You probably already have a strategy that you have been using for some time. Many businesses come to Empiraa looking for a platform to execute their already-established plan.
This blog will delve into the “steps between the steps” and what it looks like to use a business plan management software like Empiraa, within your organization.
So you come to Empiraa with a strategy that you have worked on for the past few months. You’ve probably had some large meetings with all the relevant stakeholders about what direction you want to take your business. Your Board has approved the top line goals and now it’s time to execute.
If you’ve done your research and chosen Empiraa as your software of choice, you’ll sign up to the Empiraa plan that’s right for the size of your business. We have four plans to choose from, which can all be customized further to suit your business. Talk with us today about what you need.
Now it’s time to build out the plan and transition your strategy into the platform. Our Strategy Designer is a simple 10-step setup process where you build out your vision statement, core values and company pillars (or goals). With an already established strategy, this will be a quick and easy process. We have a library of guides if you need any help, and you can also book an onboarding with our customer service team for more assistance.
After this point, you have full access to your dashboards and can see your plan in action. The last point of the Strategy Designer asks you to set your first objective. Objectives are smaller goals that contribute to achieving the company pillars. For example, if you have a company pillar to increase employee engagement by 15% on last year's results, you could set the following objectives:
It’s important to note that once you get into this section of building out your plan, it may be wise to bring in your Managers at this stage to collaborate around how they see their teams contributing to the goals of the business. You will notice that specific company pillars are more relevant to certain teams in your organization. The example above would be handled primarily by your People and Culture team.
The smaller the goal the less daunting it is to achieve. In Empiraa we have built in the ability to set up actions that contribute to the objectives. This is a great way to get more specific and allocate actions to specific people in your teams. These are bite-size tasks and you can have as many actions as you want, feeding into an objective. This spreads the load across the whole team so your people can take responsibility for certain areas.
Let's look at an example of an action. We will take the following objective that we set above:
Create a new hybrid work-from-home policy to increase the flexibility available for all employees.
This is a big objective and needs more than one person to work towards achieving it. We will create the following actions that break down how we will achieve our objective:
From one objective we got into the nitty gritty detail and built 6 actions that we need to do to achieve that one objective. These actions are relatively simple tasks. You can allocate these to different people within the team as we have suggested above.
We recommend Managers build out the objectives and actions for their direct reports and once that is done, onBoard your teams to the platform and share the objectives and actions they are going to be working on. It’s from here that your employees can connect up their daily task management platforms via integrations or they can add in some more actions they feel are relevant to achieving that objective.
With some initial time and work with your teams, you can see how you can bring your plan to life. It’s all about collaborating with your people so they feel invested in what they are working towards and contributing to the business's success.
If you really want to embody the plan you have and push it to the next level you can utilise our API integration. Don’t be deterred by the tech jargon! You don’t need any technical skills to be able to set this up yourself.
Essentially, integration means that you can feed data from your everyday platforms like Xero, Asana, monday.com, Slack, Spreadsheets, Hubspot, Salesforce, the list goes on. Using a third-party integration tool like Zapier, allows you to connect those everyday platforms to your objectives in Empiraa.
For example, you may want to create your actions as tasks in Asana. As you progress on each task in Asana, that progress will reflect in the actions within your Empiraa plan. This means that your plan is always up to date, no longer requires manual and duplicate data entry and your Managers and Executives can see how you are accurately tracking against your objectives at any time.
We have some great articles and videos here on how to set up specific integrations. Automating your data is a powerful tool, so be sure to check it out and start saving time on that data entry today!
After the initial setup and onboarding for all your people is done, you can start to see how you are tracking as a business.
When you set up each objective, you selected how frequently you wanted to input your data. If you chose weekly that means that whoever is assigned to that objective will receive a reminder email each week to input their data and contribute to the progress.
It’s important, especially if you have not set up integrations, that you check in regularly with your plan. We recommend Managers to be looking at their team's progress AT LEAST fortnightly. This allows you to make timely course corrections and get on top of issues before they get out of control.
Try adding your plan check-ins as a part of your weekly team meetings, so everyone is on the same page and can see how they are tracking. The stats show that employees who have goals that feed up into the company goals are 80% more likely to perform better. Use this as an opportunity to unite the team, create a bit of healthy competition and push everyone towards performing at their best.
Companies that embed Empiraa into their regular business operations have been by far the most successful in executing their plans. Those who center their decisions around their company pillars and bring them into day-to-day discussions have seen a huge increase in company culture, team collaboration and productivity. It’s this proven success that is why we want you use the platform to its full capacity.
At the heart of business planning is execution. Your goals cannot be realized unless you act on them. Empiraa allows you to break those big goals down into smaller, easy-to-achieve tasks that make ticking them off that much simpler.
Make checking in with your plan and the team a regular occurrence, focused around positively reinforcing great work, and bringing up those in the team that might need assistance to reach their goals. A task shared is a task halved, and by bringing your people in on the business plan and goals, you are setting yourself up for the best chance at success.
