Leadership is a challenge in itself and taking up a leading role in a company can bring even the most resilient of workers to their limit, as it is not only stressful but also high-risk from a financial, professional, and social point of view.
Having to draw up and analyze data, decide on achievable goals, find the most efficient plans, and engagingly present all of this work can be daunting even for the most experienced leader.
Traditionally, yearly planning was the norm: the CEO or leadership team would hold a meeting to explain the course of action for the next twelve months and call it a day. Currently, it is widely considered that quarterly planning is more beneficial for the overall efficiency of the company and its future developments.
What is Quarterly Planning?
Quarterly planning is a strategy that entails dividing the year into four periods of three months and organizing a meeting at the end of each quarter to analyze the data and progress so far, and plan the next quarter.
Because there’s no standard way of counting quarters, your planning might look something like this: (A most common way is to start in October)
- Quarter 1 (Q1): October, November, December
- Quarter 2 (Q2): January, February, March,
- Quarter 3 (Q3): April, May, June
- Quarter 4 (Q4): July, August, September
To reduce the time you would normally spend drawing up the plans for your next meeting, tools such as Flowster’s quarterly planning template can guide you every step of the way and provide examples to use as inspiration.
Quarterly Planning Meeting: Small Steps, Great Improvements
Why go through the hassle of planning not once, but four times a year? Well, if your goal is to keep your team engaged and focused and your data on track, quarterly planning ends up saving you much more time and energy, and here are a couple of reasons why.
Your responsibilities as a leader include keeping an eye on your team’s progress and ensuring they’re on the right track. It is far easier to do this when the timespan between meetings is 3 months instead of 12 months, as with annual planning. You can draw up conclusions and steer your team in the right direction before any major issues arise and adapt your strategies the moment new opportunities come up to maintain a sense of novelty.
Also, with quarterly planning, you get to identify and study the mistakes of the past 90 days and fix them before they are repeated, thus adding to the overall efficiency of the company. In these economically uncertain times, it is sensible to be cautious and take the time to discuss major changes multiple times a year. Speaking of mistakes, by reducing the number of days in between meetings, it is easier to keep track of data analysis and ensure statistics are as accurate and easy to comprehend as possible, which in turn lowers the risk of taking emergency, stress-fueled decisions at the end of the year.
Quarterly Planning vs. Annual Planning?
Going to work every day can often be rather mundane, and the lack of engagement from the leadership team will make your employees even less focused on their daily tasks. Annual planning offers everyone a set of goals that they must reach in 365 days, a period during which many may quit or join the company. It is not uncommon for employees to find new job opportunities every month which makes the working environment very fluid and unpredictable.
The interests of the market might also change, especially now – due to the looming influence of capricious and unreliable media trends, and the grip they have over possible customers. People nowadays have completely changed their spending habits, focusing on products that they see on social media and trusting companies that they get to interact with online.
The company itself may be subject to significant changes of direction, too. For example, foreign business opportunities could open new, international doors; or entirely new markets opening up.
In the fast-paced contemporary environment, all these dynamics not only render annual planning rather useless but also can make your company strategies feel outdated.
Quarterly planning, on the other hand, offers short-term goals that can be achieved with ease, and few things provide as much satisfaction to employees as instant gratification. Not only that, but quarterly planning will keep your company atop the rapidly-changing economic environment.
Quarterly Planning: Preparation is Key
Preparation is key to success. The time, place, and date of your next quarterly alignment meeting must be decided upon three months in advance so that you can find a Facilitator who will assist with the process at this crucial stage.
You might want them as either CEOs or members of teams worth being represented within their organization.
As we know there are many different types of people working for various companies around us which means it may not always be easy breaking into groups where all employees get together but if they’re willing enough then maybe some good ideas could come out!
The Framework of a Quarterly Planning Process
Understanding the importance of quarterly planning is not going to be enough to properly prepare for and organize a meeting, so here are some steps we recommend you take before switching
The best place to start is to prepare for the quarterly planning meeting by analyzing last quarter’s data and goals. Check for any areas that need improvement and make detailed notes of them. You can also ask the quarterly meeting attendees to prepare their theories and assumptions beforehand.
When all the attendees are present, make sure that everyone feels welcomed and heard. You have a variety of options, such as having everyone pitch in and say what their predictions are for the next quarter or encouraging them to share what they enjoyed the least during the last 3 months. You can also allow them to speak freely about the progress of the company since the last quarterly planning meeting.
After everyone has settled in and is engaged in the conversation, you can go about presenting, in broad terms, what you have achieved (or failed to achieve) during the last quarter. You can draw up last quarter’s data, statistics, and financial records to give a clearer idea of what you are currently working with.
Once everyone is aware of the up to speed, present solutions to issues that have arisen and agree on which areas of the company you must focus on and how. Having a quarterly planning template is very useful in such moments as it can help you and the attendees keep track of what has been discussed so far and the major goals for the next quarter.
A very effective way of discussing the solution is presenting the issue, along with the steps required to fix it, with reasoning and goals. You can do this for every major problem and then move on to the minor ones, while always allowing your attendees to share their ideas and solutions. When you are finished, also allow your attendees to bring forward the issues that they have noticed and find solutions to them.
You should allow yourself a couple of minutes to draw conclusions and ask your attendees to give feedback on the meeting either by rating it from 1 to 10 or by giving detailed opinions on how the meeting was conducted and how useful it was.
Quarterly Planning Automation
Do you know that you can automate this process? Quarter planning can be tedious and time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to feel that way. Once you automate your quarter planning you’ll find yourself saving hours of work.
When employees follow instructions in an automated workflow, it makes their work easier and faster. They also have fewer errors because they’re following well-established processes for doing so!
Using Flowster’s Quarterly Planning & Strategy Template, you can automate the process of creating repetitive tasks. You can edit and delete them at any time, and you can also place a suitable due date around these recurring tasks so that they recur at the desired time.
The best part is that this template is free. To get the free template click HERE.
Communicate Quarterly Plans Across the Company
When it comes to executing strategy, no one department can do it alone.
Sharing information and making sure everyone knows what’s going on is essential in creating trust. When employees feel like they’re being informed, then there will be more collaboration between them which results in better decisions for the company as a whole.
The more employees feel like they can give feedback and make changes, the better. This will help you identify areas where your company needs improvement to be successful going forward!
Check Your Plan Weekly in Your Weekly Team Meeting
Some of you may be wondering what the best time is to review your plans. The answer might not always depend on when a vacation or conference call will happen, but rather how often we can check in with each other during meetings as part-time team members! I’ll offer one example from my own experience:
We had set out our strategic goals at quarterly intervals starting Q3 last year (which was also when I began participating), so if any participant missed two consecutive quarters then they were considered “out.” This helped us stay focused even though there wasn’t always an enemy attack happening right then–and taught me patience by seeing success long before
Conclusions
The implementation of quarterly planning can be a great way to reduce the time spent on analyzing data and planning future developments. As this article points out, such a strategy can be incredibly beneficial for a company’s efficiency and future plans. By utilizing tools such as Flowster’s quarterly planning template, leaders can ensure that their teams are on track and that any potential issues are identified and addressed quickly.
By dividing the year into quarters, you allow yourself and your team to be more responsive to changes in the market and better handle any issues that may arise. This system also allows for a higher level of motivation among staff members, as they can see their progress throughout the year and feel a greater sense of accomplishment as they reach each new milestone. Have you tried this approach to leadership? What were the results? Let us know in the comments below.
Want more help with planning & strategy?
If you are looking for more pre-made playbooks, SOPs, and workflow templates to help you with your planning and strategy or anything to help you manage your business processes, then you need to check out Flowster.
Flowster makes it fast and easy to train new employees and delegate repetitive tasks to your team so you can scale faster. You can also get access to hundreds of pre-made templates, that will save you the endless hours it would take to create your processes from scratch.
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