5 New Year's Resolutions For Your Virtual Team
The holidays are behind us, and so is another year. The new year always presents a natural opportunity to make changes and start fresh. This year, why not tap into the energy a new year brings by revitalizing your business goals?
You are likely constantly analyzing and looking for ways to improve and grow your business. You may think about the changes you want to make and the processes you want to refine. But implementation is the hard part. A fresh year is the perfect time to start something new, so this is your sign to take advantage of the opportunity to slide into a new season of growth for your company.
Why Focus On Your Virtual Team?
If you’ve been growing your business, your search for talent has likely developed to include freelance and remote workers. This is an especially valuable season for companies with telework and hybrid capabilities. Businesses adapted pretty well when the world suddenly shifted to telework a few years ago. But now that more companies have fully adopted more permanent remote capabilities, entering into a new year presents an excellent opportunity to refine processes and explore new technology to support your objectives.
Having curated a team of exceptional people who are committed to quality and business growth, you can leverage the new year to tap into the true potential that your team possesses. Working with a virtual team presents unique advantages and challenges, and modern businesses have recently evolved to contain departments with a mix of long-term leaders, loyal employees, and freelance workers to fill in the gaps. For most companies, this is a new way of doing business and involves trying new ways to engage your employees.
With the spirit of a new year, here are five resolutions that will set your team in motion to achieve exciting objectives this year:
1. Prioritize Teambuilding
One challenge of a virtual environment is that developing real connections over internet chats can be challenging. If you intentionally foster an environment of connectedness and collaboration, you can achieve a strong team bond, even digitally. Whether you schedule regular coffee chats, team meetings, or happy hours, time spent online together can help you develop the connection your team is missing. It is up to you to facilitate productive and interesting conversations, so come prepared with topics to discuss and let your team bond.
2. Reevaluate Responsibilities
It is a great time to look at how you have distributed tasks and responsibilities amongst your team and determine if that structure is still serving you. You may have team members who have developed professionally and outgrown some job responsibilities, or you may find yourself burdened with tasks that would be easy to hand off to the right person. Take the time to work with your team to ensure that what each person handles daily is maximizing their talents for your business.
3. Research The New And Audit Your Current Technology
Since technology constantly evolves, it's wise to periodically research new innovative technology and ways to use your existing technology to serve you in different ways. Recent updates to existing software, like a new scheduling feature with integration to your calendar, may mean you can ditch a few extra tech subscriptions. Or you may realize the technology you need doesn’t exist yet, and you need to hire mobile app developers. A yearly technology audit is an excellent idea for any business and will lead to a more efficient workflow.
4. Streamline Processes
Your company operates as smoothly as your processes. Reevaluating how you manage tasks can reveal opportunities for more refined processes and systems, freeing up time and energy for your team to accomplish more. Time is money, so working toward highly efficient operations is like money in the bank.
5. Plan Growth
You have another year under your belt, so reflect and celebrate your accomplishments. Then, keep brainstorming ways to pursue growth as you move forward. A new calendar year is a great time to introduce new ideas and initiatives for your company.
Knowing that today's employees increasingly prioritize work-life balance, add more remote work opportunities to your growth plan. This will help keep your employees around while also appealing more to the high-level candidates you want for future hiring.
A Bonus Resolution
If you are looking for any other opportunities in the new year, let it be this: Prioritize personal development for you and your employees.
Developing your staff pays off exponentially. When incentivizing your employees to master existing skills or develop new ones, you add value to your employees and your business. Whether you focus on one-on-one coaching and mentorship or start book clubs and enroll in courses or conferences, a highly developed team will benefit you. This year, start by actively looking at how each of your team members can grow and present opportunities for them to add to their skill set.
The Sky Is The Limit For The New Year
2024 brings with it more opportunities than ever before. We are entering a new era of doing business, which means leaders have endless possibilities for potential growth and innovation in the new year. The sky is the limit to what you and your company can achieve.
With big goals and a solid team to surround you, this is the year where you can reach new levels of business, earn more revenue, and feel proud of what your business offers to your customers and clients. Taking advantage of the power of a new year will allow you to adopt new procedures, introduce new initiatives, and tap into a new wave of momentum.