Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies
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Launching goals with a major rollout isn’t enough. Goals must be visible and repeated to keep the commitment alive. Why not have some fun with your ongoing communication. You can find plenty of creative ways to keep your employees up-to-speed on the status of the plan.

Taking it one step further, you can reinforce goals without coming across as a nag by adding humor, inspiring quotes, and customized encouragement to the messages. You can’t say thank you enough; keep that in mind when goals are attained.

Here are just a few ways to ensure ongoing communication:

  • In monthly e-mail messages

  • At surprise coffee breaks

  • On computers as screen savers

  • In envelopes with paychecks

  • In company newsletters or e-letters

  • On the bulletin board in a common area

  • Through your company blog

  • Through your intranet

One company dedicates an entire room to ongoing communication, dubbed the war room. The room includes anything and everything about the company’s strategy. On one wall is a timeline with sticky notes that display all the different goals and their deadlines. Another wall contains charts and graphs of the company’s key performance indicators from the scorecard. And yet another wall contains space for brainstorming and contributing to key strategic issues at hand.

The wall also contains an area for capturing items that are hard to measure, such as innovative ideas, customer complaints and compliments, and employee training schedules. The room is updated monthly, and anyone in the organization can walk in and see what’s happening with the business.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Erica Olsen is cofounder and COO of M3 Planning, Inc., a firm dedicated to developing and executing strategy. M3 provides consulting and facilitation services, as well as hosts products and tools such as MyStrategicPlan for leaders with big ideas who want to empower and focus their teams to achieve them.

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