Your team members are often interacting with your customers, and their own satisfaction and passion for their work always shows through. So keeping your team members happy is just as important as delivering on your promise to your customers.

At Ontraport, for example, our Operations and Leadership teams view each employee as one of their customers. Whether team members are relatively new to the company or have called Ontraport home for a long time, we’re always thinking about how we can keep them happy and engaged, challenged but not overworked, and equipped with everything they need to succeed. Just like customers, we’ve found that happy employees will usually stick around for a long time, stay engaged in their work, and be more likely to refer us to their friends.

Sara Hetyonk, Ontraport’s VP of People Operations, says, “Good employers care about their team members as people. They realize employees represent the company’s mission and provide them with the tools they need to be successful in their role.”

There are several ways businesses of any size can address their employees’ needs and let them know how valuable they are to their operation. Here are four simple ways to increase employee satisfaction in your own business:

1. Providing employee benefits

Salary isn’t the only thing employees are looking at when they’re considering job offers. In fact, many employees are just as interested in the benefits offered, the company’s culture, and opportunities for career growth. In one study, participants reported they’re twice as likely to value those factors over a hefty salary when choosing a job. Three out of five employees even said they’d take a 50% pay cut for a role they really love.

Regardless of the size of a business, there are a lot of creative ways to make employees feel appreciated that cost companies nothing yet make a big difference for their employees.

“Providing an amazing benefits package costs a lot of money,” Sara says. “One of the concerns business owners may face is not having the resources to dedicate to covering health insurance or providing meals. Before being discouraged about what you can’t provide, it is important to consider what you can provide. And small gestures go a long way.”

Here are some examples of unique benefits Ontraport offers that you can consider applying in your business to increase employee happiness:

Flexible PTO: Taking time off is essential for team members to take care of their mental health, enjoy their hobbies and relationships, handle personal responsibilities and more so they can come back feeling refreshed, inspired and ready to hit the ground running again. Since we don’t limit the number of PTO days available, employees don’t feel pressured to avoid taking days off and actually end up being more responsible about how many days they miss.

Volunteer days: If there’s a cause that one of our employees is passionate about, we care about it, too. Everyone on the Ontraport team gets two paid volunteer days per year that they can use to give back to the community.

Focus days: Another simple perk companies can offer is a work-from-home day. Since adjusting to the pandemic, working remotely is already the norm for so many of us; however, setting aside one day every so often for employees to unplug from work chats and meetings to focus on a specific project can help reinvigorate their passion and avoid burnout.

Tuition reimbursement: Investing in your team members’ personal and professional development pays dividends in their work. At Ontraport, we provide $1,500 in tuition reimbursement per year that employees can use for classes, books, workshops and more, whether related to their job or not.

Catered meal program: The way to someone’s heart is through their stomach…right? Whether that’s true or not, we ensure our employees are well-nourished through our on-site cafe, which provides breakfast, lunch and snacks throughout the day. While it might not be realistic for every company to offer this perk, offering catered lunch to employees once a month or celebrating team members’ work anniversaries with a paid meal can make them feel appreciated.

Pet insurance: Consider offering employees who have furry members in their families the opportunity to sign up for pet insurance through your company. While Ontraport employees still pay out of pocket for pet insurance, they are eligible for a group discount, which helps them save money.

Fitness discounts: When our employees feel good physically and mentally, they’re better positioned to be rock stars at their jobs. Reach out to a local gym or studio and you’ll likely find that they’re willing to offer a group discount that you can extend to your employees, which they’re sure to appreciate.

Half-day Fridays: This is a free benefit that can encourage your employees to strike a better work-life balance. At Ontraport, we work an hour longer each day Monday through Thursday so we can leave the office by early afternoon every Friday. We end up working the typical 40-hour work week, but we spread it out differently.

Health and wellness reimbursements: Everyone has their own way of managing their physical and mental health. To give each employee the resources they need, we offer flexible reimbursements for their health-related purchases. Everyone on the Ontraport team gets an annual stipend to put toward home office equipment, mental health support, family planning costs, and even wellness purchases like camping fees and workout gear. Even if you have limited resources, a little bit of support can go a long way in encouraging work-life balance.

2. Following a set of shared values

As our business grew, our leaders Landon Ray and Lena Requist wanted to ensure Ontraport didn’t lose sight of all the principles that our one-of-a-kind company culture was built on. Over time, they found that there were nine main values that contributed to making each Ontraport employee a good fit with the company.

To keep these values top of mind, we regularly acknowledge team members during our weekly company-wide meetings if they’ve been an outstanding example of one or more of our values. We also hold an annual awards event to recognize those who have exemplified each of the company values through their work, attitude and contributions to Ontraport. Our aim is for our employees to be inspired by their colleagues and see that the work they do truly matters.

To come up with your own set of company values, consider what characteristics are most important to you when hiring employees and what qualities you’ve found in successful employees. Then simply document them and work them into your hiring and recognition processes.

3. Keeping the team connected

Some companies take pride in being a tight-knit group — it’s often what makes their employees stay around for years.

Maintaining a warm and friendly company culture has always been a priority at Ontraport, and we believe this plays a key role in why our team meshes so well. Our Operations team supports our culture through fun and engaging events. With morale-boosting team-building days, annual summer soirees and holiday parties, virtual baby showers, birthday and work anniversary celebrations, we are often celebrating and getting the team together.

Keeping the close-knit vibe can be tough in the midst of all the challenges brought on by COVID-19 and remote work. But even if miles separate you and your employees, it’s important to make sure your team is well cared for. To keep our employees engaged (even virtually), our teams have Zoom happy hours, participate in virtual yoga classes, and regularly share in Slack channels about recipes to try, music recommendations, photos of pets and more.

As our office reopens and our team shifts to a new hybrid work environment, we’ve also kicked off biannual week-long company retreats at our Santa Barbara headquarters. With the whole team on-site for a week, we’re able to touch base on company goals, meet remote teammates in person, catch up over happy hours and more.

“Feeling connected and engaged is essential in making sure employees feel fulfilled,” Sara says.

4. Holding each other accountable

One of the most important things business leaders can do to increase employee happiness is create a space for open communication and feedback. The office is not simply a place where work gets done; employees should know that they’re supported and cared for. When people know that their employers have their back, they’re more likely to thrive and be engaged in the workplace.

By giving team members the opportunity to share any issues or roadblocks they may be facing, making leadership accessible, and being receptive to feedback (as well as being willing to make changes based on said feedback), companies make it clear that they prioritize what their employees need to be successful. With a survey automation tool, you can touch base with your team without adding to your workload. It’s well worth your while to make sure they’re getting what they need.

Even through the ups and downs of the pandemic, our company’s commitment to transparency and accountability hasn’t changed. Everyone at Ontraport is asked to participate in regular reviews and weekly check-ins with managers, fill out weekly surveys about their work experiences and send questions and comments (anonymously, if desired) to our CEO, Landon Ray, to address in our all-hands meetings.

“Sending a survey with benefit options or even a survey to find out what is going well or not well in an employee’s role can illuminate needs you might not have thought of,” Sara adds. “Listen if someone is having a tough time, and ask what you can do.”

Overall, engaged, motivated, happy employees will usually work to prove they want to be there and want to see the company excel. This enthusiasm, in turn, will often reflect in their customer interactions and contributions to the company.

The post Want Happy Customers? Start With Your Team appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

In 2017 alone, many concept-fueled businesses have shut their doors. Beepi, a used car marketplace, was founded on a great idea but stumbled under bad prioritization. Quixey, a digital app assistant, folded as competition flooded the market. Yik Yak, an anonymous social network whose popularity was underscored by its young user base and a valuation nearing $400 million at its peak, shut down after cyberbullies ran rampant.

The failures of these well-funded companies sent ripples throughout the startup world. But failure itself isn’t the problem — the inability to let go of a beloved idea is. Being an entrepreneur is all about having a healthy relationship with failure.

Failing to fail.

Many entrepreneurs are so fearful of ultimately failing to create a profitable and sustainable company that they overlook the smaller failures that litter the path to success. Failure can also be found in the lackluster marketing campaigns, ill-conceived software updates and rushed hiring decisions that occur while trying to realize an idea.

I’ve fallen in love with a lot of ideas, but I eventually gave up or put on hold the ones whose weaknesses became so noticeable that even I couldn’t deny them. For example, my company, Ontraport, held Implementation Days to provide strategy, copy and design services to support our clients in launching successful marketing campaigns. We knew small business owners would benefit from this additional insight on top of the capabilities our software tools offered.

This concierge service program met with some real success; we had a few deeply happy customers who were thrilled with the above-and-beyond efforts of our staff. A few cried while talking to our employees.

Meanwhile, we had thousands of people waiting. We had let the program veer off course while trying to serve individuals instead of our broader audience. I looked at the numbers and had a hard conversation with myself, concluding that although I loved the program, the business was suffering. These few happy people weren’t covering our costs.

To deliver on our mission, I had to serve thousands and that required putting Implementation Days on the chopping block. I now make a point to cancel programs at the end of each year if they don’t make business sense or don’t result in worthwhile ROI. Determining which ones make the cut, as well as how to rebound from such a loss, isn’t easy, but a few steps can soften the blow.

1. Clarify why an idea must be abandoned.

The financial devastation of throwing good money after bad can’t be overstated. If an idea was once successful but is now struggling, its owner must attach a dollar amount to its current failure. To come up with the full cost, determine how much each stage of the process costs, how much it costs to pay your employees to do that work and how costly it would be to replicate the process in the future.

Then, ask yourself, “If I have $1,000 to spend, what will truly get me closer to my goal?” You may determine that it’s worthwhile to have your designers and writers implement marketing strategies for your customers because the results will outweigh the labor costs. Or you may, like me, come up with an alternative that still supports the goal. In our case, we decided to offer templates with guidance about copy and design strategy, allowing us to provide similar value to our customers, but at scale.

2. Don’t abandon the lessons hidden in the experience.

Failure is hard, which is why most people don’t want to go through it. Even watching other people fail is hard. My one-year-old nephew is on the verge of walking, but he keeps losing his balance and falling. He’d never learn to walk if people kept grabbing him before gravity took hold. There’s a payoff to his pain.

Likewise, if you’re going to fail, you might as well make it worth your while. Write down the skills you obtained as a result of your failure. Get competitive with yourself: Compare the current version of yourself to last year’s model. What are you now capable of doing differently to lead your company? What do you know now that makes you more valuable?

I did this at the end of 2015, a challenging year for my business. I found lots of problems, all of which were our own design. I could see exactly why we’d managed to find ourselves in the position we were in. However, we escaped layoffs and grew the company by three percent. Looking back, I realized that I hadn’t prioritized data and analytics in my decision-making; I had failed to incorporate the right KPIs and how they were reported.

Today, everyone in the company receives a Daily Stats email first thing in the morning with what we call “cash the plane” KPIs. We then set up better weekly, monthly and quarterly reporting for each of our teams during our weekly leadership meeting.

3. Develop a grateful mindset toward failure.

The idea of thinking of failure with gratitude may feel like salt in the wound, but without the failures of 2015 that forced us to look at what we were doing, our company wouldn’t have uncovered and resolved so many issues that would have prevented us from becoming the scalable business we are now.

I didn’t just get comfortable with the list I’d made of the lessons I’d learned. I sat down with a colleague and put our lists together. There was overlap, but we’d each zoned in on different failures and overlooked others. That meant there was even more learning to be done. We adjusted our perspective and began embracing a new attitude: “How can we be open to that?” There’s no longer a penalty attached to failure.

We also put our work in perspective. In our line of work, unlike that of doctors or firefighters, people’s lives aren’t in danger when we fail. Remembering that makes it easier to absorb the beauty of failure — it’s part of the cost of learning, and it’s why you’ll be paid more down the line. Failing as an entrepreneur is a lot like surviving the grueling rigors of a difficult college program: You pay thousands of dollars, get no breaks and endure lots of pressure. But the “Is it worth it?” question is answered at the end, when you wear that experience like a badge of honor.

Failure resembles grief: The only way out is through. And that makes sense because failure means grieving an idea that didn’t pan out the way you’d hoped. But evaluating the data, embracing the lessons and adjusting your attitude ensures that your failure will pay off with a much stronger company that can take a few blows and remain standing.

Article originally published on Entrepreneur.com.

The post How to Develop a Positive Relationship With Failure appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Throughout my career, and as president of Ontraport, I have learned how valuable it is for business leaders to establish an environment that protects employee mental health and promotes mental strength.

But that’s often not what happens.

About 60 percent of people whose work has been affected by stress are too afraid to talk to their boss about it. Concerns about receiving a negative response from company leaders often leads to suppressing these issues, which adversely affects both the employee and the business. This is why it is especially important to establish workplace practices that create a safe space and mental health accommodations.

Mental health concerns do not apply only to individuals who have spent decades in the workforce. Many new members assign an increased value to mental health, and taking measures to improve conditions in the workplace is important across the board.

When having the conversation of promoting healthy workplace practices, it is important to understand the difference between mental strength and mental health. According to psychotherapist Amy Morin, “Mental strength is about acknowledging your emotions, expressing them, and coping with them in healthy ways.” Mental health, on the other hand, refers to “the overall state of your mental wellness.”

This can be understood in terms of physical strength and physical health. Establishing a strong physique will improve overall physical health, but an individual who works out 7 days a week can still get sick. The relationship between mental strength and mental health functions the same way.

In some professional circles, mental health and mental strength are referred to as completely separate entities — if you have to focus on your mental health, you must not be very strong; if you’re mentally strong, you don’t need to do anything to boost the mental health you already have.

In fact, they’re connected. Maintaining mental strength requires a commitment to mental health, and leaders who overlook the need to feed mental health miss out on having the strongest team possible.

These five elements are critical to building any professional’s mental strength:

1. Encourage community within your company

Nobody likes eating alone in the cafeteria. The simple act of positioning someone to feel like part of a group can counteract the loneliness that can terrorize a person’s mind and override the ability to think clearly. One study found that lonely people are less susceptible to rewards than others, suggesting they might also be less likely to be engaged with your projects or your work.

Establish a group to support people who want to quit smoking, or create a mentorship program. Building communities within your organization ensures that people are caring for and supporting one another, treating each individual like a person and not a number.

2. Set realistic expectations for performance, both good and bad

Employees’ awareness of their own need for help is the first step in the process of building mental strength, but it is equally as important for the company leaders to ensure that they have established an environment that is capable of providing appropriate accommodations. Without a comforting work environment, employees are likely to find a new job that can accommodate their needs. This is not only disheartening for company morale, but it is also financially disadvantageous. Losing employees, incurring training costs and absorbing the cost of filling roles can impact a company’s long-term prognosis.

Some leaders freeze at the thought of championing downtime, thinking it will encourage lazy people to be lazier, but it can be beneficial. 25% of people cite work as the biggest stressor in their life, and this can lead to depression, anxiety and burnout. If leaders set clear expectations for what needs to get done, they can establish built-in accountability and still allow plenty of flexibility for employees to reduce their stress levels and work more productively.

3. Invest in hiring processes that benefit candidates as much as they benefit you

At Ontraport, I personally interview every single employee we hire. Some people may think a healthier approach is the opposite: Leaders should trust their employees to make those decisions. I do trust my employees — I trust them to refer the right people. I then meet with candidates to confirm that the people I’m surrounded by not only like what they do and perform well, but are also in a situation to be successful.

By sharing my vision of where the company is headed, I’m able to paint a picture of how each person will play a part in achieving that. Seeing people light up — or lose interest — tells me whether they’ll be happy in our environment over the long haul, and ignoring that would be doing a disservice to both my company and these candidates.

4. Remind yourself of what’s beyond the office doors

As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to believe that everyone else should be as obsessed with the company as you are. Most of these people, however, aren’t owners and don’t have the same stake in the game. Providing them with opportunities to take ownership of projects or processes is important, but their lives don’t begin and end with your office.

When you see an opening to support employees outside the office, do it. Does your engineer’s daughter have a recital? Has it been a year since your designer took a vacation? Could you offer additional support to your developer who’s caring for an elderly parent? All of these scenarios represent opportunities to honor every aspect of your employees’ lives so they know you’ve got their back. Having the support of team leaders during tough times allows people to deal with mental health challenges in healthy and effective ways, establishing mental strength.

5. Take the time to build physical strength while building mental strength

As anyone who has taken a long walk in nature can attest, taking care of one’s body is often closely connected to taking care of one’s mind. The first thing to drop off the radar when we’re feeling less than our best mentally is the need to work out or eat healthy, so leaders have to proactively build healthy structures for their teams.

I’ve offered what I call Morning Meditations, built-in times to disengage from the rapid pace of everything else and reconnect with being present in the moment. I’ve known other entrepreneurs who have supplied healthy snacks at the office, organized group walks or assembled teams for kickball or softball leagues.

Mental health and mental strength aren’t built overnight — as they say, anything worth having takes work. That’s why it’s vital that leaders support their employees by creating communities, setting realistic expectations, establishing two-way hiring processes and recognizing outside influences. Strengthening the people who are important to you ensures that your company will be equally strong, making mental health a win-win for entrepreneurs who acknowledge it.

Article originally published on Entrepreneur.com.

The post Prioritize Mental Strength in your Business With These 5 Tips appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Rather than be intimidated by this looming possibility, however, entrepreneurs should recognize that this means they have more control than they realize. Technology’s power puts them in a position to create value, which should reveal opportunities and fuel the entrepreneurial spirit.

The problem is that most entrepreneurs have trouble shifting their perspective to see what’s overwhelming as empowering.

Stop fearing what’s already happening.

People are worried about machines, computers and factories taking their jobs, dwelling on whether their own positions will be threatened. It’s not a question of whether it’s going to happen — it’s a matter of when. The takeover is already underway, but we’re so busy staring at what’s fading into the mist that we’re overlooking the amazing possibilities that come with technology.

Here are a few steps we can take to reframe technology as our ally, not our enemy:

1. IDENTIFY THE TASKS YOU CAN AUTOMATE TO FREE YOUR BRAIN UP FOR CREATIVE BIG-PICTURE THINKING.

Not that long ago, we lived without cell phones. Now, we carry powerful computers in the palm of our hands, telling us which roads to take when we’re in traffic, enabling us to check in for flights and letting us look up anything we need with the push of a button. They save us time, energy and money, freeing us up to spend our most valuable resource — our lives — on the things that really matter.

The same idea applies to our companies. Things that are time-consuming but not thinking-intensive — aka the stuff we called “busywork” in school — suck up the hours and brain cells that would be better spent on the difficult tasks we can’t hand off.

A study published in Behavioral and Brain Functions concluded that a prolonged cognitive load — too much to think about — results in mental fatigue. That means that when you finally do find the time to devote to those high-value tasks, you don’t have the energy to do so.

McKinsey & Company’s 2016 “Automating the Insurance Industry” report assessed how automation could be applied to the insurance industry’s current tasks, and it found that up to a quarter of the field’s existing roles could be combined or removed in the coming decade. Machine learning could take over up to 60 percent of an insurance sales agent’s job, for example, but only 35 percent of an underwriter’s. That means that in 10 years, insurance companies will be able to dedicate more of their team members’ brain power to more complex tasks while handing the easier ones off to computers.

2. DETERMINE WHERE YOU ADD THE MOST VALUE TO YOUR TEAM, AND THEN ISOLATE THE AREAS THAT TAKE AWAY FROM THOSE TASKS.

Entrepreneurs erroneously assume that everything they do for their businesses is valuable. It likely is all worthwhile to some extent, but some efforts add more value to their companies than others. Growing a company and leading a team makes it essential that you identify where you’re adding the most value so you put your focus there.

I’ve worked with leaders who realized their time was best spent working on developing business partnerships or on hiring executive-level positions for their companies, but they were investing their days in approving ad copy or backing up data — things that could be handled by automation. To be sure, backing up data is vital to a company, as GitLab could tell us after experiencing data deletion, followed by a backup failure.  

GitLab’s incident initially occurred as a result of a system administrator accidentally deleting a folder of live production data. In the wake of this disruption caused by human error, industry professionals recommended that others use all-in-one platforms with analyzers to determine what should be backed up and then automatically back those files up. This underscores the fact that what those entrepreneurs I’ve known have spent their time on could have been better accomplished by technology than by them — and allowed them to spend time building high-revenue partnerships instead.

3. ASSESS WHAT YOUR COMPANY CURRENTLY CAN’T DO ITSELF.

We all know entrepreneurs who wouldn’t have a blog on their website if it weren’t for a platform such as WordPress. Technology can be seen as an extension of your business that enables your company to do things and offer services or products it couldn’t otherwise.

My company has consulted with businesses that have held group brainstorming sessions to determine what they should be doing but couldn’t with their current technology, staff or skill sets. They were clients of ours who hoped our platform had the ability to assist them with their new efforts. In some cases, we already offered a way to do what they wanted and simply had to show them how to integrate it; in others, we discussed how we could create what they were looking for or tweak an existing feature to do so.

In both instances, my company — and theirs — took advantage of technology to expand our offerings and grow our businesses.  

Technology may ultimately change how many of our jobs look. But this is a time of opportunity, not fear — what our companies and roles look like in the future will be enhanced, not diminished, versions of what we do now. If you free up some brain space, identify where you add the most value and pinpoint what you want to do in the future, you’ll be driving the technology changes you’ll encounter rather than be driven by them.

Article originally published on Entrepreneur.com.

The post 3 Ways Embracing Automation and Technology Can Turbocharge Your Entrepreneurial Quest appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

When you think about starting a business, you usually imagine one of three outcomes:  

1. You see a problem in the world and just can’t sit by idly. You imagine a world where that problem doesn’t exist, and your product or service is the perfect solution.
2. You’re tired of the 9-5 grind that is uninspiring and keeps you from the people and things you love. You imagine working for yourself, making enough to get by, and having the freedom to spend your time on what you love.
3. You know that the only way to earn the income you deserve is to start your own business. You imagine coming up with a cool business idea that will make you millions and deliver early retirement.

It’s interesting to notice that in all of these visions, most people don’t imagine being an employer. Being “The Boss” is often a sudden and surprising experience for entrepreneurs, and we were no different.

In the beginning, we hired people we liked (and could afford). They didn’t always know what they were doing, but, hey, neither did we. There was a vibe of hustle in the air. We were all just a bunch of kids “playing” at work, hanging out on the weekends and stumbling our way through. We didn’t have stated values or processes. Heck, we didn’t even have payroll. People would just tell Landon they needed some money to make rent, and he would write them a check. In many ways, it was a lot simpler when we first started. At the same time, it was also so much harder than it is today.

Over the past ten years, we turned that rag tag group of kids into real professionals with real skills running a real business. As we methodically worked towards our mission of removing the technical burden from entrepreneurs, we discovered that Ontraport was something more than a software company, and we were more that just “The Boss.” We had an incredible opportunity to create a new kind our workplace where people could engage their talents in unexpected ways, track their individual contribution, and develop new skills. Our vision began to expand to more than just the business we were building, and we started to imagine our lives as employers.

Today, our Ontraport culture has taken on a life of its own, led by our nine values. On any given day, you can see our team working together, supporting one another, constantly learning and growing. They are driven by a common goal to protect what we so carefully created over the past ten years. When new staff joins our team, they discover that they have instantly gained a community of people who truly care about each other, and inside this Ontraport bubble, people thrive. 

The post 10 Years of Culture: We’ve Come a Long Way From Three Dudes in a Yurt appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.