Every end of the year, organizations gather their supervisors, managers and executives to review strategic plans and develop next year's business plan, along with its budget plan. The plans will remain a plan if it just placed in a binder and put in a shelve. That business plan should not remain in the shelve but should be regularly visited and consulted as you do your usual business activity. The best thing to do is to post it on the board and make it visible to your team.
After three (3) months, HR as a strategic management partner, should conduct or facilitate and gather once again the organization's champions to revisit the business plan by conducting a quarterly business activity review or evaluation. This will provide the managers a view of how they are performing compared to set targets. How should it be done? It's not a breeze but it's not the difficult. Here's how we do it:
- Data gathering and processing - A week before the set meeting, we ask all branches and unit heads to prepare a monthly performance review for the past 3 months. These covers the financial performance, which is usually prepared by the finance and accounting department; the activity report by the HR department for the employees development plans, as well as the organizational development projects status; and lastly for the operations, the area or branch conducted activities aligned to their targets, what strategies they have implemented and marketing strategies.
- During the set meeting schedule for the quarterly evaluation - We usually take two (2) days to complete this activity. Thus, meetings were set every Friday and Saturday so that there were lesser disruption when we take our managers out from the daily operations.The program starts with the usual opening like mission-vision statement recitation, pledge, prayer and opening remarks. Then we review and revisit the "focus objectives" per unit as shown in the table.After the target review, each unit will then present what they have done and have accomplished in relations to their targets.
- Activity SWOT - During the presentations, allow some time for questioning from the members of the participants. Make sure that the line of questioning and reaction is in the line that each may be able to provide help in the improvements of strategies. They are all members of the management and they should work as a team. This is what team leadership means.During this activity, our focus is usually with the strategies, asking the Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats encountered during the implementation of activities. The focus is more on the strategies evaluation and not on the target performance. The target performance is just an indicator of the strategy's effectiveness.During this activity, you will surely encounter very good performers among the branches and there are those who are not doing well. Allow them to share practices that are effective as well as challenges encountered. Best practices may be duplicated while the challenges shared will provide a view of what to avoid and to think of a new approach should strategy is not working. As early as possible, these challenges will be addressed when you conduct a quarterly review.
I hope this article is some help to you. Thanks for the opportunity to share... thanks for reading.
