Top New Year’s Business Resolutions That Are Proven to Work

With the new year just around the corner, the time to create your 2019 business resolutions is now. Whether your goals are to increase your productivity or improve work-life balance, these steps are sure to help you navigate 2019 successfully.

1. Delegate: Ever wonder why you’re so exhausted and frustrated that you have no time to do anything? It’s because you’re not delegating enough to other team members. Let someone else handle those tasks that are stressing you out with time constraints. Delegation is of key importance to strengthening your team while gaining a healthier work-life balance.
2. Grow Your Team: Recognize resource constraints and do something about it before you burn out your existing team. Having too much work can impact your team in various ways such as the cost of health, productivity, their ability to seek out new ideas or even embrace new concepts, simply because they don’t have the time. Invest in repairing your profitability, morale, and culture, which attracts and maintains top talent to grow and lead your team successfully.
3. Automate: Perhaps the answer is automation if your company isn’t willing to invest in hiring new employees. Or, perhaps you have been tasked with looking for efficiencies within your company. If there is an opportunity, automation can streamline manual processes and allot more time to other business priorities. Make it a goal to evaluate and automate one of the toughest manual processes in your department this year and see how much more time and money you can save overall. See how our automated software helped these companies with their month-end close here.
4. Trust More: Are you having a hard time with delegating tasks? You will never be able to train your team if you don’t trust them. Benefits of building trust between each other include better relationships resulting in more work-life balance for you and less stress for your team. Provide support as needed, but allow your team to grow and learn just as you did in the beginning. Start by creating specific instructions for those that can handle the task, allow time for a Q&A, and then truly let go of the task and have faith in your team.
5. Communication: If your team is confused or at a standstill, you may want to take a step back because this is a clear indication of communication breakdown. Many times it’s within ourselves as we didn’t quite articulate what was in our head. A great way to prevent this is to allow time by yourself to go over instructions and what you want to be communicated to the team. As you read through it you’re able to pick up on items you may have left out that they, in turn, might misunderstand. Be open to listening to the team when you provide these instructions and their feedback as well. Remember, no two persons have the same thoughts, vision, goals or actions. It is through successful communication with each other that we all accomplish our shared goals.
6. Plan, Plan, Plan: By creating a weekly business plan, you are able to interpret what worked and what didn’t work in order to shape the upcoming weeks. Set aside time each week to review and adjust the plan with not only yourself but your team as well. Feedback from your team is very important so you know how to help them achieve the goals you put forth. They may be facing unknown challenges/disruptions that are getting in the way of a project/task. Leverage this in your team meetings and don’t forget to talk about things they did correctly to keep it constructive. A plan will put your team at ease with a stress-free environment by avoiding the stress caused by last minute changes/new deadlines.
7. Learn: In order to achieve better business success, be sure to learn a new skill. Whether this is focused on your department, industry, health, and wellness, or a new hobby, this new skill can help push you to learn even more skills and adopt them even faster. Learning a new skill also enables you to network with new people whether it’s online or in a classroom. Plus, these new people could be your next boss, customer, mentor, or best friend. If you’re asking yourself how you will find time to learn this new skill, all it takes is delegation.
8. Self-Care: This could include choosing one weekend per month to stay in and relax or take time off to enjoy the vacation you always wanted. If you’re stuck in a busy season at work, try to find time to meditate, exercise, or even get to bed earlier in order to recharge yourself. Make it a new goal to stay home if you’re incredibly sick or find ways to stay refreshed to take care of your immune system. Block time in your calendar called “Me Time,” and invest in yourself.
9. Goals: To start your year off right, put the most realistic goals at the top of your list. By setting these goals, you’ll feel more motivated to complete the harder ones as you’re working your way down the list. As a quick trick to keep you invested, put the easiest goals within January and work your way down so you’re off to a great start. Did you know 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail in February? Let’s try to prevent that and leverage that quick trick above.
10. Purge: Out with the old, in with the new! If something in your office is preventing you from getting your work done successfully, get rid of it pronto! This frustration is only causing stress and taking more time than needed to complete your priority tasks. This doesn’t just apply to equipment, but processes, procedures, or vendors as well. Stop putting off what your team needs as the frustration and time consumption isn’t worth the energy. If they aren’t working for you, stop investing all this money, time, and energy into trying to make the impossible work.