Those who weren’t part of the great resignation wave of 2021 watched it from the outside with interest. As inflation continued to climb, supply chain challenges remained steadfast and businesses struggled to gain momentum in markets blighted by the pandemic, we watched people throw down their gloves, aprons, pens and paintbrushes in a collective, symbolic mic drop.
But what would motivate people to leave their jobs during one of the worst recessions in history? And what does this news mean for custom and promotional businesses everywhere?
This article has been created to give you as a business owner or entrepreneur practical advice on how Brikl technology can help you make employees feel safe during a time of uncertainty.
Read on until the end for guaranteed feelings of warmth and fuzziness.
Let Employees Do The Jobs They Were Hired To Do
There’s a distinction to make between burnout and boreout. Burnout is trying to roll a boulder uphill: No matter how hard you work and the amount of hours you put in, the workload is always at critical mass and it’s all you think about.
Boreout, on the other hand, is a lack of progression or stimulation. Picture sitting endlessly next to the boulder. There’s no conversation, no ‘exciting’ anticipation of whether it will or won’t crush you. You’re just waiting for something (anything) to happen.
Both of these scenarios are bad for employees and contribute to high turnovers. In custom and promotional businesses, the culprits are often found in manual and repetitive tasks. Chores like setting up team stores or microsites, manually populating them with products and collections, and tweaking designs according to the feedback that floods in via one of many channels are painful to your employees.
Transform their boredom and frustration into freedom by automating the manual. Brikl’s MicroStore technology was specifically designed to expedite the process of setting up shop and selling. Our tailored automation tools allow you to be open for business and customer-ready in 15 minutes or less. And design tools such as our custom image editor and placeholders give designers the opportunity to bulk brand products.
Our research has shown that these time savings can amount to 400 hours per year per employee. Give your employees the chance to work on growing your business with the skills they were hired for. It’s a win-win.
More Money, Fewer Problems
The studies we carried out last year showed that our merchants, on average, increased their profits by up to 150% within the first year of using Brikl. Why?
- The quicker you can set up an online store, the faster you can sell
- Once a template store has been set up, you can duplicate that store in one click, exponentially increasing the revenue you generate
- Store management can be carried out through scheduled open and close cycles to reduce time spent managing stores
- Fundraising options have been shown to increase customer loyalty and cart value
- Localization automation has allowed our merchants to expand into new and unfamiliar markets
- 3D visualization is helping businesses generate hundreds of leads a month and save time on the design process
In an age of economic uncertainty, time- and money-starved businesses don’t have the luxury of thinking about employee needs as they’re so focused on survival. But with Brikl technology, increased revenue and profitability, and the optimal conditions created internally, businesses can finally turn their focus on nurturing their talent. You may be surprised at what you see when you do!
Time is Money
The abstract concept of time equating to the tangible concept of money is a tough one to pitch to businesses who don’t think of human effort in that way. But as one of our merchants observed:
“It takes me 20 hours a week to set up team stores. That’s 20 hours I could be using to grow the business or take care of training and development for my employees. As a leader, I’m in a position where I can see the knock-on effect my time scarcity has on the people around me and my business holistically.”
Yet again, Brikl’s cutting-edge and highly specialized MicroStore automation can save the day.
We don’t think it’s too dramatic to overstate this: plugging up time leakages in a business is like sealing up a ship. Once your business is buoyant with time, it’s consistently saving money that can be channelled back into growth plans, stronger leadership, and employee wellness. Set sail on a journey your employees always want to be a part of (instead of giving them chronic sea sickness every day).
Unify Your Employees Around a Grand Vision
Most of us have experienced this situation first-hand: sales has access to one set of numbers, e-commerce managers have access to another set, and marketing is reporting another. The resulting company meetings can be a mixture of frustration, confusion and vast internal monologues about how exactly you got to this point.
This siloed mentality where each department has created its own company reality can actually be quite damaging to team morale. As RingCentral observes:
Silos can turn into a big problem for workplace cohesion and employee engagement. They can sour relations between teams, weaken trust in the company’s leadership, and deaden motivation for employees who feel incapable of changing the culture”.
And in an age where remote and hybrid work has become a standard, giving employees access to the same numbers is more integral than ever.
Counter these challenges like a literal boss with Brikl’s admin portal functionality. Minimize disputes, bring teams together wherever they are in the world, and create a roadmap to work towards the same goals together.
To wrap this article up, Wired makes an excellent point when it says:
The Great Resignation” was a catchy term, [but] it misses the point. “The real takeaway is why people are leaving their jobs in the first place—rampant stress, the shift to remote work, a forced reckoning with what matters in light of the pandemic—and what resigning is leading them to do next.”
We encourage custom and promotional businesses everywhere to go back to the day they first dreamt of setting up a company and to cast an eye around. What do you see? Were burnout, stressed or unhappy employees ever a part of the equation? Or did you imagine a thriving business full of employees who embrace every morning as a new opportunity to showcase their potential in driving your company forward?
If your answer is the latter, we have the same vision for your business and the tools to help. All it takes is a conversation, so let’s get chatting! We can make this warm and fuzzy feeling of creating a better, more profitable business for you and your employees one that lasts.
