How to Create a Healthier Work Environment Without a Wellness Plan or a Budget for it

Many people today are very conscious about their health, and while these people are making the necessary choices to improve their health in their personal lives, they want to find a business that places just as much importance on the topic as they do.

Many companies are realizing that their employees are making healthier decisions, and these companies are making the decision to also become healthy.

Some companies make the mistake in thinking that in order to make the work environment more healthy for employees, they need to take the time and invest the money in creating a detailed health and wellness plan, but they don’t. In order to make your work environment healthier, you don’t need to invest in fancy incentive programs or bring doctors in for health screenings. Instead, you need to implement the following changes around the workplace to make it a healthier environment for all.

Ban smoking.

You’re going to upset some employees, but since their habit has a negative effect on others in the company, you don’t have to feel too bad about banning smoking on company property. Don’t let your employees stand outside the front door to smoke a cigarette—make them leave the property in order to do so. If you have a large business and leaving the property would be too much of a hassle, create a designated smoking area far away from the building. This allows everyone in your office to breathe in fresh air. Plus, if the smoking area is far enough away, it may incline some of your smoking employees to quit.

Invest in healthier office furnishings.

If you sit at a desk all day, your chair and your desk can be damaging your posture and your overall health. Enlist the help of an office furnishings specialist and invest in ergonomic chairs and desks to make your employees more comfortable and improve their overall health. Make sure that employees who use computers for most of their day have the correct mouse, mousepad and keyboard support to reduce their risk of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Open up the stairs.

Some companies have their staircases locked and only allow employees to use them during emergencies. Instead of doing this, unlock the doors to the staircase and allow your employees to use it to travel from one floor to the next. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator is a great way to exercise, and doing this provides an easy way for your employees to burn some calories throughout the day.

Offer healthy snacks.

Most companies have food and drink vending machines in their buildings, and if yours does, make sure to replace unhealthy snacks with healthier choices. Replace pop machines with water machines, and if you can’t replace the vending machine with healthier food, remove it and invest in a different program, such as a fresh fruit delivery program, which offers your employees the chance to snack on fresh fruits instead of chocolate.

Creating a healthy environment for your employees is important, but doing so does not mean that you have to invest in a health and wellness program. Instead, you can make these small changes around the office to make it a healthier environment for all.  

About the Author: Lucille Anderson is a human resources educator providing guidance in the creation and implementation of health programs for corporations.

Social Customer Service for Small Businesses

Social customer service is the process of using social media to meet the demands of customers. Traditionally, customer service success was measured through satisfaction ratings, defect rates, first-time resolution rates, average handle time, agent utilisation, and cost of servicing the customer.

Today, in the age of social media, when companies talk to customers through the same media as friends use to talk to each other, metrics have evolved. Now we look at customer sentiment, self-service usage, cross-sell, up-sell rates, conversation volume, likes, retweets, +1s, and net promoter scores.

social customer service

Image by owenwbrown

In 2010, 25% of enterprises were using social media to respond to service enquiries by customers or partners. In 2020, that number is set to rise to 90%.

One fifth of Fortune 500 companies engage with their customers on Facebook. These companies do more than marketing: they are actively listening, engaging, and responding to customer questions. But social customer service is not only the preserve of large corporations: it’s equally (perhaps even more) beneficial for small companies.

Many small companies are reluctant to start using social media as a customer service platform, believing it to lack credibility and fearing its (potentially) unwieldy nature. However, with its popularity continuing to increase, companies who ignore social media (and the customers who are active on social channels) are at risk of becoming irrelevant.

Social media channels provide opportunities that companies have not had before, which can be leveraged to significantly enhance customer service. Platforms like Twitter allow companies to monitor their customers’ opinions and complaints, even when the customers are not taking the time or making the effort to contact the firm directly. Social media also allows companies to respond faster than ever before, not only to the originator of a complaint or issue – but to all (or at least many) of those with whom he or she may have communicated about the issue.

Another specific benefit of social media is that users are willing to share extensive information publicly. That gives businesses access to people’s preferences, interests, opinions and networks, making social media an invaluable asset for many companies, and specifically small businesses, as it provides a low-cost means of finding out about their current and potential customers. Social media is a democratising force online, giving firms of all sizes access to the kind of information that was once exclusively held by the largest businesses.

Most people think of Facebook, Twitter, and perhaps LinkedIn when they hear the expression, “social media” and these are indeed the most popular platforms. But there are others, which may lend themselves particularly to communicating certain kinds of messages and advertising certain kinds of products and services. Those that are essentially visual – YouTube (video) and Pinterest (images) – can be especially powerful.

So how can a small business best exploit these media? First, be authentic. Don’t be cute: be real. Second, do one thing and do it really well – perhaps by creating a community and then sharing your particular expertise. Finally, monitor your customers and clients – the people who already use your products and services – to see what they’d like more of or less of. In other words, take time to learn from your customers, and act on their feedback. After all, they are your most valuable resource.

About the Author: Will Vicary is a digital marketing specialist whose interests include CRM solutions and online customer experience, as well as online lead generation. He is specifically interested in CRM insurance and cloud technology.

Make Signage Work for You – Five Smart Tips for Your Small Business

Small businesses don’t have the budget or resources that large companies do, which means they need to get creative and spread every dollar as thin as possible. Most small businesses do not have the budget for tactics like television or radio ads, and most businesses large and small know that direct mail doesn’t have a high success rate.

So what does a small business do when they need to market themselves effectively? They turn to signage.

Signage is a tried and true marketing tactic, and it’s especially great for small businesses that are just starting out. Not only is it extremely budget friendly, but it’s also one of the most effective and reliable tactics on the market today.

Digital signage girl
Image by Haruhiko Okumura / Flickr

But like any marketing tactic, signage is only effective and reliable when it is used correctly. As a small business thinking about using signage, the following are tips to help ensure you get the most out of your signage strategy.

1. Choose the right location.

As a small business, you want to ensure that your target market is seeing your signage, which means you need to do your research and find the best location for your signage. Make sure that you’re choosing a high traffic area that contains a good majority of your target audience. This way, your company name and message will be seen by those who will use your products and services, giving you a bigger opportunity to increase sales.

2. Keep it simple.

Your messaging needs to be clear and succinct in order to have the best impact. As a small business, you want people to know who you are and what you do, and if the messaging on your signage is not clear, it will only confuse your potential customers.

It’s also a great idea to make sure that your company name and contact info are easily seen on the signage. If you create a great sign but forget to include this information, nobody will know that it’s your company offering these products or services. Your contact information, especially website or social media addresses, are a great way to generate traffic to your online campaigns to seal the deal.

3. Capture attention.

We just told you to keep your messaging simple, but you still need to create a great sign that will capture your customers’ attention. If you stick with bland colors and boring fonts, your signage will get lost in its surroundings. When you use fun colors, exciting fonts or even a great headline, your signage will get more visibility and be remembered more easily.

4. Don’t overlook mobile.

If you can’t find the one great location to place your signage (or if you have a big enough budget that allows you to have multiple signs), opt to use mobile signage. People are driving or stuck in traffic everyday, and if you place signs on your vehicles, you will easily reach these people.

As a business, you can create signage and place it on one of your own vehicles, or there are companies out there that rent ad space on vehicles and their sole purpose is to drive around large towns all day promoting your sign.

5. Prepare for trial and error.

Signage is one of those tactics that you may have to play around with before you hit the nail on the head. If you place signage in one location and you don’t see a great return, place your sign somewhere new and see how it works out in this location. You may have to place your signage in a few different locations before you find the one that works the best, but thanks to its versatility, this can easily be done without spending extra money.

The use of signage is a great marketing tactic for small businesses, and when you implement the signage with these tips, you’ll find more success.

About the Author: M.P Brown loves providing advice to small business owners.

Start Your Own Web Design Company And Make Money Straight Away

When you start your own web design business the hardest thing is finding customers. You might be great at design, but perhaps you don’t quite have the right marketing skills to get it off the ground. This could be the difference between surviving or going under. At the very least you need to be bringing in enough money to put food on your table. So what will you do? Will you throw up your fancy website and wait for clients to get in contact? 

If you answered yes to that question then you might find yourself down at the employment office faster than you think. The easiest way to find clients is by getting off your seat and hunting them down. Now you might be wondering how you can hunt down clients. You won’t even know where they are. Will you just stop random people in the street and ask them if they’d like a website? I’m sure they’d really like that. 

Local businesses 

The perfect opportunity lies for you in the local business market. You need to start by making a list of all the local businesses in your local area. Have a plan before you begin. Now you can start picking up the phone and calling around, but the chances you will even get to speak to someone in charge is pretty low.

The only way you can maximize your chances is by going around on foot. Personally going inside each shop and asking to speak to the person in charge. First you must go to the businesses that don’t already have a website. Sell it to them. Once you have made your way around I’d like to think you’ll have closed some sales. 

Take an iPad 

Unless you’re the best salesperson in the world it could be quite difficult to sell a website to someone if they have no idea what it will look like. They don’t know you and what you’re capable of. They have no reason to trust you with anything. If you take an iPad with you this can completely change the outcome. 

Show them your best work. Make it hard for them to say no. If you are letting them see how great their website will be it could be hard for them to resist. Once it’s in their face they might become attached to it. Especially if they were already thinking of having one done. And who isn’t these days? 

Make extra money 

Let’s imagine you have made the sale. Actually, imagine you have went around everyone on your list and are booked for the next few months. You can’t make any more money. Your profit is based on how many websites you can design and unless you take on more employees it’s hard to scale. 

But not if you team up with an SEO company. If you can do this, you can up-sell them services to take their new website to the top of the search engines. Now you can take a commission for finding the SEO company extra work. It’s an easy way to make more money without the hassle of more staff. What do you think?

About the Author: James is a proficient blogger who writes articles on web designing and development. He is recognized as a keynote speaker for delivering excellent speeches, corporate presentations and trainings that are educational, motivational and entertaining.

Delivering more with less – How to (successfully) run a lean project

If there’s one thing the recession has taught us it’s that every business must run as ‘lean’ as possible.

In these cash-struck times, the basic premise of lean – creating more value in delivering client projects using fewer resources – has never been a more attractive prospect.

In project-oriented organisations where people-related costs are far and away the biggest outgoing, it is difficult to cut out the fat without leaving the business exposed. The well-established just-in-time strategies of the manufacturer have to be translated into a ‘just-enough’ strategy for resourcing, so that projects are delivered on time and to budget.

Successfully implemented, the lean approach leads to a winning combination of outcomes: better managed projects, greater client satisfaction, reduced cost to the business and importantly, greater long-term business viability.

Here, we look at the key pointers that are fundamental to developing a leaner business without putting projects and client relationships at risk…

  1. Don’t keep recreating the wheel – build on previous experience to save time, reduce administration, and improve the accuracy of your quotations. When setting up new projects, use previously entered information and apply previously established rules, processes and templates.
  2. Have clearly defined project plans – assign key responsibilities so everyone knows what they’re doing. Ensure any actions discussed as a team have a named ‘owner’, responsible for carrying them out.
  3. Measure and review throughout the project cycle – but do this in a way that does not in itself consume time and hinder progress, for example by automating the flow of information from remote teams back into the business.
  4. Eliminate bottlenecks – use the technology available to streamline essential processes such as workflow management, timesheet recording, expense claims, time and expense approvals, and billing.
  5. Trust and empower your team – an open book approach increases accountability and helps win their support in the drive to increase efficiency and identify where time could be better spent.
  6. Gain a ‘helicopter’ view of your whole project portfolio – being able to view the big picture but also zoom in on the underlying detail leads to better management and strengthens your ability to avert risk.

This article is taken from the IRIS ProjectMinder whitepaper: ‘Running lean: How project-oriented organisations are creating more value with fewer resources‘. The guide is free and available to download in full here.

About the author: Paul Sparkes is Product Director at IRIS ProjectMinder, the ideal web-based project management solution for architects, engineers, surveyors, IT & management consultants, marketing agencies, and other time-based project centric organisations