Apparently, this is a thing. During the winter, which officially began yesterday,  can be a challenging time for many small businesses. That’s because winter can bring on a form of depression called “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” or SAD. The condition can range from the blahs to a serious mental health condition and should be taken seriously, according to a recent post on the website SmallBusiness.com.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, symptoms of SAD include:

• Sad, anxious or empty feelings
• Feelings of hopelessness and/or pessimism
• Feelings of guilt, worthlessness or helplessness
• Irritability or restlessness
• Loss of interest in activities you used to enjoy
• Fatigue or decreased energy
• Difficulty concentrating, remembering details and making decisions
• Difficulty sleeping or oversleeping
• Changes in weight

Winter-related disorders are still a mystery to scientists who study them, but there is general agreement about one form of treatment, and that is light, or more light. And this is where small businesses can proactively assist their employees in coping or forestalling the onset of SAD, thus enhancing productivity.

For example, simply opening blinds to let the sunshine in an office might do more than make you feel better. In fact, it might even boost your bottom line. A study by the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that employees who sit near windows during winter months were more productive than those in interior offices.

The Whole Building Design Group (a program of the National Institute of Building Sciences) recommends employees work more effectively in spaces where there’s an emphasis on the quality of light and color. The good news is you don’t have to build a new office to incorporate some of these ideas. A few tweaks can make your office more conducive to a positive work environment for you and your employees.

If you reconfigure your office, here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Allow sunlight to penetrate as far into a room as possible.
• Avoid placing furniture or cubicles in places that block light to interior spaces.
• To control glare and filter daylight at different times of the day, use shades or blinds inside and trees or overhangs outside.
• Avoid sunlight beaming directly into continuously occupied spaces, but having a few “sun spots” in shared or public  venues are psychologically beneficial.

For more information about SAD, check out the websites of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Mayo Clinic.

 

 

 

 

Thanks to President Obama, Donald J. Trump is about to inherit an economy still on the upswing. The jobless rate for November was the lowest since August 2007 and 15.6 million private sector jobs have been added since early 2010, the government said on Friday.

A report last month by the Kauffman Foundation found a sharp uptick in small business survival rates in the last year. (The 2016 Kauffman Index of Main Street Entrepreneurship measures U.S. entrepreneurship across national, state and metro areas. It captures business activity in all industries and is based on a national sample of roughly 900,000 responses each year and the universe of all employer businesses in the U.S. in a dataset that covers approximately 5 million businesses.)

The index relies on three indicators to measure entrepreneurship:

• The rate of business owners in the economy, calculated as the percentage of adults owning businesses as their main jobs, who are overwhelmingly represented by small business owners.
• The survival rate of firms, calculated as a percentage of the firms that remain in operation throughout their first five years.
• The established small business density, measured as the ratio of established (five years or older) small (fewer than 50 employees) businesses to the total number of firms.

U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that established small businesses represent almost 68 percent of all employer firms in the country.

Some of the results were surprising.  For the first time since the recovery began, Main Street entrepreneurship activity is at higher levels than those recorded before the onset of the Great Recession, the Kauffman Index said. The increase was primarily driven by a jump in business survival rates, which reached a three-decade high of 48.7%, meaning almost half of new businesses are making it to their fifth year of operation.

On the other hand, U.S. small businesses have gotten smaller over the last 20 years. The smallest of those small businesses–companies with fewer than five employees–make up 53.1% of all established small businesses, up from 49.5 percent in 1996.

Among the 25 larger states, the five with the highest Main Street entrepreneurship activity were Minnesota, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Colorado and Pennsylvania. Among the larger states, the rate of businesses surviving through their first five years ranges from 44% in Arizona to 53.3% in Pennsylvania.

The five metros with the highest Main Street entrepreneurship activity were Pittsburgh, Boston, Portland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The first-five-years survival rate of businesses in the 40 largest metros ranges from an estimated 39.9% in Orlando to 54% in Boston.

For more information, visit http://www.kauffman.org/microsites/kauffman-index/reports/main-street