Psychologically Winning at Running Your Business

Psychology can help provide insights into how people make decisions, their behavior, what motivates them, and how you can better communicate with them in a way that is effective towards them. These aspects make it a valuable thing for business owners and entrepreneurs to be knowledgeable about. Knowing how and why your customers, clients, and employees think the way they do can help you form more informed choices for your business and how you run it. In this article, we’ll go over some ways you can use psychology in your workplace environment and your interactions with employees and customers.

Psychology of the Environment

Your environment has a massive effect on your mood. So much so that studies are even done on the impact that the color of the environment has on someone psychologically. We’re not saying you need to paint your business a specific color to make people feel happier or calmer at your business, but taking into account how your business’s environment can affect those who work for you and those who do business with you can be beneficial.

Here are some ways your environment can affect your mental health:

Messy Spaces Vs. Clean Spaces

Studies show that a messy or cluttered space can induce stress, influence bad decision-making, and make people behave more impulsively. For your business, this could lead to customers not feeling comfortable in your business, you or your employees doing things they aren’t supposed to, or cause them to feel stressed, which can lower morale and affect productivity.

On the other hand, a clean and organized space can help people feel calmer and more productive and promote a more positive emotional state. This can make customers connect your business with positive emotions and feel calm while doing business with you.

For employees and yourself as the business owner, this can promote productivity, help you feel more relaxed, and reduce stress within the workplace.

Lighting

The environment's lighting can have some interesting effects on how people feel in their environments. Natural and artificial light has a powerful effect on a person’s mental state. Natural light is the most important type of light to have in your space.

Natural light is found to reduce stress levels, improve sleep patterns, and, in general, make people feel happier. For your business, this can mean making sure to have windows to let in natural light where people frequent, and if windows are not possible for any reason, then having different levels and temperatures of lights can help add variety to mimic natural light. Cool light during the day (blue and white lights) can help promote concentration and focused work, while using warm lights are best for later in the afternoon and evening because they promote relaxation and creative thinking.

Psychology in the Workplace

You know how to help your business’s environment. Now, let's tackle how you can use psychology tactics to help improve relationships and communication between you and your employees and customers.

Let's take a look at some ways psychology can help you understand how to help your employees and customers feel good supporting and working for your business:

The Trust Triangle

Making sure you are trustworthy as a boss and business is of the utmost importance. Without trust, where would we be? The Trust Triangle is a great way to understand how to develop and retain trust in your professional relationships. The Trust Triangle states that trust comes from three sources: authenticity, logic, and empathy. If all three are balanced, there is a strong sense of trust.

If one or more is lacking, there is a weak line of trust. Knowing what goes into fostering trust will allow you to better understand how to get customers and your employees to trust you as a boss and a business.

Customers who don’t trust the business owner won’t want to continue doing business with you, and employees who don’t trust their boss won’t want to stay employed with you.

The PERMA Model

Martin Seligman created the PERMA Model, and it essentially lines out the essential components for living a happy, balanced, and fulfilling life.

The aspects of the PERMA model are:

• • Positive emotions

• • Engagement

• • Positive relationships

• • Meaning

• • Accomplishment

While these are meant for life overall, it’s very easy to apply these to your business to ensure you and your employees are satisfied to help the business run smoothly.

Here are some examples of how:

• Positive emotions - Ensuring your employees feel appreciated in their job is essential to making them feel happy working with you. This can be done by thanking them for their work, congratulating them on their successes, and setting up reward systems for their work.

• Engagement - When someone is fully engaged, they work their best. The best way to implement this in your business is to set up your employees to where they’re working in their strengths. If you have someone who is fantastic with people and someone else who is amazing at organization, get the first person to handle customers and the other to help keep your business looking great and running smoothly.

• Positive relationships - Strengthening the relationships between yourself and your employees can be very beneficial to promoting a successful and productive team. Implementing team-building exercises and collaboration is the best way to help with this.

• Meaning - Making sure your business's work has meaning to you and your employees can help everyone feel more like part of a team, all working towards a common goal. This can be done by either sharing success stories on what the business has helped with, partnering with an organization or donation you and your employees can all support, and setting a set of values you want the business to have that your employees can strive for.

• Accomplishment - Taking the time to acknowledge the team's achievements can help your employees feel more confident in their work and more motivated to keep going. When people know their work is seen, they want to keep going. Helping your employees build and advance their skills and careers is also a fantastic way to take care of this aspect.

For more information on how Psychology can help your business, check out these articles:

• • How Business Psychology Can Benefit Entrepreneurs And Their Businesses
• • Role Of Psychology in Business Management

Knowing about different aspects of psychology is key to figuring out how to ensure your business promotes a healthy work environment and can help you be a better boss and business owner.

If you’re interested in learning other ways psychology can help your business, contact Comprehensive Consulting Solutions for Small Businesses, and we'd be happy to help you!

Check out these other articles written by CCSSB:

• Neuro-linguistic Programing and Small Businesses

• Attitude Drives Success

• Cognitive Bias and Small Business