Although New Year’s resolutions, planning, and setting goals won’t guarantee success in 2017, not taking these steps for 2017 will virtually guarantee you fall short of your productivity potential.
Set some goals for growth, productivity, and employee satisfaction in 2017. Here are some ideas for New Year’s resolutions for companies and the people who run them.
Simply boasting that you’ll work smarter in 2017 isn’t a goal. Identifying three to five specific steps you can take to work smarter in 2017 is.
Begin by analyzing your own efforts. What is one thing you can eliminate in 2017 that will make you a better office manager, small business owner, or executive? Do you not give yourself ample time in the morning to organize daily activities, for example? Do you lack organization and waste time looking for important files regularly? Do you easily lose time due to workplace distractions?
Once you’ve identified specific habits you can change, resolve to follow through. Set a goal for each behavior you want to change or, if there are many behaviors, achieve these goals one at a time.
Once you’ve established goals for yourself, identify ways your staff can improve their work efficiency. This can be handled on an individual basis or on a group level. It’s critical that you allow individuals to establish their own goals, but you can provide ideas.
For example, your staff might spend time reading emails that could be better used generating leads or attending to other work duties. Address this at the next meeting (or ironically, via email). Show them the benefit of working smarter and hold them accountable by checking progress.
You will ultimately get paid based on the amount of value you bring to the company. Make yourself, therefore, as valuable as you can. These questions will help you determine a specific course of action. If you are the owner of the business, these questions will help you determine a course of action for making yourself more valuable in the marketplace.
If you’re an office manager, for example, and notice that office morale declined during 2016, set a goal to improve it in 2017. This might mean resolving to greet each employee as he or she enters in the morning. It could include a goal to acknowledge birthdays. It might even mean getting rid of employees who no longer deserve to be employed.
When it comes to running a business or managing an office, the ultimate way to measure success is to increase sales and production. It, therefore, almost always behooves business owners and managers to set a specific goal for increasing sales.
If you reach your smart office goals, making yourself more valuable, and improving customer and employee relationships, you are well on your way to increasing sales.
A toast to a prosperous 2017!