In this episode of the One Next Step podcast, Lisa Zeeveld and I walk you through how to conduct a year-end review that focuses not just on financial performance but team performance and organizational culture as well.
Experience doesn’t make you wiser. Evaluated experience makes you wiser. So we shared a few things you can do on your own or with your team to wrap up and review the year.
We want to help you maximize what you have learned from this year, remind you of all that you accomplished, and give you something to go back and celebrate with your team.
Here are some takeaways we offered up in the episode:
1. To grow as a business, you have to begin putting metrics in place to measure your success.
Start by having really clear goals and a vision for each year. Take some time to evaluate what you want to track and measure.
It’s not just about making X amount of profit. Ask yourself: How are you going about making that profit? How do you plan to go from where you are to become even better – the best in your industry or community? How many new clients do you want this year?
Sending out annual surveys to your team will help guide staffing and cultural decisions going into the next year. The information that is provided through these surveys can help you identify gaps as well as tell you what type of improvements, services or technology to bring into the next year.
This is about taking your vision and putting a plan on paper to get there, making sure you continue to review and measure along the way.
If you don’t do that, how do you know if you’re making progress or faltering?
2. You have to fail to know what works.
Don’t be afraid to mess up! Spend time each year looking back on what went wrong and what you might need to stop doing. These are the things that provided little to no ROI or maybe sounded great on paper but just didn’t pan out.
Don’t continue doing the same thing if it isn’t working, even if you’ve‘always done it that way.’
The key here is to be honest with yourself, your team, and each other in assessing all the different elements of your company, like products, processes, etc.
3. Be transparent and willing to share the good, the bad, and the ugly with your whole team.
In BELAY’s weekly staff meeting every Monday, Tricia shares different metrics and gives a quick 10-minute ‘State of BELAY’ presentation. Treat your team like adults. You’ll gain their respect, and you’ll never catch them off guard when there’s a big announcement or something changes.
Give revenue updates, hiring news, contractor pool updates, and information about where there might be gaps. This is also a great time to share positive news and rally the troops.
Do all this so when you get to the end of the year, everyone will already know whether it’s been a good year or not. There will be no surprises.