When the new year is around the corner, many of us retrospect the passing year to learn from mistakes and set new goals to improve ourselves and live better in the new year. While eating healthy and getting more exercise could easily top your new year resolution list to improve personal life, you should also consider a few resolutions you can make (and keep) to succeed professionally in 2018. Here are 3 easy-to-implement professional resolutions you can accomplish with Vtiger this new year:
Resolution 1: Conduct fewer, shorter, and productive meetings
Why?
Let’s face it – most of the meetings you hold are a total time wasters. To back this up, a recent an Atlassian survey notes that, on an average, employees spend four work days every month on pointless meetings. Of the surveyed meeting goers, 91% admitted to daydreaming during the meetings and 47% contended that meetings were the number one time wasters at workplace.
How?
Before scheduling a meeting, ask yourself these 2 questions:
1. Is the meeting absolutely necessary?
You don’t have to call a meeting for getting updates, sharing information, or anything else that can be done through an email or phone call. With Vtiger CRM you can generate custom reports to get updates on what each of your team members is working on. If any of the tasks is overdue you can quickly intervene to understand what’s slowing the task completion. And to get quick updates or share information, you could simply use @mentions or internal chat feature. This way you can reduce the number of meetings and hold only the ones that contribute to making important decisions.
2. Do all the meeting invitees have a specific purpose in the meeting?
Not everyone at the meeting table contributes to the discussions or decision making process. So, when you invite the attendees, consider only the people who will make the decisions and those who are affected by those decisions. And when the meeting is over, send the meeting minutes to the entire team to ensure that everyone is in the loop.
Resolution 2: Ask for help when needed
Why?
Perhaps you spearhead large meetings with a steel nerve and fearlessly lead your team overcome crisis. But, you dread one thing: asking for help in workplace. Irrespective of the position – a junior or a senior employee – you hold at your work, you probably feel that asking for help is a sign of weakness or a debt you owe to your colleagues. However, what you don’t realize is that eventually your inability to cope with tasks will become visible to all and your credibility will be questioned.
On the other hand, when you request help in time, you are saving the situation from turning worse. Timely help gives you more options to stay in control, meet deadlines, and maintain your mental equilibrium. When you reach out to your colleagues to seek help, it shows that you are cannily striving to do your job in the best possible manner.
How?
First, you have to swallow your pride and promptly admit that you’re struggling with something. Next, you have to reach out for help without any ego hassles. When you’re asking for help, share a few potential solutions you have in mind – this shows that you are not just crying out for help but have worked through the issue on your own first and are trying to get the job done through collaboration.
With Vtiger’s collaboration tools, you can get instant help from your co-workers. Every time you @mention a co-worker, the co-worker will see an instant desktop notification. Also, since all the related information is already present in the CRM, you don’t have to waste time shuttling emails to share more information related to the problem. And once you gain the expertise and solve the problem, you can file a lesson (like we do here at Vtiger) right within the CRM for others to learn.
Resolution 3: Reduce work related stress
Why?
With the ever increasing demand in the business world, workplace stress has become an inescapable fate for every employee. Long hours, heavy workload, tight deadlines, unorganized task and time management, errors due to poor internal communication are a few of the common factors that induce some amount of stress at work every day. Coping with such workplace stress is very important to avoid loss of productivity and improve work-life balance.
How?
The easier it gets for you to work, the lesser you have to worry at the workplace. To reduce stress related to workloads and deadlines, you can use softwares such as Vtiger CRM. For instance, Vtiger CRM lets you prioritize, organize, and automate tasks that you have to do every day, so that you have more time to focus on important tasks and successfully meet deadlines.
What are the other resolutions you would make this new year to make 2018 a better year at work? Let us know in the comments section. Everyone at Vtiger wishes you a very happy new year!
