Great! You have defined your goals and outlined your S.M.A.R.T strategies on how to reach them (if you haven't, here's a guide to get you started). You have hopefully done this together with employees to enhance involvement and engagement (here's why that's important). If you are like any other green executive or manager, you're probably scratching your head wondering "okay, so... what now?".
As you have probably just realised - the hardest part is not defining your goals and strategies, even if that's a process in itself, but its the actual doing, the execution. It is vital that your employees are engaged and that tasks and projects are aligned to your corporate goals - and that you can keep an eye on progress and deviations.
In order to do this, here are some tools that could help:
-
A digital platform
It's a necessity to provide a dynamic, digital platform for your organisation to work and collaborate in. There are many smart features that will ease your work life and help you manage tasks, meetings, personal goals, corporate strategies, projects etc.
Here are some of the benefits with a digital platform:
- Visualization: Eases communication and makes for a visual way to convey direction, progress, ideas and so on.
- Alignment: By having everybody work in the same digital space, seeing the same things and each other's work, you can more easily align your work force and ensure that the right things are done, at the right time.
-
Powerpoint/Excel/Word
These are digital tools as well, and they have the possibility to share information and involve several people in one document. They are however not very dynamic and tend to easily become "dead" documents. Think of it as a great plan that can engage individuals as the plan is created and presented, but it's hard to keep the engagement and collaboration up over time.
Here are some of the benefits:
- Price: These products are included in a Office365 subscription, so the pricing is rarely an issue.
- Plug-and-play: These products are pretty straight forward and easy to learn, so getting started with a document won't require training from your employees
Pricing and ease aside, here are some drawbacks I think is important to highlight:
- Shelf warmer: Raise your hand if you've ever had a strategy or plan presented in a Powerpoint with engaging speeches from a manager, and then never really saw the plan again?
- Non engaging: Even though these tools technically do the job, they're not an engaging space to work in on a regular basis and take up a lot of time.
- Easy to overwrite. How many versions and copies do you have of a document saved in a folder, "just in case"? Not a very efficient way to work.
-
Post-it's, whiteboards or paper
Some of us are all about that old school approach, and I can't deny that my creativity flows better writing on paper - but this approach is more suitable for workshops or bee-hive meetings where you quickly want to scribble down thoughts and easily show them to a group.
But that's about it, as soon as you leave that meeting your sheets of paper will be stacked away, probably never to be looked at again. Not suitable for good overview and a living, adaptable, process.
Use the old school for creative purposes, but translate the outcome into actions and plans in a digital platform where the work can be executed.
I hope you found this article helpful! If you want help finding a suitable digital platform, or have any other questions, feel free to contact us!
