January 2nd is difficult. There’s more than a month of holiday cheer, gift-giving, family time, and opportunities for celebrations, and then--wham--Jan 2 is a slam on the brakes. After a season of indulgence, everyone is expected to go cold turkey (or ham, or tofu) back into the professional world, with a year full of projects, deadlines, and goals to accomplish.

If you find yourself with a case of the New Year Scaries, don’t fret. Here are a few tips and tricks we’ve compiled to help ease you & your company into 2020 with smart business resolutions:

Reflect

Early January is the perfect time to reflect on the past year and how it changed your business. Work with your internal teams to identify what major goals were met. Then, take a deeper dive into the goals that didn’t quite make it across the finish line. What hurdles kept your team from completing the task? Don’t worry about solving those problems right now, just reflect. They say hindsight is 2020, and that’s never been truer than this year.

Ideate

Now that you have a better idea of how last year went, think about what you want to accomplish in the next 12 months. The efficacy of the ideas doesn’t matter yet—just think best-case scenario. If it were a perfect world and everything went your way, what would you like to accomplish as a company? Think through the pain points your leadership and employees have expressed. Maybe you want to introduce a new project management system to improve the current project process. Maybe you want to find a way to reduce stress around how HR processes payroll. Maybe you want to lean on a new sales team to help grow your current client base and to push leads and conversions. You don’t have to have all the answers to know what you’d like your business to look like in the next year. That comes next.

Identify

Now the fun part: identifying where your reflections and ideas overlap to create your 2020 New Year’s business resolutions. Get all of your stakeholders and planners into a room to talk through your findings and to identify what the top 3-5 resolutions are for the team at large.

Here is where you can cross out the improbable and the extremely expensive, and narrow in on achievable goals. Look for ideas that solve a problem, that eliminate a hurdle, that streamline a process, and that keep your employees happy while reducing stress for leadership. For example:
-If the project management tool saves more time than it would cost your team to finish a task, see if you can get a trial period to try it before you buy it.
-If implementing a pay card would eliminate the cost of printing, processing, and distributing paper checks, start by evaluating your options.
-If you need to add unique resources to your employees’ benefits package, such as penalty-free and timely earned access to wages, contact our team to bring those benefits to your team
-If staying in control of company spending is a priority this year, then find yourself the right technology to avoid using petty cash or credit cards with surprises at the end of the month
-If the efforts a sales team puts in could triple the business, hire a team to work towards aggressive sales goals.

Prioritize

Now that you have your list of resolutions that are feasible and agreed upon by the team, it’s time to prioritize them and spread out required work into every quarter. Prioritize the goals that take the least effort but have the highest impact on your workforce and then consider the seasonality of your business. For example, if you’re a construction company in the northeast United States, the winter is probably a slower time, so Q1 you can ask more of your employees to help reach these company resolutions. At Brink’s Money, our team takes the work out of improving your payroll process with our money pay card and business expense services. We are always standing by to problem-solve on the go and to make life easier for both you and your employees.

Promote

It’s not all about big picture resolutions, though. The small day-to-day changes that are implemented in your workforce can have a huge impact over the course of a year. For example, giving employees an easier way to share their expense reports with the finance department saves everyone time and money. Talk about the process with your team members, call out the benefits of the program, and work together to make any new additions to the company toolbelt something that becomes second-nature and not a second thought.
As you reflect and ideate on your New Year's resolutions for 2020, these tips and tricks will help get everyone on the same page so that when the Jan 2nd brakes are hit, the whiplash isn’t as harsh. If you want to know more about how Brink’s Money can help your business keep their resolutions, let’s chat.