The Strategic Planning Process
Step 4: Strategy Evaluation
Let’s say your strategy is activated, your KPIs are looking sharp, and you’re crushing your goals. High fives all around!
Now comes the final and critical step of our strategic journey: evaluation. This phase finalizes your grounding in reality instead of just working off aspirations. If this feels like something you already covered in previous steps and therefore something you can skip, please think again! This final phase provides the finish-line review and insights necessary to ensure that everything did, in fact, come together as intended.
Strategy is a loop, not a linear path. And evaluation feeds insights back into planning for the next iteration, whether your organization decides to review semiannually or annually.
Rollout Strategy Organization-Wide
For successful activation, everyone across the organization needs to clearly understand the strategic plan and their individual roles in bringing it to life. To facilitate this, create condensed strategy summaries for company-wide communication through:
- Employee Townhalls, where the full leadership team presents the strategy in question. Allow live Q&A sessions to build understanding and enthusiasm, and consider hosting it once a quarter. Consider allowing questions to be submitted beforehand and prepare responses to the top repeated questions.
- Department huddles for managers to share how their group specifically contributes to the strategy and emphasize alignment.
- Emails and intranet forums where summarized presentations and townhall recordings can be broadly distributed for ongoing reference.
- Posters and visuals to display strategic priorities, visions, and goals visibly in the office. Use graphics and themes that inspire.
- Individual discussions that allow managers to translate strategy into aligned individual employee goals during one on ones.
- Company newsletters to share strategic updates and success stories.
You don’t have to use all of them, but varied formats and forums can more effectively engage employees at all levels. And don’t do them just once. Repetition drives retention!
This strategic fluency empowers teams to execute decisively.
Establish Progress Review Cadence
Regular progress reviews are essential for staying on track. They provide the “pulse” checks needed to course correct quickly if required.
Monthly reviews focus on executional health, asking questions like:
- Are strategic initiatives progressing on budget, scope, and timeline?
- Are all projects fully and appropriately staffed?
- What risks or roadblocks need addressing or escalating?
Assign each initiative an executive owner to drive rapid decision-making as needed. Create escalation protocols.
Quarterly reviews involve looking at how your core KPIs are trending versus your goals year-to-date. What drove overperformance or underperformance in the past three months? Likewise, examine which lead and lag measures look strong or concerning. What are the implications?
These assessments help determine broader strategic progress, asking questions like:
- How are core KPIs trending year-to-date versus annual goals?
- Do the existing strategic priorities and organizational design still make sense?
- Should any resourcing or goals be adapted based on new data?
Your external environment should be the next area of focus. How have market, competitive, or technology conditions changed? And what new data is relevant? You’ll also want to consider potential disruptions and emerging risks while you’re at it.
Once you’ve done so, analyze whether your strategy and implementation approach still make sense. Identify any changes you need to make in your goals, resource allocation, and organizational design. There might not be any, but better safe than sorry!
Finally, annual reviews evaluate full-year performance and set the stage for the next planning cycle. Locking in a consistent cadence upfront and checking in on it throughout the year enables proactive course correcting versus reactive fire drills!
Use Leadership Assessments
This might seem obvious, but it still needs to be said: Leadership across the entire management team impacts how well strategy cascades through the organization. That’s why I appreciate tools like 360 degree assessments so much. They provide feedback on strengths and development areas from all directions, from peers to direct reports to superiors.
What are 360 assessments? They’re tools to help leaders obtain confidential, anonymous, aggregated, and meaningful feedback from the people who work with them, whether employees, division managers, peers, contractors, or customers. Receiving feedback from these diverse sources allows leaders to discover how others view their effectiveness and therefore how they can better lead their teams.
Simply put, 360 degree feedback matters, with research identifying it as a core process in best-practice performance management. Sadly, most organizations don’t implement it. But at our firm, IHN HR, we definitely do, highlighting 10 key competencies of management:
Leadership: Do you inspire others to follow you as you deliver on the mission, achieve the vision, and reflect the values of the organization?
Delegation: Do you assign tasks and responsibilities to the appropriate team members?
Professional Maturity: Do you interact with people in a manner that reflects the values of the organization and cultural norms?
Administration: Do you have effective systems in place to manage workflow and projects?
Training: Do you have the ability to provide direct instruction or appropriate resources to impart information?
Mentorship: Do you develop people by sharing your expertise, experience, and influence for the purpose of learning and growth?
Communication: Is your written and verbal communication timely and effective with an appropriate tone?
Team Environment: Do you create a culture that unifies a high-performance team to effectively deliver on their goals?
Approachability: Are you available for questions, instructions, and input (i.e., do you encourage an open-door policy)?
Execution: Do you consistently deliver on tactical projects and strategic goals?
In addition to this feedback tool, our HR Impact 360 program includes a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® assessment and CliftonStrengths evaluation to further develop leaders. The resulting data highlights growth opportunities to hone the skills most vital for strategic activation, like:
- Communication – explaining strategy clearly and compellingly
- Coaching – developing team capabilities to achieve goals
- Collaboration – building connections across silos
- Change leadership – supporting people through transitions
- Agility – adjusting course amid ambiguity
- Role modeling values – walking the talk.
Investing in accelerated leader development multiplies returns on strategic goals. Beyond 360, you can also use pulse surveys (i.e., short questionnaires designed to get real-time insights), exit interviews, and ongoing dialogue to assess the health of your company’s culture.
Remember: Real progress follows culture. So make sure your culture is a good one!
Annual Strategy Offsite
Every 12 months, hold an expanded one- to two-day offsite meeting with senior leadership to renew your strategy more comprehensively. You’ll want to look back at how you performed against annual goals and what results exceeded or missed expectations. Discuss which initiatives went smoothly and where improvement is needed, assessing how effectively you’ve responded to emerging challenges so far.
But that’s not the end of your “looking,” since you’ll also want to look around. Business conditions have almost certainly changed to some degree since you first started this journey, complete with new opportunities and/or threats. How have competitors responded, and what can you learn from their moves?
Last but not least, you need to look ahead. Given internal and external data, evaluate where you should take your strategy next. What new three- to five-year vision, goals, and priorities will drive the next phase of growth?
Equipped with these three perspectives, your annual offsite meeting should provide a fresh playbook to continue building on momentum.
Ongoing Employee Feedback
Regular employee pulse surveys can include questions like:
- Do you understand our strategic vision and priorities?
- Do you feel your work aligns with strategy?
- Are you empowered and equipped to achieve your goals?
- What gets in the way of your effectiveness?
- How happy are you in your role and the company?
The results should reveal strengths, growth areas, and vulnerabilities that can be triangulated with other data to refine strategy, culture, and leadership… making your organization that much more effective in the long run.
Competitive Benchmarking
Organizations are always better off knowing their industry benchmarks. So conducting regular scans on them provides perspective on your strategy effectiveness.
These evaluations should provide data on how your growth rates, profitability, and customer satisfaction compare to top competitors. Who leads in product innovation, technology adoption, or branding? If it’s not you, that just means you have established models elsewhere to learn from.
You might discover through these scans that you’ve become complacent or fallen behind in some area. And once that’s identified, you’ll know how to up your game. Analyze winners and disruptors across your field, adapting your strategy accordingly… always keeping in mind that you want to leapfrog ahead of your competitors, not just keep up.
Risk Audit Updates
Revisit risk assessments quarterly, and review your mitigation plans. Probe for new market-shift exposures, and prioritize addressing risks that threaten your organization’s strategic pillars.
One great way to assess your corporate policy legal standing is to conduct an HR assessment. If you don’t have the internal resources to do it yourself, seek an outside partner to ensure you’re compliant with state, federal and local employment laws. Either way, a good HR assessment should evaluate:
- Organizational mission, vision, and values
- Supervisory training and development
- Recruitment strategy
- Annual goals and objectives communication
- “Best Places to Work” eligibility
- Employee assistance programming
- Employee counseling/disciplinary forms
- Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) forms and employee request, employer response, medical certification statements, COBRA, and HIPAA documents
- Marketing for open positions
- Accident investigation documentation and OSHA 300 logs
- File reviews of employees terminated for cause and a sampling of those on active employees with a documented history of disruptive behavior or existing disciplinary problems
- Exit interview documentation and reports, including those for I-9 process files/folders, notifications to employees, and bulletin boards where local, state, and federal notices are posted
- Organizational charts/reporting structures
- Employment applications
- New-hire processing forms
- New-employee orientation process materials, both formal and informal
- Employee handbook, policy and procedure memos
- Job descriptions
- Listing of employees’ positions/titles, work statuses, FLSA classifications (i.e., exempt/non-exempt; hourly vs. salaried), and wages
- Wage/salary grades and/or ranges
- Performance appraisal forms
- Benefits communication information
- Benefits administration processes and tools.
You – or whatever firm you hire – should also do a random sampling of employee files, making it as thorough an assessment as possible.
Strategy Transformation Reviews
For large-scale change initiatives like restructuring, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), or business model shifts, schedule periodic transformation reviews to ask:
- How is execution progressing relative to plan?
- What milestones have been achieved and missed?
- Are outcomes meeting expectations?
- Where is work still required?
- How are people feeling about the change emotionally?
- Are concerns being addressed?
Major transformations require ongoing course corrections to stick the landing. They almost always add complications, but that doesn’t mean you can’t excel through them.
Strategic Planning Process FAQs
For those who have additional concerns before, throughout, or after the strategic planning process, don’t worry. You’re not alone. At In HIS Name HR, we’re very familiar with helping organizations through the process – including answering all the questions that inevitably come up.
Here are some of the most common ones, along with our best answers to guide you and your team to bigger and better things…
How often should we re-evaluate our strategy?
Ideally, quarterly checkpoint reviews enable more real-time adaptations. Monthly pulse checks on execution also provide leading indicators of needed adjustments. And ongoing scans of the market and competitive landscape keep your strategy fresh. But be open to course correcting whenever new data indicates it might be necessary.
How do we know if our strategy execution is on track?
Track performance on choice KPIs that quantify strategic success. Compare performance trends to annual goals, drill into the drivers of any underperformance, and gather employee feedback and external benchmarking data to triangulate insights. If metrics start slipping, your execution is likely off-kilter.
What if part of our strategy is working and part is failing?
Carefully diagnose why some pieces aren’t gaining traction. Perhaps you haven’t given them adequate time or the resources necessary to mature?
But if you have, go ahead and cut losses if the data clearly shows certain efforts are ineffective after you’ve given them a fair trial. Then refocus resources on high-potential initiatives that have demonstrated early wins. In short, build on what’s working.
When should we stick to the plan versus changing course?
Consistency for 1-2 years is often needed to realize returns. But you’ll still want to continuously gather data to assess if fundamental assumptions are no longer valid. If the landscape or competitive response shifts the premise of your strategy, be ready to rethink your current plans.
Of course the timing will vary depending on the business change. Covid, for instance, forced many organizations to make immediate shifts in their strategies. Whereas issues such as small sales declines allow for a greater amount of time to make adjustments.
How can we get an unbiased read on strategy effectiveness?
Survey external stakeholders like customers and partners to get candid perspectives beyond internal teams. Customer satisfaction metrics offer truth on how you’re really perceived.
You can also conduct focus groups to gather qualitative insights on strengths or blind spots. And anonymous employee surveys are another great way to glean constructive criticism that leaders need to hear.
Should everyone review strategy or only senior management?
Ask employees across all levels to provide feedback since every department brings its own unique perspective. For example, while the C-suite will see the big picture, they’ll often miss smaller but important details. Frontline teams, however, are often in the perfect place to spot changing customer needs first.
Review findings with broader leadership to discuss necessary adjustments. Strategy should shift according to ground-level realities, not executive assumptions.
How do we know our strategy is still relevant to our mission?
Revisit how evolving strategy sustains to your long-term vision and mission. Strategy serves vision, not the other way around.
All organizations are faced with changes – sometimes ones that are well beyond their control. Changes in the economy… dwindling donations for nonprofit organizations… a decline in church attendance due to the pandemic… political and societal discourses… These can all have a detrimental impact, and realignment may be required if significant deviations occur.
Customer surveys can once again help out here, since they reveal if you’ve drifted from meeting their core needs.
However, while these challenges can be daunting, change also presents new opportunities for growth, innovation, and adaptability. By embracing change, organizations can evolve, strengthen their foundations, and emerge more resilient than ever.
Want To Know Your Capabilities As A Leader?
For further actionable insights, reach out to In HIS Name HR right here. We help organizations build high-performance human resource programs designed to build your workplace into the engaging, effective, integrity-filled space you want it to be.
Contact us today! You and your employees will be grateful you did.