Does your small business planning process include involving your employees in the process? If it doesn’t, it should. The best way to help assure that your workers will buy into your plan for 2014 and work to make it happen is to have them participate in developing it. Employees have much to offer in terms of new ideas and knowledge of your customers, vendors, and your competition. To ignore them and their knowledge and struggle over your plan alone is sheer folly.

If you don’t know how to start bringing employees into your planning process, here are articles that will help:

• In “Engage your employees in business planning,” the author points out that researchers at the Harvard Business School found that 95% of a typical workforce doesn’t understand its organization’s strategy. If your workers don’t get your strategy, how can they be expected to make good decisions? This article goes on to provide tips on how to engage your employees in the planning process so that they not only understand the strategy but have a role in determining it.

• In “Involve Your Employees in Your 2014 Business Plan,” you’ll find five simple questions you can ask your employees that will help get you started on a good plan.

• In “Owning Success: What a difference a day can make in terms of getting staff on board,” you’ll read a case study about how a small remodeling business owner involved his staff in business planning.

• In “Want Employees to be More Engaged? Involve Them in Strategic Planning,” the author talks about the high value of getting ideas to “bubble up” instead of coming only from the top down. This concept captures the whole importance of why you should involve employees in planning not just as a once-a-year activity but throughout the year.