Maintaining Focus During the Holidays

The holiday season is a time of family, friends, generosity, and thankfulness. The yuletide offers a chance for us to be full of cheer and embrace the magic of the season. But for so many, this time of year coincides with a Santa-sized mixed bag full of everything from year-end deadlines to project commitments and half-filled offices to extra workload. While this season is meant to bring hope and peace, it can also bring stress, burnout, and loss of focus. So, how do you maintain focus during the holiday hustle? Check out these tips to help you end the year strong and enjoy this season!

Take a Personal Day

For many businesses, December is one of the busiest times of year. And for most workers, it’s the busiest time of year for life outside the office. From shopping for loved ones to planning holiday parties to cooking for large groups, the stress during this time can impact how effective you are at work. To ensure you maintain a healthy work/life balance, it’s important to be able to take care of all responsibilities without falling behind.

One way to help ensure you balance the responsibilities of life is to take a vacation day before the holidays hit so you can take care of shopping and other tasks this month outside of the office. With most people taking off towards the final week and a half of December, taking a day off in the middle of the month will be less taxing on your co-workers and will help you cross off items on your to-do list, so you can focus on finishing the year strong at work without out-of-office anxiety.

Work on Time Management and Delegation

As a team, it’s important to show patience and take an arms-linked approach to finishing the year strong, so you can ride success into the new year together. However, because it will take all hands-on deck, it’s important to work on time management with all parties involved, delegating tasks where needed. Be sure to have full communication with those who will be out of the office during the holidays and identify which days will have limited staff available. By analyzing which days will need more involvement due to vacations and time off, you will be better suited to decide how and when to handle the extra workload.

While delegating specific tasks to others and managing workloads between employees is key to keeping the office productive, another way to help alleviate the extra work and time needed is to hire temporary employees. Working with a staffing agency like Express Employment Professionals is a great way to not only ensure your company doesn’t skip a beat this season while core employees are on vacation, but it’s also a great opportunity evaluate potential hires for the new year.

Be Realistic About What You Can Accomplish

While successful businesses work tirelessly year-round to serve their clients and customers, most companies see the fourth quarter as the final push to achieve annual goals and tie up lose ends with projects. And the final few weeks of the year can feel like the last stand against some of the most elusive company goals. However, while this approach can help motivate team members to put in the extra work, it can also cause burnout when goals are unreachable or innumerable.

Take the time to evaluate what are the most important achievements you want your team to focus on and separate the tasks that are nice-to-haves but not imperative to the success of your organization. It’s alright for some goals to roll over into the new year and to rework the timeframe for completion. You want your team to maintain a singular focus going into the holidays, without struggling between choosing one goal over the other. Be realistic with what work needs to be done this month, as well as what can be accomplished during these final few weeks. If a goal doesn’t fit into that category, take it off your employees’ busy workload. The success you’ll experience in your one wildly important goal will help ease the discontent caused by missing the mark on the other ones.

How do you help your team focus during the holiday season? What have you done to ensure your team finishes the year strong? Let us know in the comments section below!

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