyone is on the same page. Here are four strategies to improve communication about financials with your employees:

At the Great Game of Business, results go beyond the financial numbers. Behind the numbers are stories and real individuals. We've asked actual, current employees from our 2018 All-Star companies what they had to say about how the Great Game has affected them personally. See the top comments below!

Over 1,000 business books are published every month. Over 100 of those have ‘leadership’ in the title. It seems that we are always looking for new ways to lead in an ever-changing world of business. But has true leadership ever really changed? Here’s another question to consider. Is leadership different in an open-book environment?