Strategic Plan Actions April-June 2022.
Our 5 year strategic plan is now ‘live’, which we are stoked about (in case you missed it, find it here).
To get things underway we’re focussing on establishing three ‘implementation enablers’ and commencing a number of key actions aligned to our three focus areas: capability, culture and contribution.
Enablers
Launch BeaconHQ (our company intranet / wiki). BeaconHQ is our internal company intranet/wiki. The platform will document all of our internal policies, processes and much more. Read more about the launch of BeaconHQ here.
Scope and establish an employee experience mechanism. We’ll scope a people-positive employee feedback mechanism to monitor the experience of our people. Given that many of the actions listed in the strategic plan directly impact our team, we value their input in identifying areas for improvement.
Scope and establish customer experience mechanism. Principle one of our organisational code is that clients are the reason we exist. We do an okay job of understanding the experience of our customers currently however we’ll look to put a bit more structure around this to guide where organisational improvements are needed.
Capability
Scope and an organisational capability framework in parallel to scheduling org-wide training in foundational skill/s. Something that is long overdue for us - a framework that articulates the core skills and capabilities that our team needs to possess to deliver high quality work. Our organisational capability framework will be central in encouraging professional development and performance across the organisation. There are of course whole-of-organisation professional development and training needs that we can make a start on in the meantime.
Prioritise documenting our default approaches while compiling our organisational knowledge. We’ll start a conversation around which of our core processes should be documented first. At present, we rely on organic sharing of process learnings between people and teams and this will be our first purposeful attempt at writing down how we ‘do the work’. Part of this process will be compiling the significant bodies of work that are found throughout our past projects as a starting point and then move to fine tuning what these processes should look like if we are delivering them well.
Refresh and promote our existing operating system documents (i.e. policies) before adding anything new. We’ve heard through consultation with staff that our OS documents and policies were difficult to access. From our employee handbook through to user guides on how to use email (and everything in between) we plan on leveraging BeaconHQ to centrally store and improve accessibility to our key documents.
Culture
Establish rituals to link our work with our vision. We’ll look at small ways to link the work we do with our vision (i.e. a more impactful social purpose sector). For example, when we kick off a new project - we currently take the time to share with the team how the successful delivery of the project will contribute to achieving our vision.
Schedule the iterative review of our org code (one principle at a time). We often tell our team and anyone that will listen of the importance of our org code (principles that drive our day-to-day behaviours). Well - it is time that we review what each of those principles means to members of the team and make any necessary adjustments.
Calendar of events (work anniversaries, social club/s + org-wide gatherings). An easy one but something that is very easy to gloss over as a small team that is always very busy with ‘work’. Taking time out to celebrate the work anniversary or birthday of one of your team members is just a nice thing to do!
Contribution
Scoping non-client facing ‘value add’ type work e.g. events, networks. We have dipped our toe into establishing networks and holding events but haven’t necessarily stayed the course due to a pretty interrupted past 2 years. We are looking to get purposeful, start small and commit to a small handful of consistent events in the near future.
Internal and external communication activities. Simply put - not a lot of activity in this domain in this quarter, just improving the consistency of internal and external communication so our team and our partners have good visibility of our journey.
We’re hopeful that our first batch of actions will help us get set up to steer and guide the implementation of our strategic plan and sharing our initial steps with our network in the case that you find it useful in your own strategic planning journey.
