As the year winds down, many people turn their thoughts toward New Year’s resolutions. What worked well in 2025? What to improve for 2026? While resolutions are often stereotyped or forgotten, the practice of self-reflection is an important one for individuals.
A recent trend in New Year’s resolutions has been to pick a focus word or theme for the year ahead. Creating one specific focus can help individuals avoid goal overload and fatigue. However, this could also be a helpful tool for corporate teams and larger groups that are looking to establish their own goals for the year.
It’s been often discussed that overcoming loneliness and improving employee engagement is a huge focus for many companies. If this is your team’s focus for 2026, where does one start?
We have a few ideas:
1. Assess Current Employee Resources
Employee disengagement can come from frustration at work being harder to complete than it needs to be. You can quickly review if your team has what they need to succeed by asking these 4 questions:
- Are our current resources easy to find for new and existing team members?
- Are there any processes that are not documented?
- Is there any documentation (such as a reference manual, a list of contacts, a decision flow chart, or a style guide) that we could create to fill any knowledge or process gaps?
- Are there any tools or equipment that are missing?
If these questions reveal any gaps in your team systems, you will have a clear path forward. Making these adjustments and additions will require a small time and monetary investment up front, but it should instantly improve your team’s function.
2. Improve the Manager–Employee Relationship
Research studies from Gallup have recently shown that more than 50% of people who leave jobs do so to get away from tricky managers. That’s a pretty big statistic. To combat this, it might be time to look at your current employee relationships. Ask yourself:
- Are there any ways I can listen to my team members more?
- Do my team members have regular opportunities to share insights with me?
- Do I need to remove any judgement or bias?
Focusing on your interpersonal relationships can be an inexpensive investment for your company, but it wilI be an emotional and social one. But it is important work that lays the foundation for clear communication and respect in the workplace.
3. Offer Professional Development Opportunities
Increasing employee benefits is a higher financial investment up front for any company, but it’s also an investment in a team member that can go a long way. Providing professional development support (whether in-house or external) shows your employees that they are valued, and you want to see them succeed.
This is a great topic to discuss with your employees one-on-one. Let them weigh in on the resources and classes that they would like. Take time to review their goals and interests for progressing within your company. Having an open dialogue will help you create a specific plan to follow through. And just remember…it may be an initialexpense, but it will hopefully have a long-term payoff in employee satisfaction, achievement, and retention.
4. Create Opportunities to Do Good Together
People often create strong bonds when working towards a common goal together. This is especially true for the workforce if the common goal is not tied to the usual, repetitive work tasks that employees perform each day.
Social impact projects are an easy way to get people excited and out of their work mindset. Generus brings the fun of social impact to your team directly, through our interactive events.
One Generus customer, Scott Roberts of Human Potential, wrote this about their team’s social impact experience: “We wanted our virtual summer outing to be fun and meaningful. Generus, pulled it off with flair. My stir-crazy colleagues agreed: we hadn’t laughed that hard in months, and we were happy to share in the collective goodwill.”
Doing good in a large group setting requires less coordination than you think when we’re here to help you with it!
5. Foster Environments for Casual Conversation
Friendship is a huge motivator for people to stay at a job. Providing settings for casual, non-work-related conversations where coworkers can bond is a great way to improve team morale. Review your current weekly schedule. Is there a simple, regular event that can be built into a day/week, such as an office lunch or happy hour? Are there any meetings that could be simplified or be less stressful?
Generus events have a special focus on connecting team members together through fun games and personalized stories. Montgomery Thomas from Northeastern University shared that “Generus brought great energy and a welcoming presence to our event. They helped introduce attendees in a fun and entertaining way and set the right tone to accomplish our team building goals.”
What Next?
There are many ways to improve employee engagement in the new year. These are a few tactics we know work well, especially doing good together. It would be our pleasure at Generus to help you tackle your team building goals in the new year, all while having a positive influence on the world. Let’s have a conversation!
