Did you have a bonus plan in place last year? If so, was it effective? How is this year’s plan working out? If you have a good year and want to share some of the fruits of your labor with your team, great, but to do so without a well-planned and executed bonus plan is a wasted opportunity. So, here’s a list of best bonus and incentive practices to help you get the most bang for your bonus bucks.

Huddles are daily or weekly meetings that drive employee engagement and serve as a self-correcting measure to keep your company on the path toward achieving its goals. Huddles are the linchpin of any successful open-book implementation, but if you find engagement and understanding are low in your organization, you’ve learned an important lesson: Huddles can’t do it alone. In order to foster cultural adoption and high involvement in the planning and execution of your organization’s goals, you’ve got to make the process accessible to your team. Here are three keys for reaching your team and driving their participation:

Over more than two decades, our employees have consistently been exposed to the teachings of the Great Game of Business® through meetings and trainings at Daryl Flood, Inc., but we found that we wanted to take this training beyond the classroom to interact directly with employees on an individual level. How? Through gamification of our training courses. This allows us to share content with employees in a format that is fun and motivates them to engage in learning at their convenience. There are four things to focus on when building a successful gamified education program:

“In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.”  ~Tom Bodett I remember the grip of fear and dread that day. How could I forget? After 18 years in business, we faced a nearly insurmountable crisis that could have brought it all to an end. A few months earlier I had hired a bright young man that seemed to have what it takes to grow into a valuable member of our team and become a shining star. His name was Travis and he applied to be an estimator and project manager. Filling this role successfully would increase sales and help us grow. But in time I learned my assessment was wrong! Oh, how wrong!

An open-door policy refers to the practice of business or organizational leaders leaving their doors open so that employees feel welcome to stop by and meet informally, ask questions, or discuss matters that have been weighing on their minds. These days, with open office environments, co-working spaces and remote team members working around the globe, the “open-door policy” is more metaphorical than ever before. The equivalent of walking through a physical open door in many organizations is now sending a text message, a direct message on Facebook or Slack, an instant message on Skype, or a ping on Basecamp. Regardless of whether the interruption is through an actual door or a digital door, the theory is that an organization uses such openness to build a culture of trust, collaboration, communication, and respect regardless of an individual’s position in the hierarchy.

Are you toying with the idea of attending the Gathering of Games conference in September?  If you believe all employees can more positively contribute to your business if they are educated and empowered to do so, this might be just the event you are looking for.

For the first time in our history, we have five generations in the workforce, each generation bringing a different perspective and their own set of expectations. Millennials are now the largest generation in the workforce, and employers must rethink their workforce norms. As diversity grows with this generational shift, employers across the globe are challenged to adopt best practices for building and maintaining a generational inclusive workforce to attract and retain top talent in their organization. In order to meet the needs of today’s workforce, here are four best practices to transform your culture and build a generational inclusive workforce:

As the old saying goes, opposites attract—which can be especially true in business. When Reed MacNaughton and Dan Cocozza met back in college, however, they became friends based on what made them alike. They were both engineering students who took all the same classes together at Union College in Schenectady, NY. They also pledged the same fraternity, Sigma Phi,  and when they graduated in 2004, they both moved to New York City, where they roomed together as they started jobs as structural engineers. Later, they both became entrepreneurs when they each founded their own business: MacNaughton moved back to his home state of Connecticut to start a residential construction firm while Cocozza stayed in the big city. They were both very successful in their ventures.

Transparency is key to playing The Great Game of Business®, but it raises concerns for many folks new to the open-book world. Does transparency mean sharing everyone’s salaries? Will competitors know our confidential information? Will transparency make my company vulnerable? It can be scary to pull back the curtain. But practiced skillfully, transparency is part of a formula for success rather than a risk for overexposure. Take a look at our top tips on business transparency and practicing GGOB.

At the Gathering of Games conference each year, the open-book community honors and celebrates the remarkable achievements of companies from around the globe that have fully embraced the principles of open-book management and The Great Game of Business®, and demonstrated outstanding results. We are excited to celebrate the 19th Annual All-Star Award Team. This team of All-Stars represents the companies who stand out as the best of the best in open-book management:

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.

Over the last three years, I’ve interviewed over 200 highly successful CEOs, military officers, entrepreneurs and leadership gurus including John C. Maxwell, Ken Blanchard, Stephen M.R. Covey, Liz Wiseman, Kim Scott, Patty McCord and others. I always get them to reveal their number one secret to workplace leadership; what advice would they give to a younger version of themselves? After analyzing their answers 10 themes emerged.