| Why Protecting Your Reputation Is Important |
| Reputational harm is one of the greatest business threats today. How can business owners best protect their companies?
Your business reputation is simply what others think and feel about your business. Those thoughts and feelings could be based on experiences with your business or on what people have heard about your business. And these experiences could be true or not. Your reputation is important because potential customers don’t wait until they’ve verified accurate information about a business to decide whether to engage with it. They make decisions based on whatever information is available to them. Your reputation can be created both online and offline. Online, it is created through your business website, your social media posts and online customer reviews. Offline, it is created through the appearance of your office or store, your events and your phone calls. How can you maintain a good reputation? Carefully craft the appearance of your store. Maintain your offices. And think about how your behavior may be perceived. We hate to sound like a nagging mother, but if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. If you aren’t careful, more than your reputation could be at stake. Libel and slander claims are pervasive, and the average cost to defend and settle these types of claims is more than $750,000. For small businesses without proper coverage, these suits can prove devastating, so make sure you have the right insurance in place. Give us a call today to see how we can support you! |
| The Case for Having Humor in Business |
| The workplace can often feel like a dull environment.
When the going gets tough, many offices enter a heads-down mode in which any deviation from seriousness is taken as a distraction from the task at hand. However, according to research from the London Business School, Wharton and MIT, amongst others, laughter in the workplace can actually bring incredible benefits to productivity in a business environment. Regular laughter has been shown to relieve stress and apathy, causing a boost in creativity, attention to detail and collaboration amongst colleagues. So how, then, can more humor in the workplace be encouraged without annoying the busybodies who tut at the first sign of office giggles? According to the book The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny by professor Peter McGraw and journalist Joel Warner, there is a formula that may help what would otherwise be subjective humor become a more inclusive, universal joke that everyone can get in on. They name the theory “Benign Violation” and witnessed it in effect in a diverse range of environments, from comedy clubs across the USA to remote forest villages in the Amazon. Benign violation involves provoking laughter when it is “unsettling” or “wrong” to do so yet is also “safe” and “acceptable.” While this may have many variations, the general gist is that an assumption has been made but discovered to have been a mistake in which the general audience may find a pun, innuendo or prank to be laughed at. This is, of course, context and audience dependent, but finding some way to bring joy and laughter into the office environment has a wealth of positives for an effective workplace. |
