End of the Year Management 101

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The end of any given year is always a challenge. Even if your fiscal year runs contrary to the Gregorian calendar, managing time, people, expenses and other resources in December can leave you waiting with bated breath, and perhaps a serious lack of patience, for the New Year holiday.

So, how did the end of the calendar year become such a challenge to manage? After all, you still have staff to do the work, and many of them come to work this time of year in a festive mood. This should translate to more work and less stress, right?

That’s not necessarily true since many employees save a significant amount of time off for the end of the year, and in our undeniably now global society, not everyone celebrates the same holidays, requiring the use of different vacation or PTO days than the traditional Christmas to New Year’s week. Couple that with the increased demand of customers and clients who also want things done before their holidays begin, and you generally end up scrambling even more than usual to make staffing assignments and provide resources to meet that demand.

Don’t get me wrong – this is not a bad thing in any way, shape or form. I, for one, enjoy celebrating the various holiday traditions and exploring those for which I have very little knowledge or experience. I guess it’s the one-time-sociology-major coming out, allowing me to revel in the opportunity to explore different ways of looking at life and business.

Over the years, I have picked up a few tidbits here and there about meeting end of the year management challenges, and have listed three of them.

Make Company Holidays Flexible. As I mentioned earlier, different cultures celebrate different holidays. If your company’s annual holidays include 2 or more days for Christmas, make them floating holidays that can be taken by employees of different faiths when their holidays fall. This provides your company with staff coverage for clients during traditionally slow periods. Global companies staff their offices 24/365 because they recognize the importance of being there for the customer when they are looking for something. Having flexible authorized holidays makes this possible.

Choose and Support a Nonprofit All Year Long. Resource allocation, including staff, is one of the greatest challenges in December. If your company supports a nonprofit by allowing staff to volunteer during work hours, implement a program to encourage staff to do so every month of the year, rather than just December. Having worked in the nonprofit community for almost 30 years, I can tell you that they need your support on a consistent basis; not just on Thanksgiving and Christmas. In fact, the need for those supporting the homeless and less fortunate is often greater in the first quarter of the year once winter really sets in.

Be Flexible in Managing the Generations of Your Workforce. Although I've written about this before, I think it still bears repeating. There are at least four different generations in the current workforce, all with differing needs and means of communication. Yes, you can teach an old dog a new trick, but that doesn't mean he likes it, or embraces it willingly. Likewise, puppies have boundless energy and their own ways of doing things that an older dog can’t fathom. However, that doesn't mean that one way of doing something is better than the other; they are just different. Don’t forget to keep that in mind when confronted with a management decision.

All in all, the end of the calendar year can be an exciting and busy time with its own unique management challenges. Although I've only listed three, I’m sure there are many, many more ideas, so please feel free to share yours.

Editor's Note: This blog post also appears on LinkedIn.

Before founding her own consulting firm in 2013, Dawn Gannon served as a respected project management and administrative operations professional in the military, higher education, and women’s healthcare fields for 25 years. She holds a Masters of Business Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Organizational Management from American Public University, is a contributor on LinkedIn, and the author of the Management in Motion blog.

Dawn currently serves as the Past Chair of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s Women’s Council, and teaches health and safety classes for the American Red Cross. As an infertility survivor she has been a featured speaker within the Fertility Community, and written numerous articles on the topic of childfree living. 

Five Fabulous Facts About Facebook for the Fertility Field

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Management in Motion Blog is pleased to welcome guest blogger, Terri Davidson, MPH, to talk about using Facebook as a part of a well-designed social media marketing plan.

Facebook Isn't What It Used To Be

Get used to it. Facebook is continually changing and is definitely not as effective as it was for businesses six months ago. At the beginning of the year, Facebook changed its algorithm formula for showing and garnering impressions for posts. Why did they do this? Though I don’t have a pipeline to Facebook corporate headquarters, most pundits feel one reason is that Facebook users are following numerous pages and it needed a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. This means that if consumers have engaged with pages in the past, then they are more likely to see posts from those businesses. If they have not engaged with a brand, they probably are not going to see its posts unless they visit the page. This means brands need to work harder than ever to make sure their followers like and comment on their posts and/or take other types of action.

Face This Fact: Your Patients are Still on Facebook!

Complain as you will (and I have heard many such diatribes), your patients, referrals sources and colleagues still are using Facebook. According to Facebook in June 2014, worldwide there were over 1.28 billion monthly active Facebook users, representing a 15 percent increase year over year.

Undoubtedly many fertility patients find Facebook to be emotionally painful when they read baby announcements and other child-related posts, nonetheless, they are finding creative ways to work around this by establishing ‘infertility’ profiles with unique names like ‘Rachel TTC’, as well as participating in closed Facebook groups where only members can see their posts. Even if some social media experts are declaring a decrease or potential drop in the number of users, there still are many potential and current customers who can read your messages. So instead of longing for the good ole days of 2013, adapt.

Develop a Budget for Facebook Promoted Posts and Ads

Call me cynical, but another reason Facebook probably changed the algorithm was to ‘encourage’ business owners to pay for ads and promoted posts. After all, it has to make money to continue its service, though many Facebook page administrators have the right to feel angry after Facebook encouraged them pay for ‘likes’ to their pages. The reality is that Facebook still is the best website to accurately target your potential market. Therefore, I would encourage you to develop a budget to promote newsworthy posts that you think will garner engagement and/or buy ads for events like seminars. Facebook ads and promoted posts are very cost-effective compared to other types of advertising plus you can target, target, target them to reach your ideal customer base.

Familiarize Yourself With Facebook Insights

If you have a Facebook business page, you probably have noticed that the number of fans seeing your posts (impressions) unfortunately has been decreasing. The good news is that Facebook provides page administrators with an excellent set of insights that can help you analyze all sorts of metrics, including which posts garner the most impressions and engagement so that you can recognize trends to create similar type of posts. You can also see data about when your followers are online, where they are from and other valuable data. So use Facebook Insights so you don’t lose market share.

Post Directly on Facebook

Though it may be tempting to use third-party apps like Hoot Suite to save time and sanity, I don’t suggest doing this. First, a tweet is not the same as a Facebook post. Facebook posts can be longer and should not be filled with abbreviations, though hashtags before keywords is acceptable on Facebook. Second, I believe that posts generated on Facebook will accumulate more impressions than posts generated via an outside source. Of course, you can verify or disprove this by running your own tests and seeing which type of posts win out statistically.

Have questions about Facebook or other types of social media? Please email me at terri@terridavidsoncommunicaitions.com, direct tweet me at @marketingmaven or post on my Facebook page, Fertility Marketing Maven.

About Terri Davidson

As the founder of Davidson Communications, Terri is a marketing specialist who has worked with a variety of fertility clinics, physician practices, hospitals, home health care agencies, other health care organizations, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and small businesses.

Terri is also a member of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), and serves as a Member-at-Large on the Executive Committee of the ASRM Women's Council.