You’ve updated your aging website, you blog regularly and
your Facebook fan page has lots of followers. You’ve read every success and management magazine,
you have a copy of the most trendy business strategy books on your nightstand, and
you spent several hours listening to webinars and attending conferences and
networking events.
So, you’ve got the competitive edge, right? Wrong, because your competitors have all done
the exact same thing. Marketing 2.0 and the
global economy have evened out the playing field – the leading players in any
industry essentially all look alike.
2012 doesn’t promise to bring anything new, unless you think that
creating a Google+ account three days before your closest competitor does will
truly make a difference.
What could you possibly do in 2012 that will make a
difference? What do you have that your
competitors don’t, that you can use to create a competitive edge? Well, to start with, you have you. And you have your partners, employees and
contractors.
But, you’ve squeezed every ounce of productivity out of your
exhausted workforce. All your
salespeople have attended the best sales training and your customer service
department just underwent an overhaul due to too many customer complaints. Your marketing department seems to have lost
their creativity, your finance group is just trying to keep your corporate head
above water in this endless recession, and HR is having a hard time finding
enough qualified people to fill the few job openings you’ve dared to
approve.
Let me give you a few statistics that might make you think differently
about things:
- Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56%;
- Happy employees take, on average, 15 less sick days per year than their unhappy colleagues;
- $360B is lost each year in the U.S. due to reduced productivity caused by poor relationships between employees and their supervisors;
- An employee’s belief in his or her ability is a stronger predictor of job performance than his or her actual level of skill or training;
- A study at KPMG reported that positive psychology training was responsible for improving life satisfaction, one of the most crucial predictors of productivity and performance in the workplace.
This will be your competitive edge in 2012 – the human edge. Investing in developing a happy workforce
(and this includes you) can provide you with a huge edge over your
competitors. While they are scratching
their heads, trying to figure out how to continue doing more with less, you
will become an employer of choice, reaping the many benefits of a happy,
optimistic, creative, and innovative team of contributors to your bottom line.
Want to know how?
Check in tomorrow for part two of this blog: how to incorporate the key
concepts of positive psychology into your organization.
