How to Finish the Business Year Strong in Time for the Holidays

With the holiday season around the corner, the final quarter of the business year is coming to a rapid close. Is your organization poised for a strong conclusion to 2022 and an even more effective 2023? If you don’t have a strategic plan in place for sustaining and enhancing your business operations (both now and into the coming year), you could be putting your organization at risk of experiencing stagnation, complacency, and declining revenue. Here are a few key initiatives you can employ to mitigate year-end challenges and set your business up for success, throughout this holiday season and beyond.

Assess the previous year’s successes and shortcomings.

Getting a bird’s-eye view of everything you and your team have accomplished over the course of the past year helps you identify what worked effectively and where processes could be improved in the future. If certain deadlines were missed for any projects, digging deeper and uncovering the reasons why helps you prevent potential problems like this in the future.

For successful initiatives that made the most impact for your organization over the past year (whether from a financial or efficiency perspective), it’s important to identify what these were and build upon them in the new year. Once you have a comprehensive list of both your high-impact and lower-impact strategies, you’ll be in a better position to begin crafting your plan (and any necessary adjustments) for 2023.

Get employee feedback and conduct market research.

In addition to data gathered from metrics over the past year, acquiring employee feedback is another essential part of building a strategy to finish the year strong. What did your employees appreciate about your company culture in 2022? Are there any new ways where you can continue to enhance staff engagement and retention?

Market research is another phenomenal tool to help you identify where your business’s particular industry is heading and stay ahead of the needs of your customers. It can also help you become aware of new technologies that may be being used in your industry, allowing you to understand recent developments and continue revolutionizing how your company does business.

Ensure current staffing needs remain adequate.

With many employees taking well-deserved time off during the holidays, it’s still important to make sure your current business objectives are met. This means ensuring that for those individuals who are working at a given time and available, they remain engaged and accountable to meeting company objectives. Wrapping up final projects prior to the new year starting helps to clear everyone’s schedules and leaves availability for everyone to begin work on the new objectives outlined in your 2023 strategy (once your office is fully staffed again).

Craft a plan based on the data that positions your business for growth into the new year.

Once you’ve identified with quantifiable data the strengths and weaknesses of your current organizational processes (as well as which previous projects were most impactful), it’s time to craft your plan.

If your business is preparing to implement any new strategies or offer an expanded variety of services, ensure that your outline accounts for the time spent communicating with and training your current staff on these new expectations. If any new hires need to be made, make sure to do so well in advance of executing your 2023 business plan.

Celebrate company “wins” and positives from the past year.

It’s also important to celebrate any major milestones your organization has accomplished over the past year before you move on from the planning stage of 2023 to the execution stage. As with any organization, success is always a team effort. Acknowledging “wins” from the previous year and recognizing outstanding individuals in your workforce helps your employees feel rewarded and can make them more on-board and “bought in” when it comes time to carry out your upcoming business plan.

Embrace new technologies to make business operations easier and more efficient (both now and into the future).

One final essential to positioning your business for success is a digital solution that can help make executing your finalized plan easier, more cost-efficient, and more communicative. A great example of this is with workforce management software, which can be a key contributor in helping to streamline your company’s workflows (by removing mundane, outdated, and lengthy manual processes from the equation). Does your business struggle with a lack of detailed insight during day-to-day work? Is your business overly reliant on paper forms for its documentation, timekeeping, and dispatching needs? With a workforce management app, you can stay better connected to your workforce in the field and help to automate all these processes for your business. In turn, your company is afforded more time to focus on the important new objectives in its 2023 plan.

Finishing the business year strong and devising a realistic, yet impactful set of deliverables for 2023 is a critical way to help your company remain successful. If you’d like to learn more about our workforce management solution, TeamWherx™, and how it can assist your organization in becoming more productive and profitable, schedule a quick, free demo today.