As the year draws to a close, we invariably begin to reflect on what we did in the past eleven or twelve months. We compare our successes with our shortcomings. We think about things that didn’t turn out quite the way we expected; and we start thinking about how much more dedicated we’ll be next year than we were during this one.
On a personal level, diets and fitness regimes are at the top of the agendas of most people. At a corporate level, the ambitions are a bit more serious.
Profits are seen to be too small, in most cases, and costs too high. These perceptions set the scene for discussions that will raise ultimately sales targets. Of course, everyone will be expected to tighten their financial belts; just like last year.
One person quipped that, “We’ve been doing more and more with less and less for so long that pretty soon we’ll be able to do almost anything with practically nothing!”
But the truth is that you can’t have it both ways. Perhaps the most surprising thing of all is that companies do expect to have it both ways.
Typically, they expect revenues to increase and costs to fall while those that lead and manage them maintain the status quo. This is how great expectations fail. The goalposts are moved, but the players are given last year’s equipment and last year’s plays.
Planning is essential; but those plans must also include a radical departure from the methods that produced last year’s results. You simply can’t expect people to work any harder and if better results were possible doing things the way they did last year, then they would have produced more. But they didn’t, and the numbers are right there in front of you to prove it.
So you have to ask yourself two questions. The first is, “How are your people going to work differently in order to produce the improved results that you want in the coming year?” And the second is, “How are they going to get the skill to do it?”
If you don’t have a plan to get good answers to those questions, then your plans for the coming year will be as real Santa Claus.
Probably the most important thing you can do to achieve your targets is to train your employees to use new methods. Training is one of those things that everyone talks about and hardly anyone does. Although the average training investment per employee may seem quite high, the fact is that a very small number of companies make the largest investment. Most companies invest very little or none at all.
Accountants have trouble with training. That’s because it doesn’t fit into their return-on-investment equation. Part of the reason for that is the fact that the effects of learning something new aren’t felt in the short term. Time is required for the new skill to produce the results intended. This means that training is often ignored as an unjustifiable expense.
But training isn’t the only investment you need to make in your people. Development is just as important. Training tends to address a short-term need; but development is for the long haul.
In a climate of life-long learning, both personal and professional development contribute to staff retention. If it’s not available in your company, then your employees will eventually move to a place where it is.
If you want your great expectations to come to fruition in the New Year, then you need to start planning right now for how you will train and develop your employees so that they have the means to do it.
Otherwise, it will be business as usual come mid-January.
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