15 Effective Tips for Adjusting and Setting Up Company Goals

Tue, Dec 7, 2021 7:40 PM

Adjusting and setting company goals: You've probably put goal-setting on the back burner lately. You've been scrambling to make improvements merely to stay alive throughout the COVID-19 catastrophe. While managing a new remote workforce or transitioning your business to operate under shelter-in-place limitations, you've reassessed your cash flow estimates, changed sales predictions, and probably even asked for a loan.

You've been working to lessen the impact of the crisis on your company. The last thing on your mind is sitting down and reviewing your annual and quarterly objectives. But here's the thing: we're shifting our focus from crisis management to business recovery.

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This means it's more critical than ever to examine your company's goals and set a clear course for you and your staff. The following are some suggestions and ways for adjusting and setting your company goals and business objectives. These are based on how the team tackled goal-setting amid the recent financial crisis.

Set shorter deadlines for receiving input and obtaining results

In a crisis, everything changes all the time. Historical data, last month's outcomes, and monthly estimates are no longer sufficient. To maintain your business in sync with external market conditions, you should operate on weekly, if not daily, timelines.

You should regard the way you create goals and evaluate accomplishments in the same way. Set shorter deadlines, more optimistic due dates, and pull results as frequently as it appears to be useful. It's preferable to begin at a higher speed and gradually slow down when things settle down, rather than following a standard review cycle and falling behind right away.

Weekly, review and adjust your objectives.

Although it has already been emphasized in this text, the dynamic environment created by a financial crisis necessitates frequent modifications. This does not imply that you wait a month before making a change; rather, you should examine and revise on a weekly basis. Because everything is unpredictable, it's difficult to make long-term plans without first taking little measures to discover what sticks.

Set daily and weekly check-ins

You won't be able to have those weekly face-to-face water cooler talks because your team is distant. This means that if information and results aren't made a priority for your company, they won't be as readily available.

Establishing short daily check-ins to go through initiatives, results, and any questions is the finest thing you can do. After that, you and your management team should hold a weekly meeting to discuss the same topic on a larger scale. This will ensure that nothing is overlooked, that everyone is kept informed, and that your objectives are always current.

Year-over-year and time-over-time comparisons

This also extends to traditional financial reporting for your organization, based on the reality that everything is volatile amid a crisis. You'll have a hard time acquiring insight into how your business is actually operating if you merely compare year-over-year (how your business fared in the same month last year).

Instead, use time-over-time (t/t) performance comparisons, in which you compare results from week to week and month to month. As a result, you'll have a better picture of what adjustments are working and where you still need to improve. It can help you determine whether your monthly and quarterly goals are feasible, progressing, or need to be adjusted.

Establish a long-term strategy gradually

Instead of pouring everything into a long-term direction, we've focused a lot on actively comparing and changing your goals on a frequent basis. While it's critical to be flexible and constantly retooling your plans and goals, it's equally critical to set strong quarterly and annual targets for the rest of 2021.

Keeping your company's long-term needs in mind will ensure that you don't make any decisions that will have bad consequences beyond a few weeks or months. It also allows you to notice when your tweaks are working consistently and when you might be able to return to a more regular planning cycle.

Collaborate between departments

When your firm is in trouble, it's all hands on deck, which means there can't be as many barriers between personnel and departments as there once were. Everyone should be able to see the team's objectives. The same can be said for any data that your departments gather.

The more information that can be exchanged and the more people who are aware of it, the more likely you are to identify opportunities for collaboration. This is a good practice at any time, but in a downturn like the one we're in now, it can be a gamechanger when it comes to trying to recoup sales.

Examine your present annual and quarterly objectives.

You've probably done a light version of goal revisions as you've gone through and evaluated your financial statements. Even though they weren't formal and had little to do with your defined 2021 goals, you still had to make changes. When you get down to officially review and adjust your goals, use the same practice, starting with what's important right now and working your way up.

Shift short-term goals toward current priorities

Short-term no longer has the same connotation as it did prior to the crisis. Your short-term goals were most likely represented by monthly or quarterly chores before the crisis. You should think of them as weekly or even daily goals after the crisis is over.

In such a turbulent economic world, shifting your mentality to what is now relevant is vital, and it keeps you on your toes. Start here and prioritize what's most important in order to lessen the impact of the crisis on your company. When the bleeding has stopped or you've gained some forward momentum, it's time to focus on the future.

Make changes to the way you and your team plan

You've probably developed a way for approaching annual and quarterly planning with your team. It most likely entails gathering in a boardroom, expressing several points of view, and possibly even scribbling ideas on a whiteboard. Unfortunately, that typical face-to-face practice won't be liable for the rest of 2021, so you and your staff will have to get used to remote planning.

You can turn this difficult situation into a perfected planning system if you embrace this idea and are willing to make improvements. Here's what we suggest you do to change your planning habits and embrace virtual planning.

Begin with department-specific objectives

Start small. Instead of inviting everyone on a Zoom call to thrash things out, start small. Set a deadline for departments and managers to set their own quarterly goals and link them to the broader company-wide goals you've defined.

As your staff acclimatizes to working remotely, allowing them to focus on their basic principles implies more realistic goals, less interference, and more collaborative efforts. It also means less time spent figuring out how to have an effective virtual meeting with 50+ people, and it assures that each employee has ideas and personal goals to contribute if that becomes necessary.

Allow for outside-of-meeting conversation

Official goal-setting conversations are traditionally saved for in-person gatherings so that everyone can hear what's being said. When establishing duties for your team, however, since face-to-face meetings are no longer available, you may discover that other kinds of communication are just as beneficial.

Creating additional Slack channels, sending out group email chains, or simply working off a shared Google doc could be enough to keep the dialogue going. It may even save you time by eliminating the need for regular meetings because enough information is easily available to keep everyone up to date.

Determine which objectives are still relevant

While most of your objectives have been blown out of the water, there may be a few that can be salvaged. You can't just assume that what you prepared is no longer relevant. Instead, read over your original objectives again and see what still applies to your current circumstances.

Some may only require a change in the timeframe, while others may remain entirely relevant and require no changes at all. Some goals you had planned for later in the year or whenever you had free time may now be able to be moved to the top of your to-do list. Whatever the case may be, take the time to go through what you set out to do in the first place. It will save you time and assist you in achieving your objectives.

Irrelevant goals should be eliminated or pushed to the side

As you reviewed your original objectives, you probably recognized that you had a lot planned for 2021, perhaps too much. While it may be unpleasant, part of revisiting your original intentions involves deleting or deferring goals that are no longer relevant.

You should concentrate on the most critical aspects of your organization, such as boosting cash flow, maintaining workers, and connecting with customers. Anything else that takes up too much time or resources is a waste of time and resources that you and your company cannot afford.

If you discover that some of your ambitions are unattainable or unsalvageable, get rid of them totally. Put others in a backlog and revisit them in the following quarter if they give long-term benefits but aren't required right now.

Create goals for newly important areas

You'll need to focus on building goals around emerging priorities as a complement to your short-term ambitions. The crisis has produced a tremendous deal of upheaval, which has resulted in the creation of new opportunities that were previously unavailable.

Discuss with your team which aspects of their day-to-day workflow have grown more critical, and whether they've noticed any early returns on investment that are worth pursuing. You're essentially formalizing your short-term efforts into monthly, quarterly, and annual goals that you'll review and update.

Return to your business strategy with this information

To keep your business healthy and recuperating throughout a crisis, you must actively maintain and alter your goals. However, you must ensure that any changes you make are consistent with your overall business plan and fundamental corporate objectives. This is why it's just as important to keep your company plan and financials up to date as it is to keep track of your weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual goals.

However, if the idea of manually managing every single document and spreadsheet makes you nervous, you should look into LivePlan. With one simple interface, LivePlan saves all of your planning papers in one place and allows you to simply make revisions, test numerous forecasting scenarios, and actively analyze the current health of your organization.

Whatever path you take, make sure you begin reinventing what goal setting and planning in your company looks like. You have a better chance of making efficient modifications and avoiding unexpected calamities if you maintain your organization flexible and create a clear goal for your staff.

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