In the recent Market Basket uprising, one of the things the employees kept bringing up was that Artie T referred to them as associates. They were very offended whenever his replacements referred to them as employees.
When I ran a mall-chain store just outside of Boston, I referred to everyone who worked in the store as crew, rather than employees, and let them put anything they wanted on their nametags. I largely credit my successes in that job to those policies.
