Managing | Business Made Simple

Why Your C-Suite Should be Accessible to All Employees

Making executives accessible and working directly with employees gives businesses the legs to launch a brand into unmatched success. At RNR Tire Express, we’ve built our company culture on empathy, openness and accessibility to fuel the brand’s success.

Over the last few decades, employees’ outlook and priorities have shifted causing a change in the way that companies operate on the day-to-day. As millennials and gen Z take over the workforce, they are bringing new perspectives into the business world. They are likely to value culture and lifestyle more than other generations that have come before them.

Today’s employees expect a productive, engaging, enjoyable work experience that fits into their lifestyles and matches their personalities. Now more than ever, employees are demanding more than just benefits and perks – they want to be part of a community that makes a difference and they want to work for a company they can stand behind.

Many know that employee engagement is key to reducing turnover and ultimately boosting profitability. However, research shows that still less than 30% of employees are engaged at work. To better retain quality talent, leaders should strive to find ways to make their employees feel valued, while at the same time showing them how they are making an impact. To start, employers should make their teams feel valued by steering clear of manager-led communication entirely. If managers are restricted to top-down, one-way communication with their employees, productivity, innovation, and retention will all drop significantly.

The relationship between a CEO and their employees should be built on mutual trust, respect and communication. Offering all of these gives a company a unique strength and a competitive edge to succeed among competitors in a tight labor market. The following guidelines have helped RNR Tire Express to create a company culture built

A Small Business Guide to Open Enrollment

Open enrollment is a few week period at the end of the year when employees can choose, drop or change their employer-sponsored health care coverage.
Small businesses with fewer than 50 full-time employees aren’t necessarily required to pay into group health insurance premiums.
Small businesses that do offer plans through the Small Business Health Options Program enjoy the Small Business Health Care Tax Credit.

As far as fall rituals go, the health insurance “open enrollment” period is right up there with raking wet leaves and paying property taxes. If this isn’t your first time around the block as a business, you already know that earlier is better when it’s time to get the word out and meet what always turns out to be a rocket speed-approaching deadline.

Here are the basics for 2019 and what small business owner’s need to know.

Do small businesses have to offer health coverage?

Not always. If you’re a business with fewer than 50 full-time employees, you aren’t required to pay a percentage of group health insurance premiums – but many small organizations opt to do it to stay competitive.

Things have changed with the Affordable Care Act: A mandate fining individuals without health insurance was removed in 2019. But the ACA still requires employers with 50 or more full-time employees to offer health insurance coverage. Regardless, it’s still a good idea to offer a plan given the tough climate for finding and retaining good workers.

An added bonus to offering coverage is that small companies who sign up for plans through the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP), can take advantage of the Small Business Health Care Tax Credit. If all criteria are met, this tax credit is worth up to 50% of the costs a company pays for employee premiums, according

How Mind Mapping Can Help Entrepreneurs

Everyone’s attended a class where their primary responsibility was to memorize and learn facts. As long as you remembered all the facts and you could prove it – for example, during a test – you passed the class, but you may not have fully understood what you memorized. You most likely failed to retain most of the new information.

Mind mapping, however, is a better way of absorbing knowledge. You can use it for anything from creating a plan for developing a healthy habit to fleshing out a pivotal business idea. It involves building on ideas that you already know and comprehend so that you can absorb new concepts with a real understanding and better retention.

What is mind mapping?

A mind map can help you learn a large, unfamiliar body of concepts. It’s a technique that involves using both the left and right sides of your brain to absorb new ideas. The visual aid created during a mind-mapping exercise can help you to organize new information as it correlates to a new central concept. Once you establish a new central concept, you can build out your mind map with branches of related sub-concepts.

Eventually, you’ll create a hierarchy that shows the relationship between a concept that you already understand and the new one. Mind mapping works because it takes advantage of the natural cortical skills used to process and absorb new information.

Mind mapping can help with retention and learning

Mind mapping enables meaningful learning, which occurs when you retain new knowledge by connecting it to existing knowledge. Mind mapping forces your brain to make the connections between what you know and what you’ve just learned. Learners make this connection by mapping discrete pieces of information around a central theme.

Historically, the Romans used the loci visualization technique to

5 Elements of a Successful Training Video

Training videos are effective tools for communicating information to an audience who are learning about a specific subject. The audience can range from employees or curious individuals who are looking to expand their skill set.

Training videos can be a stand-alone tool or a part of a training module. They are available online and can be accessed anywhere. However, sometimes these videos can come off as boring or even cheesy. This results in ineffective learning and even worse, the message the video is trying to deliver isn’t received and the viewer is left baffled.

What makes a bad training video? We’ve heard countless people say those lousy instructional videos from the 90’s as an example. Let’s not forget the stiff acting and cringe-worthy lines; not to mention, unclear instructions. We now know what to avoid.

What makes a training video good? Take Melbourne Metro Trains’ video for raising awareness for train safety for example. You might’ve heard of the Dumb Ways to Die video. Train safety sounds like a pretty mundane subject so how can Metro get their point across about safety without the audience taking a snooze?

They decided to make a weird, yet pretty scary video to promote train safety. In the end, the catchy video ended up generating $50 million in free ads, contributed a 30% reduction in “near-miss accidents,” and went viral.

Although there are several things that make it good, here are some simple elements to keep in mind when making effective training videos.

Visuals

Research shows that people are able to retain information from visuals or graphics in their long term memory in a much more effective way than written or spoken information. A study showed that individuals are only able to retain 10-20% of written or spoken information whereas they were able to

The Best Decision Makers for Business May Surprise You

Many of the decisions made in your business are going to be wrong, regardless of who makes them or how long they cogitate before they do so. Nobody gets it right all the time and we all learn from our mistakes.

That’s is because, in many organizations, it is the bosses who make all the important decisions. Other people are afraid of what will happen if, or when, they make a mistake. In a hierarchical organization, it is often risky to be seen to carry the can for something that looks like the wrong choice, and nobody wants to be in the wrong.

Hierarchical companies conform to the idea that the best decision-makers are the most senior people in the business. This is because people see that business leaders may have the most experience and the greatest depth of knowledge. In these traditionally-structured businesses too, they may be the only ones who have visibility of all the information, such as the financial data and statistics about how the company is doing and growing. They also may be the only ones who really understand the vision for where they want it to get to. Therefore, they are the ones making the decisions.

This is what many people expect, it is the way things have tended to happen in the past. Structuring the company like this probably works fine when the company is made up of three people and a dog, all sharing the same office space. It may also work well for a company that is not growing, in a marketplace where there is little prospect of disruption or rapid change. For instance, picture the Ministry of Dog Licenses in a small imaginary country with a static population and a stable government.

Out in the real world, in the era of