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If you are in charge of a team or run a business, then you will likely already be familiar with quarterly plans. A business year is broken down into quarters. Each quarter has its own goals, plans, and desired results. It is much easier to manage a business this way since it enables business owners to give their employees clear and achievable goals.
When you are making quarterly plans, you need to make sure that you plan them out meticulously. The clearer your plans are, the easier it’ll be for your staff to follow them.
This post will tell you how you can make good quarterly plans.
Developing OKRs
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are an extremely effective way of giving your company a clear direction and ensuring that your staff know what they are supposed to be working towards. If you aren’t familiar with OKRs, then they are a tool used to communicate a company’s vision and direction to its employees. If you have had no experience with them before, then a good way of using them is to use templates. You can find a lot of customer success OKR examples online, which you can then change and use yourself, or give directly to your customer success team, or really any team that you think will benefit from the use of OKRs. You can also use specialist software to create OKRs, although many people prefer to just use templates since most templates are completely free. You should enlist other employees’ help when you are creating OKRs so that you can get their insight.
Thorough Review
When you are writing up a quarterly plan, you need to include a review of the previous quarter. Including a review of the previous quarter will give your employees an opportunity to pinpoint areas in need of improvement and identify strategies that didn’t work. It will also give you an opportunity to mention all of the things that did work so that in the coming quarterly, your staff know what things they should continue doing. Make sure to praise specific employees identified as being particularly hard-working in the previous quarter.
Focus Areas
In your quarterly plan, you must make sure that you pinpoint specific focus areas. A focus area is an area or task that you want your staff to focus on. You will need to create individualized focus areas for each team. You can’t give your marketing team the same focus areas as your sales team. When you are developing focus areas, make sure that you are realistic and that you don’t ask for too much from your staff. You should organize your focus areas hierarchically, with the most important ones being at the top and the least important at the bottom.
Risks and Opportunities
In addition to pinpointing specific focus areas, you also need to write down the risks and opportunities of your quarterly goals. Writing down risks and opportunities will make it easier for your staff to tackle specific goals. The reason that you need to write down risks is so that your staff know what to look out for. Knowing what opportunities specific goals have will also make it easier for your staff to achieve them. Make sure that you get your staff to write down which risks and opportunities came to fruition at the end of the quarter.
Team Plans
As mentioned earlier, you need to write down individualized team plans. The reason that you need to do this is so that each team knows what direction it is traveling in. A lack of direction can be very damaging to a team’s morale. There is no sense in creating a company-wide quarterly only. Instead, you should create quarterly plans for each of them, then align these plans with one broader, overarching plan. Make sure that each team’s goals and objectives all work toward achieving your company’s wider goals. You should enlist each team’s leader in creating team plans so that they can tell you their team’s strengths and weaknesses.
Stretch Goals
When you are creating your quarterly plans, it is a very good idea to stretch your team’s goals and give them challenges to overcome. If you don’t give your teams challenges, then they won’t be able to improve and work harder. However, you should make sure that the challenges that you set aren’t too difficult to achieve. Unfortunately, a lot of company owners overburden their staff and set them impossible goals. You can damage your team’s morale if you set them goals that are going to be too difficult for them to achieve.
Creating quarterly plans is an essential part of running a business. However, when you are creating your quarterly plans, you need to make sure that they are well-thought-through and properly planned. Failing to properly plan your quarterly plans and reviews can do a lot of damage to your company’s morale.
