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Two recent posts, both in Fast Company, are a great reminder that when it comes to cultivating a company culture, sometimes it’s the little things that matter most.

In “It Isn’t Just a Myth: A Little Thanks Goes A Long Way,” Robert I. Sutton quotes an academic study that provides evidence for the value of a simple thank you:

“The simple act of having a boss come by and offer a public thanks to one group, and but not the other, really packed a wallop. These fundraisers were paid a fixed salary, so Grant and Gino compared the number of phone calls made be each fundraiser before and after the “thank you” intervention. The results were pretty impressive, as while there was no change in the average number of calls made by the group that was not offered thanks, the folks who heard a warm two sentence thank you from a boss made an average of about 50% more calls during the subsequent week.”

In “Chip Conley Took the Maslow Pyramid, Made It an Employee Pyramid and Saved His Company,” Kermit Patterson interviews the founder of the Joie de Vivre hotel chain, who’s just published a new book called Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. Conley says, “What really is meaningful to people is genuine appreciation shown in real time. My basic belief is that life and business is all about where you pay your attention. Let’s pay some attention in our management and leadership to the idea of recognition. It’s not just platitude.”

What is the best way to make “thank you” a consistent part of a company’s culture?

How much does communication cost your company? One of my clients just shared an equation she picked up at a conference - try it; it will blow your mind.

• Take the average monthly salary at your company
• Multiply by two (to cover overhead, benefits, etc.)
• Divide by 20 (working days in a month)
• Divide by 8 (hours per day)
• Divide by 60 (minutes per hour)
• Multiply by number of employees at your company

This gives you the cost per minute of having all your employees do something - like read a memo.

Multiply by number of minutes - let’s say by 5 minutes to read and digest a 1-plus page memo. That gives you the cost of communicating. Now let’s see it in action.

• Average monthly salary = $5,000
• Times 2 = $10,000
• Divided by 20 = 500
• Divided by 8 = 62.5
• Divided by 60 = 1.04, or about a buck a minute.

Multiply that by 5 minutes and you get $5.21. Now here’s where it gets really good. Multiply by 5,000 employees and the cost of having all your employees read a memo is $26,050. If you have 100,000 employees that cost goes to $521,000 - and that’s for a SHORT memo. Bring all your employees into a one-hour all employee meeting and the numbers are really amazing. For a 5,000 person company, the cost is $312,000.

I’m a big fan of communication, obviously - but the equation above provides a compelling reminder of the need to think carefully about how and how much we communicate to make sure we’re getting the most bang for the buck.

According to numerous accounts, Americans’ New Years resolutions are fairly predictable. Not necessarily in this order, here are the top ten for 2009:

• Stop smoking
• Get Fit
• Lose Weight
• Enjoy Life More
• Quit Drinking
• Get Organized
• Learn Something New
• Get Out of Debt
• Spend more time with Family/Friends
• Help Others

All worthy goals, to be sure – and as anyone in a leadership role knows, it’s important to have a goal. With that in mind, I’d like to suggest some resolutions for leaders to consider in 2010:

• Listen more than you talk
• Lead by example
• Show you value employees by asking for their ideas and input
• Communicate clearly, in plain language
• Say “thank you”

What else should leaders be thinking about as we look toward a new year?

Amazingly enough, it’s mid-November. With the holidays approaching, things are slowing a bit, meaning many of us have a bit more time than we’re used to. What to do with it? Take stock.

What were your key priorities for 2009? How many of them were you able to accomplish? What unforeseen events intervened – either to prevent you from achieving something you’d planned, or to redirect your energies? What are your key priorities for 2010?

Harvard Business Review blogger Tony Chan (also CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of Cue Ball, a venture and early growth equity firm investing in the information media and consumer sectors) recommends that every CEO write an annual memo to the board summarizing the most important lessons learned from the past twelve months as well as the four or five key priorities for the coming year. It’s a great idea for any leader, and could also make an effective exercise for a team meeting.

OK, I’m a little late to the game, but I highly recommend Dan McCarthy’s leadership/management skills quiz, based on the book 100 Things You Need to Know: Best People Practices for Managers & HR.

I’ve been managing people for almost as long as I’ve been managed and I (humble expression here) only got six out of 10 right.

How’d you do?

Years ago, I was one of only two female junior faculty members at a large state university in the South, and often the only female at a given meeting. Invariably, one of the middle-aged white men at the table would look over at me and suggest that I take notes. Although at first I said OK – who can say no to anything during their first few weeks on the job? - pretty quickly it began to irate me (as they said in that part of the south). But I didn’t know what to do.

I debated saying, “You know, I’m junior faculty, not a secretary,” or “I took notes at the last three meetings; who else would like to take a turn?” but feared I’d come off as too uppity. Finally I hit on an idea: I left my pen and notebook back in my office. When the request came, I smiled disarmingly and said, “Oh my goodness, silly me – I didn’t bring pen and paper!” In the silence that followed, I could HEAR them chewing over the alternatives: “This is damned awkward.” “If we ask her to go back to her office and get the pen and paper…” “I could offer to lend her pen and paper but that’s almost worse…” Eventually one of them motioned to one of the others: “Morton, you take notes this time.” BINGO. I never, ever brought a pen and paper to another faculty meeting. [And I never regretted it until (fast forward to my next life) my boss, who I adored, laughed and shook his head as he passed me yet another pen and a sheet of paper and said, "Why don’t you ever have a notebook with you like a normal person?" But that’s another story.]

Why am I telling you this? Because in figuring out how to construct communications that drive behavior it’s important to remember that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Years ago, I worked for a credit card company that almost died. A reputation crisis followed by financial mismanagement led to a dramatic fall in the stock price and a near shutdown by regulators.

During that fall, every day brought a new crisis, and each crisis seemed to demand extensive communication to employees, because (the conventional wisdom went) employees would be upset and fearful and would need context and reassurance quickly. Except I didn’t care.

That fall, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He was given three to six months, fought valiantly, and made it through four. Each day, as I got to work and was given the latest news, I had my own news in mind. “The regulators are setting up onsite.” “We just got a stage four diagnosis.” “Our stock price has fallen another 20 percent.” “We’re stopping chemo.” “The regulators are demanding a capital plan.” “We’re giving up on radiation.” The two stories formed a point-counterpoint in my mind all fall, and although I loved my job and was committed to it, I had no doubt about which story was more important, and which outcome would have a bigger effect on my life.

I’m not saying that communicating with employees isn’t important – it is. But it’s important for us to remember that employees have lives outside of work, and often we don’t know much about them. When communications don’t have the desired effect, we may want to take a step back, and see if there’s something else we should be factoring into the picture.

In a recent (fabulous) blog post about how to get people to change behavior, Peter Bregman wrote about a lion at Disneyworld who is always on the rock where he’s supposed to be, waiting to show himself off to the folks on the train. How do they get him to stay there? The rock is temperature controlled – warm in the winter, cool in the summer, so he WANTS to be there.

Our equation at OgilvyImpact is Know + Feel = Do. Our emphasis is on helping businesses get their employees to do what’s needed to advance the business agenda and strategy, and part of that is figuring out what they need to know and feel to want to take that action.

When we work with employers, we talk about carrots and sticks – incentives toward certain behaviors, and disincentives toward others. We also talk about barriers, and how to remove them, and that’s where Peter’s article comes in.

One of the simplest things you can do as an employer is to remove barriers to the action you’re trying to incent. Sometimes it’s as simple as moving desks closer together, or enabling someone’s phone to dial internationally. Sometimes it’s more complex. But whatever it is, the easier you make it, the more likely it is that it’ll happen.

The metaphors are seemingly irresistible. For every so-called “green shoot” that’s identified as a potential sign of life in the economy, there’s a patch of brown grass, a withered leaf, or a dead sapling.

They may not be as dramatic as the 735 enormous cargo ships anchored off Singapore, but every day employees see signs that the recession is not yet over. For me, it’s the fact that the train station where I park – chock full by 7:25 AM when I started commuting – is now one-third empty at 8:45 AM. For my husband, who drives a couple of hundred miles a week on sales calls, it’s that there’s no traffic – ever (and in northern California, that’s a big change).

To reach employees in these times, it’s important to acknowledge these realities, not pretend they don’t exist. Why not start a meeting by asking employees to identify the signifiers they watch? Drawing a parallel between the signs they watch and the signs the company watches can help employees understand where the company is and what it needs to do – and how they can play a role.

According to the study The Road to an Engaged Workforce, the four areas that most affect employee engagement are reduced role conflict, appropriate training, personal autonomy, and personal power.

Interestingly, as Paul Hebert, managing director at influency consultancy i2i notes, these are all controlled by managers, NOT by employees.

Hebert suggests that employers could save money and increase engagement by focusing not on convincing frontline employees that they’re engaged, but on motivating managers to engage them and rewarding them for doing so. His suggestions include rewarding managers for seeking input, for changing work processes to maximize employee autonomy and power, for prioritizing training, and for communicating openly and frequently with their teams.

It’s a truism in employee communications that employees prefer to receive most information from their direct manager. Why wouldn’t engagement follow the same path?