Turning Workplace Happiness Into Business Success for SMEs

Good morning, everyone. It’s Monday so that means it’s John Garrett coming to you with another episode of Green Apple Slices where every week, find an article online about employee engagement and firm culture and things like that to talk with. Me talking to myself is kind of weird so every week I call Rachel Fisch. Yes.

Rachel: Hey, John, how are you?

John: How are things?

Rachel: Things are good until you’ve been in London for a week and wakeup at 3:00 in the morning and you’re ready to get on with your day.

John: Right. But you had fun in London and a lot of great meetings I’m sure.

Rachel: An absolutely amazing time, yeah, for sure.

John: That’s great. Very cool. Yeah, but I found an article online on the B2C blog, Business 2 Community. We’ve talked to some of the articles that they’ve had on there in the past and this one is by Matthew Foster and “Turning Workplace Happiness into Business Success for SMEs.” I had to Google it. Because I was like I never heard that before but it’s small and medium enterprises. I was like enterprises now, they’re not businesses, they’re enterprises.

Rachel: I thought SME was on Peter Pan, Smee.

John: Oh, maybe. But the really big thing that stuck out to me in this article is that it talks about in Europe how Amsterdam consistently ranks as one of the happiest countries in the world in general and it’s pointed to their work structure as the source of this happiness which is fascinating because they only work 36 hours a week which is crazy.

Rachel: Which is crazy. Yeah, and it actually spend less than 76.6% of women of working age spend less than 36 hours.

John: Right. I guess it allows you to know that I’m only here for a short amount of time so I’m going to be all-in, focused, getting the work done, and that way then I could be happier outside of work, use that energy that I get from those passions that I have outside when I come back to work and it allows me the fuel to get through the day.

Rachel: For sure and it goes on to list a bunch of stuff so there’s like different segments then with different lists and so what it is that SMEs need to do and then what are things that you should do and then how you can do those things. Each one of these things could really be its own like we could really expand on many of these can kind of be their own conversation. Like talking about investing in their internal brands so you spend so much time marketing your product and your business and you services to the outside world, how much time do you spend working on getting that message to your inside world, your colleagues and things like that.

John: Yeah and it’s investing in your people.

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely.

John: I mean this applies to large companies as well. But especially when you’re a small or medium-sized enterprise, then those hits are harder. When somebody leaves or when there’s turnover or someone’s not as engaged or locked in or contributing as much as they can.

Rachel: For sure and yet sometimes you see the perspective of will get a well-being program when we hit more employees or when we hit a certain revenue and these things really need to get it from day one in order to build that really great culture.

John: Absolutely. I mean a couple of the things that I loved on the list of things that you can do were encouraging staff to take their PTO. Take your time off. Encouraging humor, fun, and creativity as oppose to stifling it. You know what I mean? A lot of workplaces, it’s quite the opposite. It’s don’t take all your PTO. What are you doing? We have work to do and why are you laughing? What’s with the smiles? We’re at work.

Rachel: What’s that look on your face? Well, the thing about holiday, like taking your vacation or taking your PTO is the expense is already on your books, right? If we want to get technical about it as for a company, you have already paid these expenses, let your staff take advantage of them.

John: Let your people go, right? There we go. That was a Frozen and a bible reference at the same time. I am on fire this week. Look out everybody. But check it out if you like. You can read the article and see the full list at greenapplepodcast.com and you can listen to all the other interviews that I have every Wednesday or the talks that Rachel and I do every Monday.

Don’t forget to hit subscribe. You can hit subscribe on iTunes or whatever app you’re listening to this podcast on and yeah, follow us on Twitter @GreenApplePod or Rachel’s @FischBooks and I’m @RecoveringCPA.

Thanks so much, Rachel. Hopefully your jetlag goes away quickly before you have to travel again then you get even more screwed up.

Rachel: In time for next week’s episode at least.

John: Exactly. Yeah. Have a great rest of the week, Rachel.

Rachel: Thanks. You too, John.