Archives for July 2021

Impact of Workplace Environment on Employee Performance and Morale

July 31, 2021 by Viridiana Valdes Leave a Comment

With the number of hours employees spend in the workplace, it’s not surprising that the work environment directly impacts their performance and morale. More than just the physical office or site that an employee works in, the work environment is a combination of different aspects.

Each of these factors plays a different role in how well employees do at their jobs, how satisfied they are with their work and position, and what other motivations they have to remain with the company. Having a better understanding of these can help companies better cultivate a positive work environment.

Factors in the Workplace that Affect Employee Performance and Morale

Workspace design and layout

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of the work environment is the physical space that employees occupy. A workspace that is organized, easy to navigate, and accessible to every employee can make an impact on how they work. Depending on the nature of the company and its culture, alternative layouts may improve cooperation and productivity.

Aside from this, other structural elements like lighting, ventilation, equipment, and furniture can also affect productivity. More than just facilitating their work, workspaces need to keep them comfortable enough to keep morale up. Otherwise, great discomfort may cause employees to underperform.

Company culture

Aside from the physical aspects of the workplace, company culture is also part of the environment, representing the atmosphere created within the office space. A company’s attitude towards the nature of its work, its employees, and the values it upholds are just some of the traits that can make or break an employee’s trust in their employers.

Given the diversity of employees in today’s job market, companies need to foster a discrimination-free workplace that will welcome people from all kinds of backgrounds. Embedding this into the company culture sends a message that discrimination is taken seriously and will not be tolerated.

Leadership and feedback

Employees depend on the company’s higher-ups to set the pace for the entire organization, especially when making decisions and implementing policies. Strong leadership that recognizes and addresses employee needs adequately can help improve overall motivation and job satisfaction.

Employees also look to managers and supervisors to provide helpful feedback and guidance to help them improve their performance and further their careers. If employees feel like their career or skills have stagnated, they may be less likely to keep up their productivity levels.

Structure and processes

A company’s structures and processes can improve productivity as they create a reliable and efficient workflow. Well-established systems and procedures also make it easier for employees to understand how things work and execute tasks.

On the contrary, nonexistent structures and processes or ones that are faulty or needlessly complicated can undermine the employees’ work performance and lower their motivation levels.

Social connection

In line with a company’s culture, the way employees relate with their colleagues and form good working relationships with them is just as important. Harmony and synergy between teams and departments can help productivity and morale rise.

While a company has little control over an individual’s actions with their colleagues, it can promote positive social connections by encouraging collaboration and cooperation. In addition, companies should also take interpersonal issues in the workplace seriously. Addressing these conflicts well can help employees feel more satisfied and motivated.

Motivating Employees Require More than Just a Cool Office

At the end of the day, a company’s most valuable asset is its employees. Ensuring that their needs are met, especially within the workplace, can provide encouragement and motivation for them to succeed. From there, the success of employees can only lead to the success of the company overall.

Viridiana Valdes is a Relations Director at Shegerian & Associates. An experienced marketing professional with a demonstrated history of working in the law practice industry, Viridiana is passionate about employee rights, diversity and inclusion, career development, and more.

Give Your Employees A Boost With These Tips

July 31, 2021 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

As an employer, you’re going to find that you come across a lot of employees from time to time that lack confidence. It’s natural – some people have that instant ability to chat and communicate and others don’t. Those employees that aren’t quite as confident, though, they’re going to be the ones who need to have a boost.

It’s not just being told that they’re good at their jobs: they need to know that you believe in them. The podcast with Shawn Meaike can give you some tips on how to tell someone that you believe in them, and it can help you to understand why you should make an effort with this. You want people to work toward something, and this is something that requires a lot of effort on their part. When you are dealing with people who don’t feel so confident about what they’re doing, how do you handle it? You need to make sure that they’re boosted: and here’s how to do it!

Image source: Pexels

Keep building them up. It’s so important that you are working closely with your staff to help them to meet their goals and the best way to do that is to consider the good things that your employees do and elevate those as much as possible. Be mindful about how you work with your employees who are less than confident and be gentle with them!
Always give more. Details, encouragement, rewards – hang it all out and make sure that your employees know that they are a priority for you. You should consider how much you are relying on them to do well and then work to reassure them that you know how much they are trying. Give them all the information that they need to succeed and be open to repeating it if they’re not confident they understood the task.
Give your employees a mentor. It doesn’t have to be you but you can ensure that your employees have someone that they can look up to. This will keep them confident and happy that they can bounce ideas around and reach their goals quickly.
Always give feedback. It’s one of the things that most employers do wrong: they don’t give their staff enough feedback or credit for the work that they do. Always make sure that feedback is timely, and you can be sure that your staff are going to be excited to work with you.
Appreciate. No matter how small the achievement, appreciate it and praise your staff. You will find that this constant encouragement is going to make your employees feel good and that’s the goal here. You want your employees feeling good so that they can work well. Without your appreciation, they’re not going to be as positive as they could be.

Your employees are going to need you to help them to achieve their goals. They need to be boosted and supported as much as possible, and you are the one who has the power to do that for them.

8 Tips To Improve Your Marketing Strategy

July 30, 2021 by Delan Cooper Leave a Comment

When designing your marketing strategy, using a marketing mix will help you address key issues in marketing your products and services. Focus on answering the following questions:

How can you develop your products and services? Try to identify what makes your products and services different than your competition and try to better cater to customers’ wants and needs. You may also want to expand your products and services by offering additional, complementary products and services. Find partners to enhance your products, services and surpass customer expectations.

Can you change pricing to a medium among market-based, cost-based, and value-based.

Do your distribution options include online and in-store?

Should you use or add owned, earned, and paid promotional channels for target marketing? Explore many avenues and channels to collect performance data and find out which ones work best.

How do you build customer confidence? Do your business processes offer the best value for customers? Are your people well trained and skilled at providing customers with a superior experience?

Is your in-store environment inviting to your customers? Are you making the most of the signage and layout?

Is your customer in a cyclical relationship that includes post-sales communications and obtaining feedback to improve and enhance the next experience? Send after-sales emails such as purchase summaries with a satisfaction survey, letting customers know you value their business and want to improve your services.

Is your website quick to load and easy to use? This could factor into customer engagement and search engine placement.

Data Gives Insight

Analyzing the data from your efforts tells you the areas most in need of improvement. Your business software should include tools that will make it easy to track this information and deliver reports. Your marketing and business strategies should have a common goal. You can make data-driven decisions from analytic and employ techniques that improve your marketing mix. You can also ask your customers where and how you can improve as part of building a lasting relationship.

Let Technology Work For You

Stay on the cutting edge of marketing. Technology, such as customer relations management (CRM) software may also include marketing management capabilities that can help you run your business more efficiently. There is no need to put your marketing mix on hold with marketing management software because it can facilitate automated posting at all your social media outlets and websites. You can make scheduled posts, interact with your audience by responding to questions and comments, and share your industry knowledge and expertise, even give advice through your content. You can add value through your content, support, offers, and bonuses to customers.

The Importance of Your Website

Your website is your online storefront and you want it to give the right impression. With the help of a web hosting service, businesses of all sizes can present a polished, professional appearance. A business can create a secure online presence with a few clicks and for a small fee, a web hosting service provides a domain name and storage for your website. Different web hosting services offer different features in their web hosting packages.

When considering a web hosting service, cost, guaranteed up-time and customer support may be among the features important to you. Some web hosting services may include features such as shopping cart processing and scripting support. Decide on the features most important for your business. Web hosting services store your website on servers. There are 4 common types of servers with different pricing and features:

Servers

Shared Hosting services are usually the least expensive option. Your website is on a server with other websites. It may serve the needs of start-ups and small businesses with minimal traffic.

A Dedicated Server host a single website and gives concentrated computational power for your website speed and better performance.

Is Cloud Hosting (VPS) is similar to shared hosting in that many websites share a server. Virtual private servers are cloud-based servers that offer scalability, flexibility, and redundancy of cloud computing and businesses’ computational value.

A WordPress server can be hosted on any of the above servers and is specifically designed and optimized to serve WordPress pages. Content creators, journalists, and bloggers use WordPress.

How Founders Should Manage Their Money

July 30, 2021 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

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As a founder of a company, your entire life seems to revolve around money. You spend it like there’s no tomorrow and look for savings wherever you can find them.

Founders, however, need to look after their personal finances too. Your business isn’t your only source of wealth – it’s just the activity that takes up the majority of your time. As an entrepreneur, you need to create multiple income streams that can support your projects

So how should founders personally manage their wealth? Let’s take a look.

Keep Saving For Retirement Regardless Of What Happens

Founders often believe that they have to go “all in” to make the companies that they start successful. Anything short of full and total commitment, they think, is a sign that they’re not up to the task.

But that’s not what professional money managers believe (or the majority of entrepreneurs for that matter). While it might seem necessary to raid your retirement fund to support your business, you should avoid doing so at all costs. Usually, if you have to dip into retirement savings, it’s a sign that your business idea fundamentally isn’t working.

Keep saving for retirement no matter what. If your current business idea isn’t working out how you planned, there will be plenty of opportunities to try another. You don’t have to stick with an idea that fundamentally isn’t working.

Diversify Your Assets

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Founders can sometimes fall into the trap of putting all their eggs in one basket. They believe that if they own a successful company, they’re safe.

Naturally, however, that’s not how it works out. Companies that you found personally are just as risky and individual stock market bets. You could experience wild success and massive profits, but you could also go under, as most businesses do.

The trick is to diversify your portfolio as early as you can, as explained by https://www.veracitycapital.com/services/investment-management/. Don’t automatically reinvest all of your dividends into the company you founded. Instead, spread them out among your other investments. This way, even if your company goes under, you still have other sources of passive income. If you need extra funds for investment, do a fundraising round. Don’t rely on your personal wealth.

Plan For Your Personal Life

People don’t acquire money for the sake of it. Instead, they do it so that they can build a life that they want to live.

It’s a good idea to look at your life as a business. You want to make sure that you have a financial plan for it that is just as sound as any commercial money-making scheme.

You don’t have to plan every detail in a giant calendar. But it does help to know where you want to go. Having long-term goals is essential for success.

When building a strong financial future, the first few years are always the hardest. During these, you have to set aside as much money as humanly possible for investment while spending very little. Often, it requires living in cheap accommodation and working weekends.

Once you get the investment flywheel running, though, the rewards build up year after year. Eventually, you find that you have a tremendous sum of money in the bank, allowing you to live a life of your choosing, almost without limits.

Network To Hire Out The Tough Stuff

Spending money, however, is also often necessary for making it, according to https://techcrunch.com/. Sometimes there will be tasks that you just can’t perform, requiring the help of outside talent. In these situations, it is actually sometimes better to spend the money than to keep it. It’s a matter of opportunity cost. Could you earn more money doing something else while a specialist fixes a tricky problem for you? If you can, then holding onto the money for the sake of it doesn’t make sense. You’re actually making yourself poorer.

Try To Manage Your Wealth From A Central Hub

Keeping track of all your assets can be difficult if you spread them out all over the place. Many people actually lose track of where they are holding their wealth, leading to mismanagement down the road.
If you have a lot of wealth, try to find services that will allow you to collect it into a central hub. This way, you can easily compare the performance of the various assets that you own. Many hubs allow you to manage all types of assets, from crypto to gold to stocks to real estate. Knowing which assets are earning high returns and which aren’t improves your asset allocation.

5 Quick Rich Schemes That You Need to Avoid

July 29, 2021 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Everyone would like to make money a bit quicker these days. And, as a general rule, this is not a bad thing. However, the issues arise when you decide to get your money in questionable ways. Here are some of the ways you should avoid trying to amass your fortune.

jc_cards from Pixabay

Run a Scheme

Ponzi schemes were big business back in the 1990s as silver tongued salesmen pitched business opportunities that never arrived. If you have never heard of a ponzi scheme, you might know it better as a pyramid scheme. The idea is to get people to invest some money in your “business” and they get their friends to invest. It builds up and eventually the “early investors” get paid but the guys at the bottom don’t. A lot of Multi Level Marketing companies (or MLMs for short) have been compared to pyramid schemes as they rely heavily on recruitment in order to turn a profit.

Pollution for Profit

If you are running a business, you need to be mindful of the effect that you will have on the world around you. Unfortunately, some people are happy to ignore the fallout from the production of their products. If you are stuck with how to create a cleaner company, take inspiration from Geoff Hirson and renewable energy sources. The race to the top doesn’t have to include trampling over everyone else, including the environment, to get there. It is also worth noting, many of the businesses who are not eco-friendly are losing customers as people search out better solutions.

Blackmail

Everyone has some dirty laundry, and some people may have confided in you over details that they are not proud of. Unfortunately, some people will use this as an excuse to blackmail money out of someone. Blackmail is a really terrible thing to do on someone. But what is even worse is if you know a person and company is doing something illegal and blackmail them to keep it covered. Blackmail rarely ends well so you might want to think twice about asking for money to keep that juicy gossip quiet.

Drug Dealing

This is one of those jobs where you can make a lot of money quickly, but it is highly illegal and very dangerous. However, you don’t need to be a Drug Kingpin to make money selling drugs. Over the years, many doctors and nurses have found themselves in hot water over prescription painkiller sales. The medical market and health care system in America can provide a wealth of opportunities to make some money. In this environment, where people are priced out of basic medical care, people will pay to access basic medicines rather than talk to their doctor.

Hacking

This is another one that was big in the 1990s. As the internet was growing and companies were moving information to digital servers, companies were hacked to access all of their information. Companies found themselves being blackmailed and held to ransom to ensure confidential details were kept quiet, or their secrets were sold to the highest bidder. Hacking still happens today but isn’t nearly as glamorous as it did back then. Besides, hacking has become incredibly difficult now that companies have firewalls and insurances against hacking scandals.