Made your new year's resolution?

Have you made your New Year Resolution?

Why not make 2008 the year you start the year with a proper marketing plan for your company?

A number of organisations start the year with no real plan in place and then spend the rest of the year stumbling along making ad hoc decisions on marketing and communications activity.

The start of the year is the perfect time to plan for the forthcoming year.The early days of a New Year are usually quiet, your key staff should be refreshed after the Christmas break - and enthusiasm should be at his peak, so capture it whilst you can!

So why not celebrate the new year by examining your strategy, your positioning, your communications and your marketing priorities?

A couple of hours spent compiling a 12 month comms schedule now will bring an added dimension to your new business planning - discipline!

Why not check through your 2007 marketing results and see:

• What activities worked for you?
• How did you measure your results - if at all?
• If you can't measure results, should you repeat the exercise?
• What about your company's image? Is it tired or out of date?
• And finally, what about your online presence? Does it need a brush up?

The need for teamworking

Diligence undertakes quite a bit of teambuilding work with clients. Most organisations would do well to look at improving teamworking skills amongst staff and we are keen to help them develop a defined teamworking strategy.

Doing so, should help you to achieve a positive and more beneficial relationship between staff, particularly those from the geographically disparate parts of the organisation. Teamworking solutions can help build relationships amongst staff as well as acting as a motivational tool.

For any business unit, particularly those working to tight deadlines or seeking to achieve targets, the ability to work effectively as part of a team is an essential skill. The successful development and adoption of team skills will also enhance the knowledge base of the organisation and will encourage individual professional development.

Whilst we would always recommend that teamworking and teambuilding be a continuous process, we are also realistic to understand that it must take its place on the organisation’s priority list!

The key to the success of any teamworking exercise is that staff are made aware of the positive benefits of certain practices, agree to adopt them and are then made to assume responsibility for maintaining and advancing these practices within their respective teams.

The aim of such programmes is to convince staff of the need for team skills and of their own personal responsibility in applying them within their own team environments by:

· motivating staff and demonstrating the importance of effective teamworking
· providing practical examples of how teams should work together
· imposing responsibility for maintaining good team practices
· providing a reward structure to demonstrate the value of good team practices
· helping staff develop examples of good practice and tricks-of-the-trade

In addition, a successful teamworking strategy should assist the development of a real ‘family’ environment by:

· helping to improve communications within and outside of the organisation
· helping to improve the visibility of managers
· promoting staff recognition
· encouraging staff empowerment
· helping to improve workload management

If you'd like any help with developing an effective teamworking strategy, why not drop us a line?