New Year, new you? It’s a conversation almost impossible to avoid around the festive period – ‘what are your New Years resolutions?’. The expectation for change is almost unintentional, not only personally but through expectations for a business too, looking forward to what the New Year will bring and how new goals will be reached.
While the air is filled with the spirit of wiping the slate clean and changing focuses, that is, if not a little unrealistic, a lot of pressure to apply to the shoulders of what is essentially a normal week back in the office.
Putting too much pressure on the business and on staff for this one specific time of year can actually be quite counter-productive, so we’re looking at how you can harness that New Year energy and manage it in the best way possible to drive business growth in the year ahead, beginning now.
Review your goals
Take the New Year energy and review your goals, identify your successes and, dare we say it, failures of the previous year. Reviews are unquestionably a practical and useful way to take stock of what is and is not working for the business, this may be in terms of how the team is operating, how marketing is progressing to secure leads, or how accounts are being handled.
Reviewing your goals allows you to clearly see areas of the business which need to grow, change and where it is succeeding well already! You might not need as much change as you think!
Refresh Your Goals
Following your review, it’s vital that you listen to the results. Take note of the recommendations of your review, and rather than bringing any drastic changes to the table, realign your goals and objectives to incorporate any new or more focused aims. Subtle changes are less daunting to impose and therefore more easily accepted.
Use Your Employees
Make the most of their fresh and, hopefully, rested post-holiday minds, there’s nothing more useful for idea generation than a break away from a project, so this is the ideal time to connect with your employees and gain their input, feedback on where business operations are lacking or excelling and their ideas for the future.
By doing this as teams return to work, connections with employees are strengthened and more useful information on the business can be gained via different perspectives.
Align with Workforce
With refreshed goals and the insight of your workforce, you’ll need to align and communicate the business’s desires for the year ahead. If the whole company can be on board, fully aware and clear on the refreshed goals and where the business should be heading as the New Year begins, then the team will be better equipped to drive it forward from all angles!
Take on the New Year with a fresh approach but much less of the daunting and time-consuming pressure of big change!
