Every organization has a wealth of knowledgeable, talented people doing their best every day to achieve what they understand to be business goals and objectives. Much time is spent on staffing, onboarding, orientation, learning and development, and coaching and feedback.  

Yet, one of the biggest challenges all organizations face is ensuring that everyone shares a common understanding of goals. This includes the way to get there, and what individuals and teams need to contribute. Without it, well intentioned teams/individuals often pull in different directions, which creates unnecessary conflict and little progress. 

The rapid pace of change all around us and the fluid work environments post-pandemic makes building and maintaining common understanding even more difficult, yet more important than ever. T

Organizations need to focus on:

• Building a culture of learning and feedback,

• Using a simple practical process for strategic planning, and

• Taking advantage of available technology, like Microsoft Viva Goals.

Culture 

The complex challenges organizations face is well beyond the capability of a single individual or small team to overcome. Developing useful strategic plans and operationalizing them to achieve business benefits requires collaboration and cooperation across the organization — not competitiveness and divisiveness.

Lines of business, corporate administration teams like HR and Finance, and IT, must work together to continuously reflect on and learn from the past. They also need to contribute what they know for a shared understanding of the way forward.  

This requires:

• The ability to give and receive feedback effectively, and

• A balance of driving towards personal and team agendas with achieving collective ones.

In most organizations, this requires identification of specific collaborative core competencies, explicit and tacit rewards and recognition for collaborative work and outcomes.  

Process and Common Language 

Every organization engages in strategic and operational planning. Every organization has their version of a planning process and terminology for different process steps and outputs. And, every organization has a wealth of published information on strategic and operational planning. Some common themes emerge however, that tend to lead to success: 

• Simple, clear, defined and sharable process outputs: simple, realistic goals, clear results that the organization is targeting, and the critical steps to get there

• A suitable time horizon for the type of business and the environment it operates in 

• Inviting the collective wisdom and diversity of the organization to participate in the process and contribute to outcomes

• Regular, simple communications on the plan, progress, challenges and successes

• Feedback mechanisms to regularly learn from progress and emerging external factors in order to adjust the plan going forward 

• Facilitative leadership and coaching so people understand the process and contribute in the right way at the right time

Technology 

Never has there been so many technologies and tools to support the planning process. Not long ago, businesses were limited to developing plans in documents and spreadsheets and forwarding them by email.   

Now most enterprise platforms have some form of planning module or the capability to support the strategic planning process.  

Most recently, Microsoft released Viva Goals for organizations on the Microsoft 365 platform, and it is well worth a look. Viva Goals allows organizations to: 

• Create, manage, align, and customize objectives with templates and automated check-ins 

• Publish shared dashboards and advanced insights for monitoring progress 

• Connect Viva Goals to data in other systems for a consolidated view 

• Engage everyone in the process with Microsoft Teams integration 

• See and automatically update objectives, results and projects within the project management and data management tools you already use in Microsoft 365

To support the planning and implementation process, ensure quality internal and external information is easily available to process participants by continuing to follow good information management best practices:

• Content is available in accessible locations like SharePoint, and not hidden in personal OneDrive or network drive locations

• Content uses standardized metadata and tagging to be easily findable

• Dispose of redundant, obsolete and transitory content on a regular basis

In summary, review your culture, process and technology practices to amplify the efforts you put into strategic planning for your team or organization. There is a wealth of resources out there we put together below to help you and reach out if you want a demo of Viva Goals and using OKRs.

References and resources  

Indeed Editorial Team, T. (2022) What is facilitative leadership? (plus tips and benefits). Available at: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/facilitative-leadership (Accessed: November 16, 2022). 

Vellore, Vetri (2022). OKRs for All: Making Objectives and Key Results Work for your Entire Organization. USA: Wiley. 

The Microsoft Team. Introducing Microsoft Viva Goals. Retrieved 16 November 2022, from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/introducing-microsoft-viva-goals-bd651be7-472a-4f40-8fdd-6fcead79f3ad 

Caprino, K. (2022). 6 Concrete Steps To Building A Collaborative Culture That Inspires. Retrieved 14 November 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2014/09/24/6-concrete-steps-to-building-a-collaborative-culture-that-inspires/?sh=57b0dee145bb 

 Is Yours a Learning Organization?. (2008). Retrieved 14 November 2022, from https://hbr.org/2008/03/is-yours-a-learning-organization 

Contact us to explore how to use Microsoft 365 and Viva Goals in your goal planning and tracking processes.