Q1 is off and running. You may be wrapping up the quarter, reflecting on what your amazing team has accomplished. Depending on your fiscal year, you may also be making the final push to hit your goals to close the quarter out strong. No matter where you are in the quarter, you are all working from the strategic plan your leadership team spent hours putting together in the company offsite.
So how do you most effectively execute this strategic plan? How are you measuring if you are on target? Do you know if you are getting any closer to making that vision a reality?
Here are a few tips you can implement to ensure that your strategic plan will be transparent and top of mind for the whole team.
Create a Regular Check-In Cadence
Out of sight = out of mind. If you don’t create routine meetings or check-ins for your team, you may be deprioritizing the importance of your strategic plan. If you’re not checking in on your most important initiatives, it will lead to time being spent on less important projects.
A regular check-in cadence creates accountability for objective owners. If objective owners know they will need to share progress every week, they will be more likely to stay focused on the goal. They will also be more likely to keep documentation up to date related to their objective’s progress.
No one wants to look like they dropped the ball. A regular check-in cadence creates a culture of accountability around your strategic plan.
Transparent Objective and KPI Performance
Help your team make smarter decisions by enabling them with data around objectives and KPIs. If your team doesn’t have up to date information, they will make uninformed decisions about what they should do for their objective if they don’t see the bigger purpose or picture.
Educate your team on where to go to understand progress around all objectives. Your employees should not have to spend time asking where to find information. They should instead be making smart decisions based on what they see in the data. Create a shared area for objectives, as well as for KPIs, that your whole team can access.
Making information transparent serves a few purposes:
- People have the information they need to make the best decisions for their objectives.
- It emphasizes what the most important KPIs are for your team, and helps prioritize where people should spend most of their effort.
- It creates accountability for people to own their number. If they know the number is front and center, they will spend their time accordingly.
Automate Updates and Management of KPIs
People don’t want to add another task to their plate. Behavior change is hard, which is why updates on objectives are sometimes forgotten about.
Take the manual effort out of your strategic plan by automating what you can. Elate’s software sends out automated Slack and email reminders that remind your team to update objectives they own.
Additionally, Elate integrates with popular tools to streamline reporting on KPIs. We recommend having some type of automation like this to reduce the headaches around endless manual follow up on your strategic plan. Your Chief of Staff, Ops team, and the whole organization will thank you for making their lives easier.
How to Get Started
Executing your strategic plan is critical to the success of your business. You can’t grow your business if you don’t hit your numbers.
Many companies early on use a variety of tools, such as Google Sheets and PowerPoint slides, to track their progress. This is a great starting point to get into a routine, but at a certain point, you outgrow these methods. Employees will get tired of updating spreadsheets and having stale Powerpoints. Over time, your team will lose track of which of the dozen spreadsheets they check to find the information they need.
Investing in a tool to help your team execute on the strategic plan will help you make sure everyone is on the same page. Let us know if you want to learn more about how Elate does the heavy lifting around strategic planning so you can focus on growing your business, not on asking people for updates.
