Quality Over Quantity
Until recently, a company’s success was based on the fundamental principle that quantity outweighs quality. The better your numbers were, the better the chances that your company would outperform its competitors. However, recent studies have begun to offer insight into the importance of a company’s internal environment, which influences its success. The amount of sleep employees get and the relationship between an employer and its employees are major contributors to a company’s overall performance.
Don’t Lose Sleep Over Your Workload
In the past, there was a common misconception that longer work hours were key to a thriving business. Fortunately for workers nowadays, studies have shown that fewer work hours—and subsequently more sleep—have actually led to a more efficient workplace. Prominent CEOs like Arianna Huffington, founder of Huffington Post, have praised the importance of sleep and its contribution to a more productive workplace. “Ultimately, at work, the most important thing is our energy. It’s not exactly how many hours we are sitting at our desks, but how present are we when we’re there,” she explains in an interview with Business Insider.
Open Door (and Mind) Policy
Many corporations have implemented an open door policy between the company’s leaders and its employees. Even more important, though, is the idea behind an open mind policy. It is becoming more evident that monetary compensation isn’t the only driving force behind an employee’s happiness. The trust that a company builds with its employees—as well as a company’s ability to keep an open mind to the ideas and concerns of its employees—are invaluable tools that have made companies such as Internet giant Google stand out above the rest.
Search Influence Gets it Right
In a day and age where merely finding a job can be a challenge all its own, I’m fortunate enough to work at a place like Search Influence, a company that doesn’t take these important elements to success lightly. Their flexible 9-to-5 work hours, quarterly team building events, and company-wide “suggestion box” are just a few factors that helped to name Search Influence one of New Orleans’ 50 Best Places to Work in 2014.
Image Sources:
Adrienne Myers – Junior Account Associate
Anthony Armstrong – Junior Account Associate
Chris Roberts – Software Developer
Cory Agular – Junior Internet Marketing Associate
Jason Vermaelen – Junior Account Associate
Mikel Pak – PR & Marketing Manager
Serena Hirasawa – Account Associate
Think of the most obvious way you would search for your business. This should be simple, to the point, and usually very general. Think, “If I sustained a life-altering injury that rendered me incapable of speech and left me with only a basic grasp of the English language, and I could only communicate through the use of my single working stump arm and a special stump-optimized typewriter, how would I search for my own business?” Great! You should probably have around ten simple and obvious ideas, and most often, these will be the most rife for traffic. In addition to these terms, you should also think, realistically, of where most of your clients reside. If you are a small business or storefront with services offered to those in your immediate area, keep focused on your local region or the nearest metropolitan area if you are in a suburb. If you overreach and try to optimize for every suburb and town within 1,000 miles, you’re not going to do well anywhere. Stay focused, and you will fare much better.
Time for some good old-fashioned espionage! Use your simple search terms to pull up some results on Google. These will likely be your competitors showing up, the ones you will eventually need to dethrone in your quest for fame and fortune. Take a gander at their sites and see what key terms they’ve used to optimize their pages. What title shows in the Google results, and what do the headers on their pages say? These can give you some good ideas.
