5 Boredom Busters to Boost Productivity in Your Small Business
Here’s an interesting paradox for you: Boredom may be the biggest cause of burnout. Consider the times in your life when it has been most difficult – on a regular basis – to pull yourself out of bed in the morning. It’s very likely that those were periods when you have boredom breathing down your back – not when you’re being challenged by long list of daunting projects. Boredom is an equal-opportunity plague. It can strike in the highest levels of management as well as among entry-level minimum-wage workers. However, according to some 2011 Gallup research, well educated middle-aged workers are the most at risk. Worse yet, Gallup found that only 29 percent of American workers were “engaged” in their positions. The rest were divided between “not engaged” (52 percent) and “actively disengaged” (19 percent). Boredom is a productivity killer. Not only do bored workers produce less, they are far more prone to errors and some even engage in active sabotage. Hey, they have to do something that interests them! However, I suggest we see this not as some hand-wringing scourge on the American workforce, but as an opportunity to greatly increase productivity with very little capital investment. All we have to do is challenge, motivate and energize our workforce, and the resultant boost in creativity and productivity should be something to behold. Changing the business culture that seems to be fostering boredom requires a variety of steps, both big and small. Foster better communication. Do you have a workplace where an employee can approach a manager and say, “I’m bored, I need more to do”? Many employees are afraid to say that they are underutilized, fearing they will be fired. Let your employees know that if they have time on their hands, you have important things that need to be done. Reward suggestions that increase productivity. Be more flexible. Rigid walls between “job descriptions” are productivity killers and boredom creators. We all have stereotypical images of union workers who will sit idle rather than pick up a hammer because it’s against union rules. Don’t let that kind of mentality creep into your workplace. Cross train employees. Let employees see tasks all the way through to their completion. Don’t unnecessarily “assembly line” the workflow. Meet less. Hold fewer meetings, or dramatically slash the time spent in meetings. Make meetings interesting, focused and relevant. National Public Radio recently ran a fascinating piece on holding meetings standing up. When Washington University’s Olin Business School, Andrew Knight and Markus Bear tested standing meetings, they found that participants were more open and less territorial. That should lead to greater creativity and more engagement. Broaden horizons. Give your employees opportunities to learn more advanced skills and develop a deeper comprehension of your industry. See this as preparing your workforce for the growth of your company; adopt the idea of “if you build it, they will come.” Mix it up. Perform random acts of energizing. Break up the routine in fun and exciting ways. Bring in food. Get out of the office. Declare Halloween in August. What you do isn’t as important as the message the activities send: You want your employees to have a positive attitude about their work and workplace. How have you energized your team? Image: Public Domain...
read moreCounteroffers: As in Poker, You Need to Know When To Fold
It’s a situation many of you have faced: a valued employee announces his intentions to leave in order to take another position. It’s one that I’ve experienced as well. When it happened to me I put a counter offer on the table and also made several other concessions. In the final analysis, it wasn’t just economic reasons that were driving his decision. His new job would reduce his commute to just a few minutes, while my offices were 45 minutes from his home. The new job gave him back family time and allowed him to engage in other activities. I couldn’t compete with that. And thank heavens I couldn’t! Phew! That was close. In retrospect, I’m generally relieved that he didn’t accept my offer, it would not have been healthy for the financial condition of my company. I dodged a bullet there, albeit somewhat unwittingly. When presented this situation, often small business owners are unable to see the bigger picture. For one thing, they have time working against them. When a valued employee is about to jump ship, and you know all the pressing needs of the business, it’s hard to sit back, relax, and calmly analyze all the implications of the situation. The “fight or flight” reflex takes over and there’s no way you and take the “flight” option, so you “fight” back with a counter offer. However, if you can internalize a few principles before you’re confronted with an employee who’s about ready to pack his things and go, you’ll increase your odds of making the right decision. Three-fold affordability If you have determined that the main reason for the employee leaving is money and a counter offer carries a high probability of success, there are three “areas of affordability” you need to consider before weighing in with your counter offer: Financial. Can your company afford it? Social. Can your “esprit de corps” afford it? Managerial. Can your authority afford it? First, determine what the financial impact will be and take off your rose-colored glasses before you start to crunch the numbers. Can you replace the employee at the current rate, or perhaps even less? Will a raise prompt others to lineup outside your door with their own requests for a bump in pay? The payroll hit may end up being larger than just the additional compensation to the prodigal employee. Next, consider the possible demoralizing effect the counteroffer will have on other employees. Will coworkers turn on the employee who was ready to bolt? It might also prompt others to start looking for “greener pastures,” and this would greatly compound your problems. Usually it’s less painful to pull the bandaid off in a single fast motion. Who’s in charge here? Finally, would a counteroffer decrease your authority and ability to manage your workforce? Will the rest of your workforce see you as having been a pushover? This will decrease your authority down the line and once you lose authority, it’s difficult to get it back. File away these three points, but make sure they are there when you need them. The biggest mistake you can commit in a situation like this is to make a hasty decision, because trying to turn back once it’s made, is the worst of all worlds. Image: By Promoplay (Template:Www.promoplay.ru) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)],...
read moreThe Freelance Revolution and How to Join It
In sports, talented athletes look forward to the day they become free agents. They can then shop their services around to the highest bidder or look for the best “working” environment. A certain basketball player named Lebron James—maybe you’ve heard of him—is doing this right now. Aren’t freelancers in many ways the business world equivalent of professional athlete free agents? This is especially true today when a lot of very talented businessmen and women have lost full-time corporate employment. It seems that many agree with my premise. Freelancers are American’s fastest growing workforce and almost nine out of 10 freelancers say they would keep their independence even if offered a full-time job somewhere, according a survey released by Freelancers Union. We discuss work-life balance a lot here; it’s an important topic and it’s one reason freelancers deeply appreciate their situations. Other top benefits of freelancing are Flexibility, Schedule control, Being one’s own boss,and Doing what one loves. The boom in freelancing is probably attributable to a “perfect storm” that involved the collision of telecommuting and the Great Recession. We know that recessions always give a boost to the number of small business startups, so when the last one hit—and the Internet had made telecommuting effective and efficient—everything was in place to create a bumper crop of solopreneurs. The salient question today is, are you thinking about joining this revolution? If so, here are a few tips to help you get off to a strong start. Make sure you have enough money in the bank to get you through your lean startup months. As an alternative, you can piggyback a freelance business onto your current gig and then transition to the freelance lifestyle as it grows. Not recommended: forcing a reluctant spouse back into the workforce. Be on the hunt for a couple “anchor” gigs. If you’re currently working for someone, perhaps they would want to keep you on in a freelance position that could provide a sizable chunk of the new business you need to drum up. In any case, without a few steady clients you will end up spending far too much time running down jobs. Tip: On sites such as Elance.com, when projects are posted that say something like, “We have a lot of work for the right freelancer,” it’s a lie. They just want you to lower you bid in hopes of future work. Leverage collaboration and networking. Sometimes there will be gigs or elements of jobs that you cannot handle yourself. Develop a network of like-minded freelancers who you can turn to in situations such as these. They will end up doing the same for you. Not only will you get additional work through networking, you will be able to offer more services to potential clients. Wow. It’s almost starting to sound like a business, isn’t it? One of the promises of the Internet was that it would liberate and empower individuals. The move toward freelance employment is one tangible measure that at least some of the web’s promise is being fulfilled. Image: Lemonade Stand by John O’Nolan, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike...
read moreThe High Costs of Regulation and How to Reduce Them
The results are in: Two-thirds of US small business owners believe their government’s policies are unfavorable to small business. Trinet, a company that provides cloud-based HR services to businesses, engaged Harris Poll to conduct the survey. Here are more highlights: 32 percent rate US policies as very unfavorable. 53 percent of small business owners believe that legislation hampering small businesses as well as the overall economic health of the United States (53 percent) will get worse in 2014. 76 percent of small business owners strongly agree that the amount of federal government regulations regarding employee benefits is restrictive to the growth of small business. 75 percent believe state government regulations also restrict the growth of small business. 35 percent think that the impact of the Affordable Care Act has been worse than they anticipated. The Heritage Foundation has taken a look at government regulations and found that the cost of federal regulations to businesses rose by $70 billion between 2009-2013. Further, at the end of 2012 the number of federal regulations affecting small companies was 13 percent higher than at the end of 2008. Small businesses hurt the most Government regulations deliver a bigger wallop to small businesses than they do to larger businesses. Because they are generally fixed costs, smaller companies register a higher cost-per-employee than do larger firms. Nicole and Mark Crain of Lafayette University say the price tag for complying to federal regulations is $10,585 for companies with under 20 employees while the figure is $7,755 for firms with 500 or more employees. These kinds of numbers are of interest to companies such as TriNet, because small businesses can often reduce their direct need to keep up with changing regulations when they outsource some overhead functions. In fact, moving the regulatory burden to others is one of the best ways to minimize the impact of regulations on your small business. An actionable plan Business strategist Sandy Graham suggests that businesses develop a long-term plan to deal with regulatory costs that has three goals: Reduce or mitigate the impacts of government regulations, Limit the impact of regulations on operations as a cost factor, and Develop a growth plan. His approach is to deal with the problems directly, assess them as variable cost factors and then encourage growth so the burden of regulations is reduced overall. Specifically, look at strategies such as: Sharing space with other businesses, Using infrastructure companies, such as UPS logistics, PitneyBowes, cloud-based services, payroll providers, etc., and Contracting out manufacturing, warehousing and fulfillment. Attack the job of reducing the costs of regulation just as you would any other cost of doing business. Don’t just accept it as a “given.” And when you do a cost benefit analysis of signing on with service providers, don’t forget to factor in the savings to you in a reduced regulatory burden. Image: Public Domain...
read more7 Hot Ideas To Boost Summer Sales
We all love the summer, but it can be a rough time for business—they don’t call them the “dog days of summer” for nothing. With kids out of school and families going on vacation, the world of commerce becomes less predictable. To help you fight back, here are seven ideas to heat up your warm weather sales. Some will give your bottom line an immediate boost; others will help improve your brand recognition and loyalty. The summer of social media. Create a thread that will carry through your social media campaigns. You might use a “road trip” theme on Facebook, for example. As you “travel” to different states, highlight something about the state that relates to your product or service. If you are a retail establishment, create killer displays in your windows and throughout your store that are totally Pinteresting. Find ways to dovetail summer visuals with your business. Nostalgia is what it used to be! Summertime is nostalgia time. We all think about summer family vacations. Have a sale with throwback prices. Again, grab the visuals of a previous generation’s summer memories. Vacation and recreation giveaways. If you can swing it, have a summer vacation sweepstakes. If you need to scale that idea down, try tickets to a nearby summer hangout, like a water park or the county fair. How about a drawing for a summer picnic basket complete with food? Go where your customers go. Summertime is a season of festivals, community events, Little League games and more. Be there, or be square. If you can’t set up a booth, be a sponsor and hang a banner. If you can’t sell, hand out information. Temp up, prices down. To get people out of their homes when the heat wave hits, try offering a $10 discount on purchases over $100 when the mercury hits the 100-degree mark—double it if the humidity also hits 100 percent! Take me out to the ballpark. Entertain your best clients by treating them to a classic summer event, like a warm evening at the ballpark. Another option would be to rent a pontoon or houseboat for a day of cruising and barbecuing. Celebrate special days. There is a “day” for everything, check out this calendar of special days. Find some fun days that you can transform into a “hook” to get people to your business. One cousin eats free on Cousins Day, for example. BTW, I’m celebrating Penuche Fudge Day on July 22 whether or not your small business figures out a way to take advantage of it… The bottom line with all of these ideas is to associate your business with the season on some level of customer consciousness. That will tend to help maintain the flow of people to your establishment and you should then be better able to afford your own summer vacation! Image: Vintage Postcard – North Ave Beach Chicago, by Dave, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike...
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