Here are the 2021 Focus predictions, focusing in on company culture and improving your business performance.

The Focus 2021 predictions recommend the five most common business elements to tackle that arise throughout 2020 and have been regular talking points with teams and clients in Q4.

The areas to tackle are:

1. Improving internal communication

2. Reducing screen time

3. Teaching where the line between home and work is

4. Enabling physical and mental health support within your teams

5. Ability to offer external support and advice when those are struggling with mental health, grief or anxiety from 2020.

We recommend four problematic areas to look to remove and provide guidance on:

1. Zoombie’s aka zoom and video fatigue

2. Personal conflict

3. Reliance on stealing each others time with meetings

4. Uncertainty for the future

We answer five important questions we feel are most important:

  • Q1. What will be the new role/job created for 2021?
  • Q2. What will happen in company culture in 2021?
  • Q3. What hires will be most important for 2021?
  • Q4. How will the role of the manager change?
  • Q5. Will businesses return to normal (working in the office)?

Our 10 quick but essential tips are:

  1. Company Culture: Put as much into company culture as company strategy
  2. Design Better Meetings: Design your meetings, question should this be a meeting, agenda’s as standard, reading materials, why people are attending, the expectations of the meeting, the follow up actions and owners and the delivery dates.
  3. Time: Help colleagues co-manage their time and the line between work and life. Enforced remote work has been a challenge even on those who had experience with it or had to help everyone adapt to remote work
  4. Develop: Build personal development plans in December and January and ensure you stick to quarterly outputs 
  5. Training: Champion internal training – arrange external & online training 
  6. Clear Company Strategy: Create a strategy one-pager, and a company playbook with all plans of actions from each department and team 
  7. Connect & Align: Constantly align and connect teams, assign owner and provide clear ownership boundaries  
  8. Better Communication: Asynchronous communication over chat tools 
  9. Talent: Talent retention will be harder, more colleagues will be looking at their options and looking for new or better challenges. Talent acquisition will be harder, bigger talent pool won’t mean easier to hire. 
  10. The Next Normal: Build your next normal, be proactive don’t wait for surprises