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2009 The Year of …

We have now become accustomed to hearing about the theme of our New Year whether it is the “The Year of the Dog”, “The Year of the Volunteer” and so on. One of the main reasons why our communities promote this is to highlight a single focus to recognise the wonderful efforts that people contribute to our communities as volunteers.

In our businesses, we too have a need to provide a clear focus for our staff as to what we want to achieve in the coming year. To do so, sends a clear message for people to understand that “this is what we are about”. By doing
this, people tend to take it on board and become much more determined/focused on achieving the end goal. You can also make it fun for the staff and look at specific “events” that you can schedule in during the year that supports your theme.

When trying to decide what your theme should be for the year, look at the real needs of your business. If you could categorise the ONE single critical success factor for this year, what would it be? Here are some examples of what other businesses have themed in the past:
  • The Year of the Customer
  • The Year of Quality Service
  • The Year of Growth
  • The Year of Learning

Each of these themes sends a clear message to the staff as to what is the main focus of the business for the year. It does not mean that we do not continue to work on all our other strategies, but it does provide us with a focus of the critical element for the year. When you have decided on what theme best suits you, then take it to another level. Plan some specific events that support your theme. It may be that each month you will have a staff member that is awarded a monthly acknowledgement for their work towards the theme with a great prize for the end of year winner. You may even display some promotional material telling your customers what your businesses theme is for the year. One of the most important factors is to involve your staff and clearly communicate why we are doing this. By sending this clear message to your staff, planning out activities that support it, and then keeping the theme prominent during the year, it will make everyone work towards achieving this goal and in the end you will find that the staff will drive the whole project.

And yes, it can be made a lot of fun and very rewarding for you and the staff to be involved in activities of this nature. Be daring and have a go because as human beings, having ONE single focus tends to help us be more aware and therefore feel a need to contribute to the end objective.

By Trevor Holmes CEO/Managing Director of ENACT Business Architects 1300 1 36 228

Comments -

Kevin commented on 24-Aug-2009 10:42 PM5 out of 5 stars
Great Article Trevor

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