When we celebrate the new year, there are fireworks and parties. New year’s resolutions, dreams, and goals. But for most of us, other than changing the number at the end of the date, the new year isn’t much of a new year. It is just another day. There is also Chinese New Year, the new academic year, the new school year, and all the cycles that fall within the ‘different years’ in which we operate. We often try to simplify things by trying to fit everything into one year. There is only one cycle. Even in our normal lives, this flaw is quite evident. I will stop smoking in the new year. I will spend more time with my children in the new year. I will visit my parents more in the new year. Why don’t you start right now. Why can, for example, October 29 not be the start of the year where you no longer smoke?

But the focus of this blog is not to inspire you to start good things sooner. It is to highlight how cycles in organisations often cause stress because we want to fit everyone in the organisation into the same ‘annual box.’ At times, this could have detrimental effects not only on performance, but on the overall wellbeing of your staff and your organisation. For the purpose of this blog, I will be referring to my own context, which is a language school in Taiwan. While I realise you might be in a different context, like another country, or a different type of school, I think it is important to consider how these cycles are different in your context and how they impact staff and colleagues.

 

 

 

Cycles in language schools

 

Here are a few examples of cycles in language teaching organisations.

The academic cycle. For the most part, this starts for us in September when the first students walk into the school for the new academic year and ends in June when the school year ends. The young learners in our school also have their school academic year from September to June. The curriculum design cycle is different. We cannot start adjusting the curriculum in September. That often starts in June, as soon as we have our end of year academic results (we use Cambridge mock tests) from which we identify weaknesses, compare it to previous years, and then pan adjustments to the curriculum. There is also the professional development cycle. The first part of our annual training involves changes to our curriculum if any. Again, this cannot start in September. Naturally, the most stressful part for teachers would be towards the ends of semester where there are student reports and exams, and ironically, mid-year exams fall right on the big ‘New Year’s celebration.’ But we also need to know what classes our teachers will be teaching in the new semester or new academic year, and that is impacted by a different department.

Marketing and sales. It is almost obvious that the marketing and sales cycles cannot start on the same day or at the same time. But marketing cannot come up with a campaign if they don’t know what sells or if they don’t understand the actual academic product. Prior to the start of new semesters or winter and summer camps, there is a significant amount of pressure on the sales team, but in between that, they also have to inform marketing of what has been selling, and deal with customer service-related issues.

Just looking at these two groups, it is clear that, in my school at least, the most stressful times for teachers are September, January, and June. For academic managers, it is July to September, and January. For sales staff, it is December and January (selling for winter camp and the new semester) and particularly May to August (selling for summer camp and the new academic year). For marketing, it is about a month (sometimes two) prior to the big sales drive, and it often ends a few weeks before the end of the sales drive.

And then there is the financial year. And this is twofold. Your organisation’s financial year, and the financial year of the country where you operate, because it impacts when you have to declare and pay tax. Often, this is the same, but it almost never matches up with the academic year.

The most important thing to take away from this is you cannot make the cycles align. They never will. And you definitely should not use cycles to postpone what can be done now. If there is a curriculum issue in January, don’t respond with ‘the curriculum review cycle starts in July.’ If there is an idea for a great new product, and marketing is ready to go, then do it. You don’t have to wait until the new academic year.

And I am sure most of you have experienced the end of year review bottleneck. Everyone must do it now. People are stressed and it feels like a performance review rush hour. It’s almost exactly like being stuck in traffic. The stress, the will I get it done on time, have I done enough, should I have started earlier, and all of those negative feelings.

 

 

 

What issues could these cycles cause?

 

Other than postponing things to ‘fit into the cycle,’ or creating performance review bottlenecks, the most obvious issue this causes, relates to professional development or performance review cycles. A large organisation that I occasionally do some work with decided to adjust their professional development cycle for all staff to represent the financial year, which is January to December. A practical example of why this is a problem relates to sales and academic staff. Sales staff are given targets in November for the December/January sales cycle. Their end of year review happens in December and their professional goals are set in January. In probably the second most stressful time of the year. Moving this back by one or two months would have a significant impact on them understanding their goals and their targets better.

Teachers are assigned classes for the year in September. They keep the same classes for a year. They set goals for the year in January. Now, this sounds great, because you teach a class for 3 or 4 months and then select areas you want to improve in. For example, improve productive tasks with low level teenage classes, especially those that are shy to engage. And then in June, halfway through the year, you stop teaching that class for two months. Which could mean you now have two months to really reflect and research and be ready to hit the ground running in September. But in September, operational needs mean you no longer teach a low-level teens class, and now you need new goals to address in your December end of year review, with new classes, and you have nothing to show for your four months of work. Or you can show it, but it is incomplete.

 

Things to consider

 

I have predominantly focused here on professional development and performance reviews. But we also need to consider the added stress our desire to have documents for everything has on our staff. Does the performance review cycle have to match your academic or financial cycle?

Do they have to produce records? Is it not more effective to have a manager produce truncated records that can be used by a management team to guide performance management rather than having pages and pages of a professional development portfolio that doesn’t impact performance? I wonder how many times, especially now with AI, these ‘rapports’ are not even really written by the staff member, or worse, is a copy and paste job from a previous year, considering they now have a new line manager that does not have the time to read over years and years of page and pages of ‘performance review reports.’

How are you considering the mental health of your employees? While I have focused on New Year in this blogpost, have you considered how other festivals impact cycles. For example, would you prefer to have an annual review meeting with a Muslim employee in the morning or late afternoon during Ramadan? Is it possible to move one employee’s review back a month if that month is the month in which they suffered a huge personal loss, or do you absolutely have to do your meeting in that month?

 

 

 

 

Looking forward

Cycles are part of our lives. If you want to exercise more, don’t wait until New Year, or worse, if you are reading this in January or February, another 10 months! Start now. Because by the time January rolls around, your new goals could be instead of being able to do 15 push ups, to do three sets of 15, because you have been doing it for 3 months by the time January came. And similarly, if you don’t understand the impact of how we use cycles to either delay or force things into boxes, you won’t be able to respond to pressing staff or product issues. The cycles are there only to guide you. Not to lead you.