Unhappy employees impact your bottom line

I stumbled across an article by start-up expert Martin Zwilling called “Negativity has no place in your start-up“. At first, an article about whining in the workplace might not seem relevant to your finances (which tends to be our primary focus around here) but nothing is further from the truth. There is a direct link between employee satisfaction and profitability:

• Happier employees are more productive employees. They get work done because they believe in the bigger picture of the business and they’re not just there to warm a desk until retirement. And, they’re not spending their workday complaining about the boss and gossiping to fellow staffers. (In fact, Zwilling quotes a statistic that says employees spend 10 to 20 hours per month complaining or listening to others complain).
• Happier employees make for positive customer experiences, which tends to encourage customers to feel good about their purchase and make them more likely to return.
• Happier employees stick around longer, which drives down training costs. (I don’t have an exact figure in front of me but I’ve heard that it costs about 1.5 times their annual wage to train an employee).
• Happier employees care, which means they take a moment longer to make sure that the products and services your business is sending out the door are actually of the quality you profess them to be.
• Happier employees talk up the company to family and friends, which has a positive, grassroots public relations impact as well as eases the costs of recruitment.
• Happier employees steal less. Workplace theft costs companies billions of dollars per year and a major driver is the sense of entitlement, that the employer “owes” the employee something extra.

When you list those benefits, it’s obvious just how important it is to have happy employees. Now, not every employee is going to be joyous every single day. There are different factors that will contribute to a happy employee and you, as a boss, don’t have control over all of them. But what you can control should be controlled to create a positive workplace. Check out Zwilling’s article to find 5 really practical ways to minimize the negative and maximize the positive in your business.

Jessica Routier, IAC-EZ

How to save the world

The world is in rough shape right now. We’re still licking our economic wounds when suddenly – BAM – there’s more oil blasting into the Gulf of Mexico than we can possibly manage… and it just keeps flowing and flowing. The world’s attention is focused on those two catastrophes because they are simply gigantic and not easily stopped.

As business owners, we can feel powerless when faced with what seems to be insurmountable issues that even large governments and trillions of dollars cannot correct. But nothing can be further from the truth! If there is anyone who can effect change, it’s the small business owner and his or her customers.

Small business owners represent millions of people and billions of dollars of influence and their customers represent even more. We can all step out and create change. So, if the two biggest issues right now are financial and ecological, where can we start?

Financial
Let’s start with some ethical, customer-service-focused, good old fashioned sales hustle. Let’s get out there and make sales, ethically selling our high value products and services to the people who need them. And, as consumers, let’s buy from others even if the price is slightly higher than we want to pay. Getting money into the economy is going to be the best thing for it and getting a bunch of money into the economy is going to skyrocket our personal, professional, and national economies toward better conditions.

On that note, here is a great article about good and bad profit – there is a difference! – and the few simple things you can do to make sure you are earning good profit.

Ecological
Individually, we’re not going to be able to cap the oil spill or reverse the trends happening there. But collectively, we can make progress elsewhere in the ecosystem to influence an overall change for the better. That starts with going green in our business. When we go green and ask our vendors to go green and buy green products and services, we’re making a significant contribution (in dollars and commitment) toward a better environment.

And here is a great article about green marketing; about turning your business from a regular business into a green business that can promote itself as an eco-friendly alternative.

Jessica Routier, IAC-EZ