How is Performance Management Linked with Strategic Planning?

You know you need a better strategy when it is the end of the financial year, and the business still lags much behind the set goals. Your organization is not alone; almost 67% of the organizations fail with their strategic planning.

You cannot take many chances running a startup, especially if you are already burning a good amount of money. And the situation is worse if the organization’s leaders don’t know why they failed.

Continuous performance management may not be the only helpful thing, but it solves many strategic planning problems.

What are strategic planning and a continuous performance management system?

Business strategic planning is a logical plan aiming to achieve critical business goals. For example, a document containing goals, SWOT analysis, stakeholders, action plan, impact metrics, and time limits. It lays out specific objectives and the actions the team needs to complete to change the state of the organization and business. A good strategic plan will result in improved employees and business.

A continuous performance management system is an ongoing review process focused on measuring and improving performance in relation to individual goals or OKRs (Objectives and key results).

You assign relevant goals to everyone on the team and constantly monitor and optimize their performance by actively collaborating.

For example,  an email marketing professional with a KR (key result): Increase email MQLs by 50% and sits in a weekly meeting with the rest of the marketing team to identify any barriers to achieving the KR.

Now let’s get to the business

How to align performance management with business strategic planning?

Both of the above are interlinked.

You cannot measure progress without a strategy; without some strategy, you cannot improve a person’s performance.

The following points will help you improve the team and business performance by working on strategy and performance management.

Setting the right goals for the right people

Do the leaders in your organization often discuss the role of employees?

A good strategy not only includes everyone in the team but also links their job roles with business objectives.

It can be hard to assign specific tasks to different professionals on the team, but there is a better way around it. 

Here’s how you can assign the proper responsibilities to the proper personnel:

• Sit with everyone on the team and decide on the company objectives. Choose the company OKRs that directly impact positive business outcomes.
• Next, assign OKRs to everyone based on the organizational objectives by discussing them with each employee.
• Give appropriate time to understand the target audience and include it in the strategic planning and OKRs.
• Also, set priorities based on employee engagement, like increasing productivity and innovative practices.

Creating alignment between stakeholders with OKRs

A big reason for strategy failure is the lack of alignment between the stakeholders in the organization (employees and leaders).

It’s pretty easy to get off track and get into silos when you don’t take measures to come together and discuss the progress of the projects.

The following steps will get your team on the right track:

• Setting the right set of goals that align with the business strategy.
• Conduct regular check-ins so the team can update their progress and correct any misalignments.
• Set quarterly goals for the company. This ensures that everyone is going in the right direction and implementing the right tactics.

Continuous improvement and flexibility in planning

A significant point many companies are missing out in their strategy is continuous feedback and improvement.

When the teams don’t come together regularly, they miss the critical discussion on what’s working and not working on the strategic plan.

Follow these measures to ensure that your business strategy stays accurate:

• Support active collaboration and enable the team to take charge of that.
• Use a tool or software that facilitates continuous feedback, collaboration, and strategic planning.
• A useful software that supports the above kind of collaboration along with strategic planning is OKR management software called JOP.
• Fix things up and make changes in the strategy if required.
• See if a given strategy is working out or not by looking at the OKRs in team meetings.
• Prioritize opinions from your whole team and promote psychological safety.
• Get timely employee surveys and feedback to improve the team’s engagement.

Continuous performance management can support your business strategy and keep you on the right track.

And to get these things more efficiently, you have to leverage technology.

A good technology product in the performance plus OKR management domain is the JOP (Joy of Performing).

You can manage the OKRs for the team, review their performance, conduct employee surveys, and do much more on the same platform.

Take a tour of our website to know more.