6 Post-summer Resolutions for a Healthy Business and a Happy Team

By Jeremy Campbell, CEO of Black Isle Group

Forget New Year’s Resolutions. September is the new January, and we all need some motivation and gentle nudging to get back into a good, productive routine at work after the summer. The business world is not short of challenges right now, but a focus on a healthy business and a happy team will pay dividends in the future.

HERE ARE 6 TIPS FOR REINVIGORATING YOUR TEAM AFTER THE SUMMER:

1. Revisit the company vision. Where is the business going, where does it want to be and what role does everyone play in it over the next 6 months? It’s so important for businesses to continue to remind the organisation of where it is heading and what everyone’s role is. Send out weekly updates on the progress made and reinforce the individual achievements of the team.
2. Remind the team of their pre-holiday successes, what they have collectively achieved to date, and the things that have gone well. Reflect on the projects/actions that didn’t work out well too to ensure you learn from the experience. Too often, we focus on driving the business forward and don’t take time to reflect on the achievements and challenges the team has encountered.
3. Is it clear what everyone’s role is over the next 4 months and how the team is going to work together to deliver the results? What are the independencies of all the members of the team? We can be guilty of assuming that everyone knows their own (and everyone else’s) role in the team. If team members don’t know the roles and responsibilities, they will often assume or, worse, make them up. This can, of course, lead to a huge loss of time and engagement for the team.
4. Set up 15-minute daily stand-ups for the team. Review the progress made and any blockers that are getting in the way of delivering the results. It’s so important to communicate as much as possible. You can never communicate where the team is and where it is going enough. Often organisations believe one well-written e-mail does the trick. In practice, it takes a lot of consistent messaging for the information to hit home.
5. Set up regular coaching sessions with the team where you focus on their development needs, not the delivery of results. The delivery of results is more of a performance management conversation, which of course may be needed. Make sure the conversation is based on what has gone well that week, what hasn’t gone well and what you as their manager and coach can help with the following week.
6. Celebrate your successes – no matter how small they are. You are looking for progress, not perfection. Is the team moving forward? Are you delivering your goals? Have there been individual breakthroughs? Celebration makes everyone happy. It releases warm chemicals in the brain which not only encourage us to want to do more but are also at the heart of motivation, satisfaction and engagement. Whilst a good team night out is sometimes the answer, often a well-written “thank you” or public recognition is more powerful. After all, most people turn up to work to do a good job, and often all they want is recognition of this.

The pandemic and the permacrisis we now find ourselves in have exposed that, historically, we have not paid enough attention to our people. This is even more vital right now in the hybrid world.

So, this September, reboot with your team and help everyone find their mojo for the last quarter of 2023.

Jeremy Campbell is the CEO of the performance improvement and technology business Black Isle Group; an expert on behavioural science; and an executive coach.