And how about that long awaited and very much needed holiday you have to book? I bet you’ve been looking forward to leaving home for a few days/weeks along with rest of Australia. Come to think of it, maybe it would be easier and less stressful to stay home and relax.

If you get started now with your preparations you’ll breeze through next few weeks with minimal stress.

Getting Organised for The Silly Season

#1 What Have You Achieved This Year?

Take stock. Did you reach your goals this year?

What will you do differently next year? Write out a list of where you are now and what you want to achieve by Xmas 2002. How will you do that? Have a list of personal and business goals. Write a completion date next to each goal. (See How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions Vol.3.18 for further details on goalsetting).

#2 Plan and Organise Your Training for 2002

What skills do you and your team need to improve? Organise it now so you can start New Year with a bang. Perhaps a “Get Organised for Success in 2002” workshop or seminar presented by yours truly (that’s me). You’ll learn simple, easy to implement strategies, which will motivate you and troops to take action and kick some serious butt. A great way to crank up New Year.

#3 Plan Your Holiday

Turnover is a fact of business life. A recent study showed that associated costs of replacing each employee costs a company 29 to 46 percent of his or her salary! In today’s world of 1 to 1 marketing and customer relationship management, it is essential to reduce turnover to help key employees nurture successful business relationships with customers. As many businesses wrestle with changing from a company based organization to a customer-based organization, employees face accountability, technology and behavioral challenges that must be addressed by management.

Why do people leave their jobs? What types of support and process changes do we need to implement to make it easier for valuable people to stay on job? Do your people have right knowledge, skills and attitudes to meet your customer service goals? Are employee expectations being met?

There are three major ways organizations can answer these difficult questions.

Whether spoken or unspoken, your expectations have a powerful impact on your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and are key drivers of your attitudes. Your attitudes in turn, influence performance, commitment and job satisfaction. Research by Inscape Publishing Company, February, 2001 shows that when companies implement clearly defined, well-communication expectations, their employees are happier, more fulfilled and more successful. Without a clearly defined mandate, many employee expectations go unspoken or unrealized. Questions like, “Will my supervisor support a balance between work and my personal life?” Can I get flexible work hours, now that I have a child,” “Will my job be secure as long as I do my job well?” Unless these expectations are managed properly, workplace satisfaction will be adversely affected.