Why new year resolutions don’t work

Every December I wish I had a gymn. I would call it GymNuary. Ah so many good intensions and vague goals.

Even the act of only thinking of goals at “year end” is doomed for failure anyway. I’m quite a fan of regular check-ups and keep on adjusting (“pivot” in agile terms). But I guess, annually it’s better than nothing.

So while a big portion of the world is sitting down to make another bucket list of resolutions that will most likely fail, here’s me sitting down on why new year resolutions don’t work.

1 – They are vague

This is nr 1 pitfall regarding goals: being vague. If you are vague, at the end of the period, you can adjust your goal to whatever you believe you achieved. Like the cartoon below, vague goals are nothing more than wishful thinking. My goal is to win the lottery. Do I even play? No, but it’s a goal.

A classic goal: “I will be less fat” – I could loose 1g and would meet the goal. I suppose if one sets such a goal it’s intended to be more than 1g. But what would it be exactly? “I will eat better.” But again what does it mean to eat better? According to my 5 year old, eating more pasta would be better. Anyway, you can copy paste any examples you want here.

Vague goals are not only applicable to personal goals / new year resolutions. No. Even companies do it too. It looks cool to have goals, it shows that one is looking to improve. Some go even to the point of declaring vague goals as a strategy! Ah! “We will be more eco friendly.” What does that mean exactly? Remove all the printers from the office?

2 – They are not achievable / realistic

Here’s me: “I will make a lot of money writing random stuff.” No, very unlikely to happen. Goals should be achievable and realistic, otherwise what’s the point of setting goals if you already know beforehand you can’t make them? I could however push myself to write 1 A4 page a day. Maybe out of all the crap I could write there would be more changes of writing something good and maybe, in a crazy world, make some money out of it.

I would go as far as to say that establishing unrealistic goals can only do more harm than good. Once you look back to whatever you wrote you can only feel depressed that you didn’t made it. Well, if you can’t make it don’t write it.

3 – They are not timebound

Writing something you will achieve in 12 months is as vague as it can be. My mum believes that if you really think positive about something and you really believe it deep in your heart it will happen. Well I don’t. Unless you set clear goals and a timeline on how to get there you will not leave your seat. Going back to my “writing goal”, let’s say I wanted to write a book with roughly 250 pages, I would need to write 1 page a day on average. To measure my goal I would need to assess it on a periodic basis, e.g. every month I would need to have 30 pages written. No, I’m not failing my math here, I’m assuming there would be more than 100 ish pages that would be unusable hence the need to include 1 page a day goal. Unfortunately I’m miles away from turning rubbish into goal, so one needs to keep on trying and trying and trying.

There’s nothing a PM loves the most than milestones. Well, there’s a reason for it, you need some key dates and key activities to be achieved on time so you meet your project / goal.

4 – There is no How

So you know what you want (your goal) but how will you actually get there? If you want to loose weight are you planning to join my JanGymn every day? Or do you simply plan to eat less crap? Maybe a combination of both? A goal on it’s own it’s just another empty wish. I would say the how is even more important than the goal itself. It’s the whole journey you plan to take to get “there”. If you don’t enjoy the journey, then forget the goal. E.g. I just don’t see myself going to the gymn everyday. Whereas this would be my sister’s paradise, it would be my hell. However, I try to “eat better”, so every weekend I spend a few minutes doing meal planning for the week and doing grocery shopping at the same time (I find if I don’t see happy calories it’s a lot easier to resist them). Whatever rocks your boat.

If you really plan to write a few goals, here’s a good picture to help out:

I will finish not by saying “happy new year”, because that’s boring, it’s what everyone says and look at where we were in 2021. So I will say, whatever the new year brings, make it yours and make it SMART.

Finishing by sharing the best article on “resolutions” I’ve read from Mark here.

The Great Resignation

Historians will be pretty busy trying to understand what exactly happened in 2020 and 2021. 2020 was THE year the whole world stopped thanks to the pandemic, and then 2021 continued with lockdowns. When people spend more time at home and not being able to hide behind their all mighty business, they had time to do something they weren’t doing much: to think. (We are all guilty here)

To think about the priorities, to think about what they really wanted to do in life in general, especially as everything could just vanish pretty quickly. Who are the friends you would see yourself going in lockdown with? Whom did you contact? And on the professional side: Am I doing the job I enjoy doing?

For many the answer was NO! And enter the great resignation. And no, this is not just something that happened in the states, where everything is big and GREAT. No, really, it was all over the world.

Disclaimer: To be able to resign without thinking of the financial implications is quite a privilege. Still some people concluded they would rather downsize their lives and enjoy more what they had.

Anyway, back to the great resignation (and by the way I do believe this is a trend that will continue throughout 2022), the same way Londoners realized they wanted more space rather than being in the city center in a shoe box, there was also a big rethink about what people really wanted to be doing.

Flexibility

Throughout lockdown – where possible – everyone had to work from home. Companies had to make a huge shift to web based technologies to ensure everyone was online and getting the job done. Meeting room meetings moved to video calls. The office suit was replaced by a presentable shirt and comfy trousers (and slippers). And then as the world started to open up, companies started to ask everyone to be back in the office. A good example of that was JP Morgan (Forbes article here). Then you had companies like Deloitte that said employees didn’t had to work from the office (CityAM article here) – as if consultants worked from the official office anyway…. so I actually took this one with a pinch of salt.

Anyway, people realized they could work from home and enjoying flexibility such as having time to exercise, take the kids to school, sort out the laundry, while at the same time maintaining the productivity (or increasing it) and loosing that didn’t felt right.

If you have 2 good equal companies and one of them allows you flexibility and the other doesn’t, which one would you choose? It’s a no brainer really.

Flexibility is a sword that cuts both ways. If you want flexibility from your employees you have to give flexibility back. If you want to retain your key people, well I would suggest burying old fashion ways of “controlling” employees by seeing them (I wrote about it here). Also, some empathy would be good. Just because you enjoy being in the office, being in your suit doesn’t mean everyone enjoys the same, or even if some enjoy, maybe they can’t afford it (enter the world of childcare or carers in general).

There’s a life outside

For a lot of people it was also about: do I even enjoy my job at all? A lot of people developed hobbies – or enhanced them – and realized they could try to make a living out of it. Even if that meant less money, it meant being in control of when to work and where to work from. (And here’s me wishing I had hobbies that made any money!)

Then for sure, the family side. For a lot of people I know, it was really important to finally be able to take the kids to school / or collect them. To have lunch at the table in your kitchen. To be able to stop working and enjoy family time or even to have time to finally exercise on a daily basis (which for me was only achieved during Lockdown 1.0). Before Covid, I rarely managed to take my daughter to / from the nursery, but now I am doing it on a daily basis. It means the world to me and her. Without working from home and with the long commute would be next to impossible to do the same.

Whatever rocks your boat, I’m pretty sure you’ve found something you enjoy that you could do more of.

So what does it mean for companies?

For companies in the long term, will be quite binary: do they offer flexible working? Yes or No:

• If you want to retain your employees as opposed to having to hire more expensive ones without the same knowledge, offer flexibility (in its true form)
• If you want to attract the highest talent (e.g. new grads or experience hires alike), you have to office flexibility. If you don’t, I’m pretty sure your competitors will. There’s more to life than just the income.

What does flexible working even mean?

• Flexibility of hours – In its highest form it means employees should be working towards goals they need to meet. It’s up to them how they meet them. In a lighter version just means there’s some flexibility of when to start the work, when to stop and which breaks can be done in between.
• Flexibility of location – (this discounts any tax implications of working outside of the country). If there are critical meetings which demand an in person meeting, by all means get together in the office, but for everything else it’s up to the employee of where he’ll get the job done. From the comfort of his bed, to a hipster coffee shop, take your pick (note, certain roles might now allow for coffee shop meetings due to the confidentiality of the information being shared in conference calls). It still looks nice to work from a coffee shop though, although expensive in the long run.
• Flexibility of roles – here I should say, embracing a skill based approach – in essence it means allowing employees to move horizontally and take on completely different roles where they could still use the same core skillset. (I wrote about the importance of skills from an employee point of view here). How is this even related to the mass resignation? Well it is. Many employees might feel they are not developing or are not given opportunities for development. Allowing (and even encouraging) changing roles would benefit one’s development as well as the company itself by utilizing diversity across departments (even if they seem unrelated). An HR guy, an IT guy and a procurement guy walk into a bar…. this could be a good conversation by the way.

What are the benefits for the company to embrace flexibility

As we have seen with the pandemic, people are working more from home, not less. If you give flexibility, you get flexibility back.

One thing that always puzzled me, was why companies never consider existing clients? Yap, I mean clients, like they always have massive discounts for new clients and totally forget the existing clients? This encourages clients to shift to also benefit from a new client discount. Same is valid regarding employees. Companies don’t always make the effort to keep the best people. They think just some random salary increases will do the trick and given the employees are there they will always stay or if they leave it’s because they are not worthy. No joke, I felt this in the past myself and this was also the view of the CEO of a company I worked for many moons ago.

What is the cost of recruiting? I have also been in companies that would give me a fee for bringing candidates from my network of contacts (as it’s cheaper than paying a recruiting agency). So how about companies make the effort of keeping what they already have?

And the cost of training someone new? I don’t enjoy spending time doing KT. Nop, not a bit. The existing team rarely has the time to properly train new hires, which means eventually some of the valuable information just vanishes. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to allow people to move roles within the existing organization or allow them some flexibility? You might not even have to spend a penny on it!

Don’t let your job define you

Let’s face it, we’ll spend most of our lives working. The way things are going, it’s quite likely we’ll have to work until we die. And then quite a another big portion was spent studying so you had the required qualifications to work. So yeah, it’s a lot. It’s then no wonder that our job becomes part of your identify.

Think how you would present yourself to a new person: My name is X and I’m Y (nurse, doctor, civil engineer, IT project manager… etc) – this excludes if you are presenting yourself to another parent, then your reduced to kid x mum or dad.

What we do day in day out on the clock becomes part of our we identify ourselves. Quite a lot of us will feel proud that’s your job (probably others no so much or they will have to use fancier words so you can feel a bit prouder). The job we have and the titles we hold end up being quite important for our ego.

Not even that long ago, your own surname would define a generation of people doing the same job and passing the knowledge from family member to another. I’m so happy that I was born in modern days so I had the freedom of choice.

But actually if you think about it, this is a big dangerous.

Unconsciously you will be tying your self-worth to your job. If you don’t get that promotion how do you think you’ll feel?

Also, what happens if you loose your job? In these turbulent times you could loose your job not because you’re not good at it, but because the company needs to downsize to keep afloat.

A lot of people will feel absolutely depressed, not just because of the financial aspect, but I would say mainly because they feel part of their identify is gone and they have to reinvent themselves. After years holding your job as you hold your name, that change can feel very daunting. It is!

Some people hate their names, so they wouldn’t mind a change, but assuming you like your name and what you do, that you felt proud about it, having to reinvent yourself or figure out how to find a similar job someplace else it’s a huge blow.

But here’s an idea, how about we start to leave the job title behind and focus on the skills?

A certain skillset can be adapted to many different jobs.

Here’s my own example:

• I’m really good at getting shit done – yap, I am (except household chores, not so good at those and I will procrastinate until I have no choice but get it done).

This can be applied to anything really, from a demanding a COO, to work in the next door bakery.

Another example

• I’m really good at thinking of creative solutions to address complex problems.

Wherever you go there will be problems that demand solutions.

So how about you take a few minutes to think about what you’re really good at, it can be something you’ve been doing a lot, and hence you have a lot of experience or it can be something you know you are good and with a bit of learning you can get even better.

Thinking of how to utilize your skillset will allow you to adapt even where you are, in your company. You can try other roles and leveraging what you already know, and if your dear company pulls the carpet beneath your feet you’ll be able to reinvent yourself more easily too.

Good article about it here: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210409-why-we-define-ourselves-by-our-jobs

Book about change:

This book seems to be so popular I have 2 of them, gifted by different companies