Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, a new book by Stuart Brown, M.D., recommends including play in the workplace.
If you’re like many entrepreneurs, you’re too busy running your company to think about how to run it. So you create a vacation policy when an employee asks for time off and a dress code when someone arrives at the office wearing an inappropriate T-shirt. Sound familiar?
But cost is still a problem. Small businesses typically pay more for insurance than big businesses do and get significantly less for their money. No surprise, then, that the share of small businesses providing insurance has dropped since 1999, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Of course, given the costs associated with administering such a benefit and the matching contributions to your employees’ accounts, it’s also a fairly expensive way to keep your people happy. Yes, the government helps defray a significant portion of those expenses.
There comes a time in the life cycle of your business—if it’s a successful venture, anyway—when you can no longer juggle all the myriad tasks, big and small, that inevitably fall to the owner of a growing operation.
Among the challenges of running a small business is finding good employees and then keeping them motivated so that they thrive. When you do that successfully, your business will thrive too.
