The New Year is just around the corner and it’s everyone’s favorite time to make New Year’s resolutions. While most of us will make ones that we will never follow through on, here are a few that may help your company. These are the New Year’s Resolutions for Businesses that will improve the work culture at your company and help you improve your worth. These resolutions are geared towards personal and professional growth, so you’d better follow through.
Focus on Better Work-Life Balance
You’ll find a lot of videos online that’ll goad you into working 14 hour days. They’ll tell you to chase money and chase success like it’s the Holy Grail. However, what they won’t tell you is that it’s not worth it. Greed begets greed begets misery. It’s nothing to be proud of and nothing to build up.
What you need to do instead is to cultivate a healthy work-life balance. It’s not impossible to do, but it will take some work. You will need to set clear boundaries between work and life. You can’t always be thinking about work and sacrificing your sanity for that pay bump. Also, you need to divide your time and schedule the right time to focus on the personal and the professional.
Consider a study by OnPay. The study reported that nearly half all small business owners and managers, who were interviewed, handled their business’s accounting function on their own. They did this of course to either save money or resources. Hence, they didn’t cultivate a healthy work-life balance. Instead of doing that, they could’ve caught up on rest or family, or could’ve done more productive things.
Upgrade Work Culture
After maintaining a work-life balance, creating a better work culture is the natural next step. Inculcating a similar work ethic with your workforce will help you make the workplace better. While that doesn’t mean telling your workers to slack off, it does tell them to be in charge of their own lives. This will help them work better, perform more efficiently and prioritize important tasks.
Start with increasing engagement with your employees. It’s important to help them see that they’re not just worker drones. Have retreats and meetings that encourage participation. Make them feel like part of the organization, not just another cog in the machine.
Incorporate Feedback
This doesn’t just mean taking surveys and asking multiple-choice questions. It means sitting down with different employees and hearing them out. It takes time since people don’t easily open up because they fear backlash or punishment. Hence, take your time with them, but do listen to them and try to incorporate their requests.
If this becomes the culture that your company swears by, it may become a better workplace. Of course, this doesn’t mean incorporate every request like a demand. Instead, listen to people like their words carry weight, not like they are part of a scheduled, mandatory, exercise.
Improve Communication
Take note of different types of communication. This should be mandatory for all the managers, and directors working at your organization. They should learn to pick up on non-verbal ticks, written complaints, and visual cues. All the verbal communication that comes in is just part of the picture.
The most effective communication is carried out by observing employees. This will show if they’re uncomfortable in their environment or are relaxed and happy. It will show in their progress and their reluctance to be honest when asked a question.
In improving communication with your staff, you will subconsciously tell others to do the same.
Pay It Forward
This is perhaps the most important part. Encourage your employees, your staff, and yourself to be good to others. This is not only about giving charity or volunteering, though that is one of the best things you can do. It’s also about helping others excel. It’s about helping people feel more at home in new environments.
Teach your employees to approach new people. Teach them to make them feel welcome. Teach them to interact and not just become worker drones confined to their cubicles. This helps an organization not just survive, but flourish.
Learn New Skills
This is the era of skills, not of degrees. What once used to be part and parcel of earning your way to the top is considered old news. Today, it’s all about the type of skills you possess and how much value you can add to an organization.
While thinking in such cold terms devalues human life, it’s also a much better way to evaluate people. Hence, a New Year’s resolution to learn something outside one’s specialty is obvious. There are many hundreds of skills that are in demand today from coding to Blockchain engineering, to graphic design. Commit to one and then learn it all the way.
Encourage your employees to take out half an hour a day or a few hours every week for this. Not only will you improve your own company’s value through this, but you will also grow your employees’ worth.
Become a Mentee and a Mentor
Learn from others and teach others. Learning is a lifelong profession. It doesn’t end at school. While the entire world seems to have forgotten that, you can start reminding other people by teaching them. If you want to learn a new skill, ask someone who knows and learn it, or at least get started. If you know someone who wants to learn a skill and you can set them on a path, don’t wait.
These are just small resolutions that everyone can commit to. If you can’t commit to them all, pick one and begin. Even if you’re doing it as an individual and not a company, it doesn’t matter.
You have to start somewhere.
Good luck and Happy New Year!
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