The Psychological Effect Of Releasing A New Product Or Service – For Your Employees

If you provide a service or product, then the amount your business earns will always be at the mercy of the clients you are selling to. In other words, a company’s profit will always be dictated by how much its customers are willing to pay for that product, and how valuable they believe it to be.

This means that you can’t easily just ‘up’ your profits. Unlike being an employee or an individual worker, you can’t just ask for a ‘raise’ because few people are happy to start paying more for the same service they’ve always received.

The solution of course may be to release a new product or service, and by simply re-packaging your existing offerings and promoting them well, you can start to increase your profits without drastically increasing your overheads.

But this has another benefit too – which is the psychological impact it can have on your employees. Let’s look into what such a change might mean for them…

Shaking it Up

Imagine you have been doing the same thing day-in-day-out for years. You consider yourself pretty good at your job, and so good in fact that you could probably do it with your eyes closed. While you may indeed be very good at your job though, this will undoubtedly lead to your becoming at least a little complacent and perhaps also somewhat ‘stagnant’.

This is the state of play then when you’re suddenly told by your employer that you’re creating a new product that needs to be better than anything you’ve ever done before. This is your ‘premium’ product, and you’ve been chosen to work on it. What’s more, you’re going to be charging the clients more for it too.

Suddenly then, even if you previously thought you were working to the best of your abilities, you will undoubtedly improve and the quality of your work will continue to go up – particularly if the new work comes with a raise.

This is something that you can do over and again too – so potentially you can keep on improving the quality of your staff’s work and thus your end product.

Other Factors

There are some other factors to consider here though. For one, you may well find that in giving your staff a new kind of product to work on, you will end up making them try even less hard when they go back to the old product. You can avoid this by giving the new product to one or two members of staff exclusively until the demand is great enough to get more of your employees to work on it. This way you will get 100% effort from those on the new product, while also giving your other employees something to work hard towards. They’ll want to get put onto the premium product, and as a result, they’ll start creating more premium-type work at the same salary.

You should also note the psychological principles at work here and understand just what it is that’s making your staff work harder. It’s not just the product or service you see that’s making them work harder – it’s the simple fact that you are challenging them and that you’re keeping their work varied thus giving them a kind of ‘refresh’ that will help them to engage more with what they’re doing. There are plenty of other ways you can do this too, whether it means simply moving your staff around the office/work site, whether it means updating the systems and tools they’re working with, or whether it means giving feedback and actively challenging your staff to keep improving.

Featured images:

 

• License: Creative Commons image source
•  License: Creative Commons image source
•  License: Creative Commons image source

Jack Russel is a mechanical engineer and runs a business that deals with supplying railroad construction tools. He is a nature lover and frequently goes hiking with his friends and also takes time out of his busy schedule to share his thoughts on various blogging sites.