Top Ten Employee Resolutions

So it’s that time of year again when we all try to evaluate our lives, pinpoint what would make us happier in the forthcoming year and make a note to try and improve on last year.

Ask anyone in your office what is on their New Year’s Resolutions list and you will almost certainly find something pertaining to work. Get A Promotion, Get A Pay Rise, LEAVE! Retrain, and have a better work/life balance are among the favourites.

But as many of these will impact on you as the employer at some point, it would be advantageous for you to find out what your staff would like to see from 2015. Posting your own New Years Resolutions, and asking for those of your staff is a relatively simple way of finding out what you could do to reduce staff turnover and increase motivation amongst your workforce.

Read on for Nine Resolutions from employees – next week we’ll have the Top Nine from employers for you to enjoy!

Top Nine Resolutions for Employees

1. Be on time! Leave for work 5 minutes earlier every day – You know how you hate yourself for being late? Well everybody else hates you for it too! Give them a break and make an effort to be on time or even early once a week in 2015. When you’ve got one day a week sorted, the other 4 should be easy to follow suit.
2. Motivate! Have regular meetings with your team and find new and innovative ways of motivating them. Do a little research beforehand – teachers are now taught to get pupils attention with a “hook”, something which captures their imagination onto which they can hang the lesson.  Try doing this with an article from the news, something topical like an episode of The Apprentice, etc.
3. Be less stressed. Reducing stress levels are on everyone’s agenda – nobody ever wrote “I want to be more stressed than ever this year”.  Find relaxation techniques you can do at your desk and practice diaphragmatic breathing
4. Spend more time with family and friends. Achieving the correct work/life balance is not just about reducing the number of hours in the office. Research has shown that if your friends and family actually KNOW what you do, they will be more empathetic about listening to you offload at the end of the day. So involve your family in your work – take your children to the office on designated take your child to work days, and ensure you always take holiday when it is due to you. Use it or lose it.
5. Lose weight/get fit.  Surely on around 98% of resolution lists, the old load less/move more challenge.  Look at ways in which your employer could help you achieve your fitness/health goals. Ask them to sign up to the Bike To Work scheme and purchase you a bicycle to enable you to cycle to and from work, or simply keep a bike at the office and go for a 20 minute ride round a local park 3 lunchtimes a week.
6. Stop smoking.  Another old chestnut, making a reappearance year after year on resolution lists around the country.  Your employer may be enabling your continued addiction to the nasty sticks, and actually has no obligation to provide you with a smoking area or smoking breaks. By law, employers must give employees an uninterrupted rest break of 20 minutes when their daily working time is six hours or more. Employees can, of course, smoke during their rest period, if they choose, but they must not smoke in an enclosed or substantially enclosed area. Try limiting your cigarette break to lunchtime and not at any other time which will help you cut down gradually.
7. Learn something new.Pearson is the UK’s largest awarding organisation offering academic, vocational and work–based learning qualifications and may have a course which could help you attain a qualification while you work.  Alternatively, to learn something such as a language as part of your CPD (Continued Professional Development) there are many courses which you can complete in your lunch hour, either online, or loaded onto your MP3.
8. Give something back.  Volunteering can take many forms – from encouraging your employers to participate in national fundraising schemes such as Red Nose Day, Children In Need, Movember etc, to talking to your head of corporate and social responsibility about new schemes which you could set up to help others.  Mentoring a young person regularly, say once a month in your lunch hour may not seem like a lot to you, but what you can offer in terms of experience, advice, a confidence boost could be invaluable.
9. Be true to yourself. If you know there is something you’d rather be doing, which would make you happier and would result in you feeling more fulfilled at the end of the day, do it. If you are genuinely unhappy in your work it’s very doubtful that you are doing a good job, and you are probably making others around you miserable too. So if you’ve succeeded in all the above and you’re still not happy, it may be time to move on!

www.theworksrec.co.uk