Motivation In The Workplace: Happy Employees = More Profits

Happy Employees mean more profits.  Motivation in the workplace can impact your business revenue.  So, you own a business, you have a great product, you’ve spent a ton of time and money to get your site fully optimized for not only the search engines but for your customers and clients as well.  Good job!  It’s not an easy task and I know the time that it took to get it all together and working.   But did you forget one of your businesses biggest assets?
 
Every business we speak with talks about and has plan in action, for increasing profits.  They talk about overall reduction is costs, marketing strategies’ and sales.   The one area that always seems to be missing on this well thought out plan is Employees.
 
The facts speak for themselves; Happy employees = more profits.  Let’s talk about a few of the reasons why your employees impact your bottom line in a positive as well as negative way.
 
First, because I live in the virtual world I am going to talk about areas that your employees really can swing the chain. 
 
Today’s search engines are really paying attention to what people are saying about your company online, how many are sharing your content, re-tweeting your posts and so on.  You already know this and I was not trying to educate you on search engine ranking factors, just setting the ground work.
 
What I wanted to get you thinking about is that not only do the search engines pay attention to the shares and tweets and yelp reviews for example, but so do your current or potential customers.
Where do you think your employees are hanging out and sharing their lives and opinions when they are not at work?   Yes, we can talk about the cost of employee turnover as a drain on your bottom line (Average turnover cost for $8.00/hr Employee = $9,444.47) but I’m not even going there with this article.
 
There is such a huge correlation between your employees and your bottom line that it’s hard to know what area to focus on so……. I’m going to give you some interesting findings that I did not create.  These findings were found on chartcourse but I loved what they showed so I am sharing them.
 
First let’s talk about Sears.  Kudos to Sears for conducting a survey of over 800 stores and not only looking for but finding out that when their employees attitude raised by just a small 5%, their customer satisfaction showed an increase of 1.3% but not only did they Workplace Motivation Happy Employeeshave happier customers, they showed an increase in revenue by 0.5%. 
 
Another shout out needs to go to Wainwright Industries.  Wainwright changed the titles of their workers and classified employees as Associates.  They made their feel more involved by encouraging this great idea submission campaign that allowed every employee, no matter what level to make improvements to their business with a budget up to $1,000.  Do you know what happened?  Well, because of this campaign, Wainwright implements over 8,000 of their employees (associates) ideas.  Wainwright has been active with this campaign since 1994.
 
But wait! Did this help the bottom line for them?
 
I’m so glad you asked because this is the best part.  By making the changes that helped the employees work schedule, turnover dropped by 50%!  Profits grew from 5 million to over 30 million!
What should you take away from this?
 
Having a happy workforce can and does impact the company bottom line but it is a sustainable business model.  The money and time spent on your employees is not money lost it is essential to maximizing productivity and profits.
 
Motivation through happy employees
 
What did I take away from all of this? Like I had mentioned before, my job puts me in touch with business owners looking to improve their businesses online.  What I saw in my mind was all these happy employees telling their social circles about how happy they were at work, I saw all the customers of those businesses that had a better experience because of the employees and how many of them shared their experiences with social circles and it made me smile for those businesses that paid attention to their employees. Great job!  Need some ideas to motivate your employees?
 
Do you know of a business that deserves a shout out for their commitment to their employees? Better yet, are you a business that has a story to share? Let's us know and we will be happy to write an article about your amazing ideas!  Give kudos where kudos are due!