Franziska: Hi, and happy new year! We have so much amazing content planned for you this year. We’re going to kick off January talking all about planning. You can see different content around planning and how we do things here at Basic Bananas here on Basic Bananas TV and also on Pick of the Bunch, on our podcast.

Something I wanted to share with you is something we do here at Basic Bananas, and we actually did this just before we went on our Christmas holiday. That is we got every team member to tell us a little bit about their dreams for 2017. What we did is, and I’ll share this with you actually so you might want to do something similar for your own team, we sent them a little bit of a questionnaire, a little worksheet, where they got to dream a little bit. We call it actually, “Dream it, Do it, Achieve it, Celebrate it.”

The reason why this is important, because your team members, of course, are one of your most important assets in your business. They are the ones that help you achieve what you are out to achieve in 2017. When we did this actually it gave us a lot of insight on each team member and it makes us really aware of what they want to do and also their ambitions, and so maybe we can support them a little bit this year also. Also, the other thing that it helped us do actually is find out more about each individual team member across our different businesses. If somebody has a birthday, all we have to do, or what our team happiness rockstar has to do, is go and look at what they actually like and so we can buy presents that they are interested in rather just the normal standard flowers or anything like that. I was going to say sunflowers because they’re my favourite flowers. Hint, hint.

Let me give you a little bit the questions that we asked in case you choose to do something similar with your own team or even with yourself. I filled this in myself, and every time I do every year it’s cool because it’s like, “Wow, look what I wished for last year and now we’ve come really far.” The first question was, “What are some of your highlights from the last year?” Some highlights from 2016. Then, “What are three things you would like to improve in your role?” This was one of the questions that gave us the biggest insights into how we can help each team member to improve something in their roles. That was amazing for me to know. Then the third question was, “What is one thing you have learnt?” What is one thing you have learned in 2016?

Then the next part was goals, so the goals for 2017. Here we made sure that was mixed sort of personal goals with also work goals. Some of the six areas that we included were health and wellbeing, relationships, experiences and leisure, development, impact, and anything else, so other, the last box was other. Then the second part was, “What are some of your key responsibilities in your current role?” The reason why we did this together is because rather than being a talk down sort of thing where we say, “Your KPI is to do this, or to do this,” we work on this together so it’s more of a joint effort and it will be more likely to be enjoyed and to be achieved.

Then the last set of questions were, “What makes you happy on a daily basis?” I thought that was just a great thing to know about each team member. The other one was, “What are some of your favourite foods or snacks?” This is mainly awesome because when we do birthday parties and things like that, if somebody really … This one here, for example, said, “I like mangoes,” so we can just get a tray of mangoes. The other question was, “What are your favourite spare-time activities or hobbies?” The last question was, “If you won a million dollars, what are some things you would like to buy?” Again, this just tells us a lot about each team member, and it’s been super insightful.

Now what we do is we have, of course, each team member has one of these. We also have soft copies. We have a folder for each team member that we can put this into, and then of course next year we do the same. Throughout the year we keep developing different things for us, for ourselves, like one of the things that Aga did was your love language, so basically how do you communicate. That’s something else that goes in the folder.

I just thought I’d share this with you to kick off the year because you might be able to copy some of this for your own business and I would love to know how you go with this. We’ll talk a lot more about any of the planning tools that we use here at Basic Bananas over on Pick of the Bunch, on our radio show, too. I’m just excited. I’m excited for 2017. It’s going to be amazing. I can’t wait to share a lot more awesome content with you. Thanks for being here.