Helping your team recognise the importance and benefit of goal-setting will prepare them for a prosperous year ahead in 2020.

We all want to succeed and prosper. Many employees don’t realise the importance of strategizing and goal-setting to recognise rewards in the future. Goal-setting allows you to visually see what your future could hold if you planned appropriately. Without proper planning in place, by the time February rolls around, New Year’s resolutions and goals are easily given up.

You can help everyone in your workforce to adopt a clear plan of action for their New Year goals. The following pointers offer a clear-cut path to success, provided they pay close attention to each element. Run through these with your team and let them complete each step as an exercise in preparation for the New Year.

Set Focussed Goals – Between 5 – 10 Goals

What do you want to achieve? Keeping your goals to a minimum makes it easier to set quality, attainable goals instead of spreading your focus too thin. Write your goals down. Once they are written down, they are visible, and you feel a sense of commitment to them.

Choose Goals For Different Areas In Your Life

Personal life, career, wellbeing, family, etc. While career goals are important to everyone as this is usually the area that everyone wants to excel in, personal goals are equally as important. Balance in life is key to preventing burnout and to living in a state of optimal wellbeing. Look at each area of your life and determine how you want to progress in that domain.

Attach Reason To Each Goal

Reason gives each goal meaning. Why do you want to achieve this goal? Why is this important to you? Justify each goal to ensure that it’s something you want to invest time and energy in. Are these goals compelling you to want to achieve? They need to be in order to motivate you to make a positive change in your life.

Make Your Goals Measurable

Create something to measure your success against. For example: if you want to transition from being a meat-eater to a vegetarian. When will you transition by and what milestones can you achieve along the way? If you want to lose weight, how much weight do you want to lose and when do you want to achieve this by? Having some form of measure makes the end goal easier to visualise.

Set Action Items For Each Goal

If you have a clear plan of action, it’s so easy to see where you are headed on your path to achievement. Action items make this a more practical exercise. Try to break each goal down into bite-sized chunks of action so that each activity can be achieved before moving onto the next one. For example: If you want to lose weight, some action items could be:

• Plan a healthy meal plan for the month
• Go grocery shopping for only the items on your list
• Plan your exercise times and duration for the week
• Enlist a partner to help you stay accountable

Make Your Goals Visible

Make sure you can see the goals written down somewhere regularly. They could be your desktop wallpaper or pinned up on your pinboard at work. Without having them visible to remind you of your responsibility towards them, it’s much easier to fall off the wagon.