With only two weeks to go in December, 2015 is nearly upon us.  If you haven’t already, it’s time to start evaluating the past year.  What were your biggest accomplishments?  Did you meet your annual goals?  How did 2014 rank in comparison to previous years?  These are the questions that you and every other company should be asking right now.

Here are a few tips to help you celebrate accomplishments in 2014 and start planning for next year.

Ask the right questions.

Look back over the goals that you set at the beginning of the year and evaluate whether or not they were attained, noting how you can learn from your successes and failures:

• What did you accomplish over the last year?
• What new strengths were gained? How will they help you progress?
• Which areas of your business still need improvement? How do you plan to address those issues?
• What are reasonable goals for next year?
• What are your goals do you hope to achieve in the next 3 years?

Are you using be best metrics to evaluate success? This is a great time to take another look at your evaluation process.

Don’t forget to celebrate.

Too many organizations neglect to take time to celebrate achievements before moving on to the next goal.  It’s important to congratulate the team for all of their hard work.  It helps improve morale and increase job satisfaction, enabling employees to have a more positive mindset and increased motivation moving forward. Take a moment to reflect upon how you achieved those victories as well. How can you apply what you have learned towards future endeavors?

Eliminate obstacles.

As 2014 draws to a close, identify the obstacles your company faced in the past year.  Poor processes.  Irrelevant goals. Bad hires.  Which of these affected your organization?  Come up with solutions to eliminate these hurdles in the coming year.  A good house cleaning will give you a fresh start for the New Year.

Document results.

A critical aspect to fostering a culture where planning and objectives are important to everyone, is documentation.  In order for employees to be passionate about meeting goals, maintain transparency when around the vision of the organization.  Begin by ensuring goals are documented so they can be shared with employees and can be referred to down the road.  When goals change or a new objectives are added, make sure a notification is sent out to the appropriate people. Finally, as you wrap up and evaluate outcomes, document everything; successes, failures, strengths, weaknesses and anything else that is relevant. It not only helps solidify, evaluate and understand the outcomes but also helps you move forward, using the results as a reference in the future.

If improving your hiring process is one of your goals for 2015, ensure success by teaming up with RealStreet Staffing. We deliver talented architecture, engineering and construction management professionals who will lay a foundation for the success of your next project.  Contact us today and we’ll provide the best staffing solutions for your organization.