Morale Is A Terrible Thing to Waste

Every business owner or manager knows first hand how difficult it can be to handle and provide enough staff to succeed in any entrepreneurial endeavor. In addition to running a smooth operation, the added dynamics of hiring, firing, training, and onboarding, can be a full-time job for one or more persons depending on the size of the business. The myriad tasks of a manager in this position can be overwhelming to a business, as just managing staff can be highly resource-intensive.

Employee management is a core focus for most businesses as it does take both time and energy to handle success. Let’s look at some of the tasks involved in managing staff:

Hiring

The hiring process can be incredibly resource-intensive. From managing job duties to helping to define individual roles, to placing ads to lure prospective candidates, to answering inquiries regarding the positions, finding suitable candidates can be a challenge depending on the skills needed to fill the roles. This one phase of hiring staff members can be a drain on resources such as time and money.

Firing and Employee Turnover

Employee turnover happens for a variety of reasons. A person relocates and needs to move away from the city in which the business is working. A better offer comes from another institution. And the most common reason for employee turnover is due to unchallenging or mundane work making the person feel underutilized, unrecognized, and unhappy in their job.

Onboarding and Human Resources

Onboarding for a position includes hiring, training, scheduling, and providing human resources such as the implementation of insurance, 401k, vacations, sick days, etc. Complicated forms have to be filled out, mailed to the government, and constant management of that person and their employee resources must be maintained.

Staff Relations: It can be challenging to manage staff relations within any business or office. There are myriad human tendencies that can wreak havoc in any venture. There is a natural hierarchy to manage for the people on your team. There is seniority to recognize. There can be power plays, backstabbing, gossip, or discord to manage, all of which can be draining on resources and employee morale.

Training

After a candidate is hired, you or a staff member must train them thoroughly over a period of days, weeks, or even months. In some cases, a full-time employee must shadow everything a new trainee does over those months. That can be a significant drain on resources as one person is not up to speed and another has to watch and correct everything the new hire does in your organization.

Scheduling

All business owners must handle the difficult task of scheduling staff members to cover shifts or days to work. And it seems in the current business climate, everyone has needs that have to be fulfilled such as childcare concerns, second or third job schedules to accommodate, and family time off to consider. Getting staff to agree on days to work can be challenging and almost no week goes by without scheduling conflicts arising.

Vacation and Sick Days

Whether paid or unpaid, vacation and sick leave can be hard to predict and schedule for an entire office of staff members. And when your schedule is down one or more key employees, your business suffers from their absence. When an employee calls in sick, it can burden the others in the office and trickle down to miscommunications and mishandling of client relations. All of those things really affect your ability to function as a business.

Providing Opportunities and Upward Mobility

​Employees want to be challenged, provided opportunities to grow, move up in the company, and advance in every way. They grow bored easily without regular engagement and opportunities to learn, to change, and to get financial raises and be given more responsibilities. Mundane tasks drain your employee’s energies and create a feeling of stagnation in their minds and therefore in your business.

Repetition Can Be Boring

Within the list above as we described, there are some issues of employee management that can be hard to monitor and mitigate. One of the biggest challenges a business can face is the unknown effect that drudgery has on employee morale. Repetitive tasks, work that feels beneath them, and jobs that seem never-ending in size and scope can be a drain on employees that is both hard to measure and quantify.

You can see it on the faces of workers all around the world when they feel unchallenged or underutilized in their jobs. Be it in a retail store, a coffee shop, a small business office, or a huge corporate conglomerate, the employees that feel bored can be seen a mile away by their lack of verve, excitement, and fervor for the work that they do. This aspect of employee business management is one of the most difficult to track and to change.

And yet, your employees are the face of your business, so providing and creating a healthy and happy work environment can be the biggest challenge for any business. Workers want to be stimulated, offered chances to shine, and outlets for hidden and overt talents. How can a business owner provide all of that stimulation when so much of the work on the business plate can be boring, repetitive, and unchallenging?

Making The Case For Outsourcing

It’s time for us to make the case for outsourcing. Outsourcing is simply the practice of hiring out some of the tasks that any business might try to do in-house. Much of today’s businesses are beginning to outsource more and more aspects of their business practices that are not directly involved with their core competencies. For example, so many businesses outsource their human resources. Larger companies can hire out their employee benefit training and management through 3rd party businesses that are experts in handling human resources.

Outsourcing specialized skills to partners not on payroll can have significant impacts on your business. When you trim all the fat off of what is on your plate, what you get is just the steak. The meat of your business meal becomes your focus, your specialty, and helps fuel your passion for what you love to do the most. And that is exactly how your employees feel as well. When your staff is trained to do what they do best and their time is spent on efforts to drive, innovate, create, and contribute to your business in more than a menial way, they work harder and with greater energy than ever.

Any business is likely to have printing and mailing that is generated weekly or monthly. Be it a retail shop, financial institution, manufacturing operation, or office business, most businesses produce and mail either statements, sales notices, coupons, bulletins, schedules, announcements, flyers, or notices to mailing lists of clients every so often. During the month, one or more employees are placed at a desk formatting, printing, stuffing envelopes, stamping, and mailing dozens, hundreds, or thousands of envelopes to client lists to keep them updated on events, accounts, and memberships. This can be a highly resource-intensive project.

And let’s face it. That kind of work is boring, repetitive, mundane, and unchallenging. And if you are a bank or business with frequent mailing, it can seem like there is never an end in sight for the employees that take on those tasks. And those are usually the employees that find the least amount of job satisfaction in any business. Those are also the positions that tend to create the largest instance of turnover, sick days, and office drama for your business. An unhappy employee can topple a business almost single-handedly.

Save Money and Time, Increase Efficiency, and Improve Morale

Outsourcing not only saves money, time, increases efficiency, it also raises the morale of the entire organization. Money is not wasted on employee turnover and the high cost of training and onboarding new employees. Time is saved by not having so many dedicated staff members working on mundane non-core competency tasks. And efficiency is gained by partnering with a specialty company whose core competency is focused on one thing: printing and mailing. When you partner with one of the leaders in printing and mailing services such as Towne Mailer, you literally give your business the edge it needs to be successful in such competitive times as our modern business climate.

Who is Towne Mailer?

Towne Mailer has been specializing in handling printing and mailing for over 20 years. Located in Missoula, MT, Towne Mailer has clients all over the United States. We proudly serve everything from small, local mom and pop stores to huge financial institutions, corporations, and non-profit businesses in America.

Our focus is on creating and mailing excellent, state-of-art documents for our clients. Our process is simple, easy to handle, and our mailing turnaround times are fast. We get your projects done quickly and perfectly every time. Call us today for a no-obligation quote for your next printing and mailing project and start on the road to eliminating repetitive work. We handle the drudgery so that you don’t have to.