For well over a decade, my first post each year has been a prediction about what the upcoming year will bring in employment. (The less said about my 2019 prediction to dust off the reduction-in-force guidance, the better.)

But there was a year when I didn’t make a prediction 2010 (except that I went “out of my way” to predict that we would not make contact with aliens. You need to read the post.)

So, another decade has gone by and yet I’ve still gone back to that post because it still seems meaningful 10 years later.   In it, I quoted from creator of LexBlog, Kevin O’Keefe — the blogging platform that this has been written on.

I’m going to take a page out of Kevin O’Keefe’s recent post entitled “Why Predict the Future When You Can Make It?” In it he repeats an oft-reminded, yet seldom followed, expression: The Future is What You Make Of It.  As he said: “Good luck in 2010. But remember luck is the residue of design and hard work.”

For employers, there will always been the next case or new law that will need to be tracked and followed, but employers that follow best practices in employment law can worry less about those developments and more about the big picture. The employers that can focus on attracting and keeping the best employees will succeed — no matter what the other developments are during the year.

With that, I wish you all a very Happy New Year.

I think that’s pretty spot on, even a decade later.  This is not to say that you don’t need to be up to speed with all the developments going on. But use 2020 to look at the big picture; sure, sweat the small stuff, but show your employees that you are working to get things right and you’ll go a long way to reducing your legal exposure.

Consider it your first resolution of the year.