What Is Your Plan for 2026?

What Is Your Plan for 2026?
By Myrna Pashinski
NAPS Rocky Mountain Area Vice President

Are the metrics driving you crazy? You constantly are being told you are part of a team, but you don’t feel like you are. Are you told you are a stakeholder in the company you work for, but don’t have any decision-making ability?

The company always is deploying new innovations or renaming, reclassifying something in the name of positive change. This, while you still have endless emails, text messages and scanner messages with which to deal while being pestered to use your personal vehicle and still work off the clock. Who has time to have a plan?

Have you started your plan for 2026? Here are three things to consider.

1. Work conscientiously toward creating a good working relationship with the management team in your unit. Your NPA depends on it! You don’t have to be friends with them, but you do have to work with them.

Conflict resolution begins with your management team and cascades to the working relationship with your subordinate employees. Here’s where being confident enough in yourself comes in to let your management team know what you can and cannot get done in a day and how tasks can be better spread among the team. It will reinforce how you delegate tasks and hold your employees to their duties and responsibilities, as well.

2. Adhere to your unit’s fiduciary responsibilities because your unit performance and NPA rely on them. This includes your unit performance percentages, individual and unit goals, personal availability and employee availability. Everything that rolls up into every dashboard and in the ever-growing, important Power BI dashboard boils down to how you manage getting your employees to work every day.

How they safely perform the duties and responsibilities of their jobs and accurately complete their clock rings every day get you to the top-most level of your unit’s performance while meeting your safety and fiduciary goals.

3. You must create a working environment with your management team and employees that fosters mutual respect and dignity at work for everyone. Without displaying this for every person in the building, we all feel like the first paragraph of this column—not really a part of the unit. It’s as if we are in a unit working just to get a paycheck.

Finally, you must be confident in yourself to plan your year and be willing to adjust it throughout the year. Remember what’s important right now and start the plan. Avoiding the obvious isn’t going to get your goals completed or upward mobility opportunities you want if you don’t start planning each year. You simply will get exactly what you planned for—nothing at all.

Again, the year will slip by and you will continue to be frustrated. At mid- and end of year, you will get that frustrating feeling of, “What do I put down for my accomplishments?”

Set your goals and document as you go along when you complete a goal. Adjust your goals when you are asked to add something to your plate; you know you will be asked to do that. Change is inevitable.

Grow to expect change rather than letting it give you stress. I’m not saying you won’t have any stress at work if you set a great plan, but if you plan and accept the fact you have to adjust along the way, the stress may not be so harsh.

Remember, also, that self-care is important. When stress becomes overwhelming, the Employee Assistance Program should be a part of your plan. The EAP has great, quick plans for stress reduction. Trust me on that!