In January, the end of winter festivities and the pressures associated with a new year can combine to dampen spirits and heighten feelings of anxiety. Fortunately, there are steps that businesses can take to reinforce the idea of a new year being a positive event that brings renewed opportunity, rather than added strains.
A wrap-up party which celebrates your team’s top achievements from the year before can be a light-hearted form of positive reinforcement. Encouraging your team to submit their own 2021 work highlights also helps to ensure praise is shared horizontally, rather than just from top to bottom.
Encouraging team members to share an anonymous sentence or two which identifies a quality they admire in a colleague can be a good way to take the pressure out of new year goal-setting. Resolutions do not have to be self-critical – they can (and often should) take inspiration from the goodness of others, rather than the perceived badness in ourselves. Thinking ‘I admire the way X person does this’ is often a better way to grow than ‘I hate the way I do this, I must stop.’
The act of giving up on New Year’s resolutions after a few weeks, or even days, will be all too familiar to many. Ensuring you opt for achievable goals is likely to help limit undue pressure and be more productive in the long-term.
The start of the year is a great chance to remind your team about your business’ purpose and to understand their connection to it. At JourneyHR our purpose is to create great places to work and it is something that all the team have bought into and share a common value around building positive change. That connection can sometimes get lost in the day to day so we asked our team members to share an example in a group chat about a something they have done or are working on that brings our purpose to life. It’s been a great exercise to get the team feeling connected whilst we are working remotely.
The new year brought a return to remote work for many businesses, which in turn could once again bring feelings of isolation and added stress. Pencilling in a weekly town hall meeting ensures everyone experiences at least some form of social contact, no matter where and how they work. Let’s stay connected as well as motivated this new year.
Aliya and her business partner Sue run an HR Consultancy called JourneyHR. They have a brilliant team of creative industry HR specialists who work with a large community of award winning clients helping them attract and retain their talent.
Aliya is an accredited member of the DBA Experts Register. Find out more and get in touch.
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