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Whether you’re a startup or a large enterprise, having an effective organizational strategy is a recipe for business growth and success.
While your mission and vision statement describe your company’s destination, your strategy explains how you’ll get there. Think of it as a roadmap for how your business will utilize its resources to achieve long-term goals, navigate complex business environments and stay competitive.
Creating an organizational strategy can be daunting and how you approach it can make or break your business. That's why we've put together this comprehensive guide on how to create an organizational strategy that benefits your company.
So let’s dive right into it.
In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business environment, creating an organization's strategy offers numerous advantages. Let’s take a look at why you should create one.
When developing an organizational plan, you'll need to draft your long-term business goals and the various steps you’ll need to take to achieve them.
This process gives your company a sense of direction because all the steps you need to take and the path to follow have already been mapped out and prioritized.
Additionally, when your plan is broken down into corporate, business and functional levels, employees and stakeholders can focus on what has to be done to get the desired outcomes.
A critical part of developing a solid business strategy is simplifying tasks, allocating and utilizing resources and reducing waste. This activity helps you eliminate bottlenecks and make the most of technology and systems that increase efficiency and productivity.
But that’s not the only way strategy sessions help you improve business processes.
Organizational strategies thrive on communication across all levels. When stakeholders understand their roles and how they contribute to achieving the company's goals, the silo mentality is eliminated, which eliminates conflicts and improves team collaboration and overall team performance.
During the process of creating an organizational strategy, all the actions and roadmap for execution are laid out in advance. This approach streamlines the decision-making process across the board and minimizes the risk of conflicting or contradictory decisions.
Change is constant, even in a business environment. When you continually assess, adjust and revamp your organizational strategies, it will be easier for your business to
An effective organizational strategy helps you allocate resources effectively by prioritizing initiatives that support the company's long-term goals. By focusing on strategic objectives, organizations can avoid wasting resources on non-essential projects and ensure everyone is working towards common targets.
An effective organizational strategy explains how you will compete successfully in your industry. However, you need a solid understanding of your business landscape to navigate the challenges in your environment, establish a unique presence in your market and stay competitive.
Understanding your company's landscape is more about being aware of all the moving parts that can impact your business's performance and growth. Armed with this information, you can develop an effective strategy.
In this section, we’ll explain how to analyze your current business environment.
When developing your organizational strategy, you’ll need to take a step back and assess the bigger picture.
If you’re a new business, this means creating a vision, mission and value statement. This provides deeper insight into who you are, what your company represents and where you’re headed. But if you're an existing business revamping its strategy, you need to ask yourself:
Freshening up your vision and mission helps you remain dynamic, relevant and competitive in your niche.
Once you’ve assessed your organization at a high level, the next step is to drill down to internal and external factors that could impact your organization.
Let’s take a look at some of these critical factors.
The first step is to review the current organizational structure. Examine the current work design, departmentalization, roles and responsibilities. Also, evaluate the chain of command and how power is distributed across the organization using the template below.
Determine whether your strategy’s organizational structure supports efficient communication, collaboration and decision-making processes. Also, figure out whether it’s agile enough to accommodate innovative efforts and technological advancements.
You can do this by mapping out the workflow process to identify any redundancies, silos or bottlenecks that may exist. Consider how technology or remote work arrangements can disrupt your structure. This will help you identify areas to improve within the structure to enhance productivity and efficiency.
You can also compare your structure with that of your industry peers to identify any best practices.
Every organization has different processes and systems in place. Depending on your business type, this may include:
The goal of this step is to determine which processes and systems work effectively and which need improvements or updates.
Also, find out what critical tools, systems and processes your company is currently lacking. It also makes sense to prioritize which one is most important to enable you to allocate resources effectively.
Evaluate the skills and expertise of your current workforce to identify gaps that require training and development programs.
You can conduct your evaluation using different methods, such as:
Once you’ve completed the assessment, the next step is to address the skill gap.
One way to approach this is by conducting a full-cycle recruitment strategy. However, bridging the skills gap doesn’t just involve recruiting top talent. You can also close any skill gaps or address impending retirement by deploying strategies such as succession planning, training and development and employee engagement.
Reviewing financial reports and metrics to evaluate the organization's current financial status helps to create a strategy that supports sustainable growth and profitability.
When reviewing financial performance, take a look at important aspects such as:
Other critical financial metrics to look at include asset utilization, cost structure, capital expenditure and risk management.
During this exercise, identify trends, challenges and opportunities for cost savings or revenue growth to see areas where improvement is needed.
Monitoring your competitors and market dynamics gives you superpowers.
It equips you with valuable insights to make informed decisions, stay agile and thrive in a rapidly changing market.
When you're conducting a market analysis, use the following strategies to maximize your findings for a more rounded review.
For more help on how to conduct a detailed market analysis, read this article. It includes tips, templates and tools to help you get started.
Stakeholders at all levels impact your organizational strategy as their interests can sometimes clash with one another.
Managing stakeholders’ interests is a delicate balancing act and you can’t wing it. Every stakeholder's interests must be protected.
Collect input from employees, customers, suppliers, and other key players to help you capitalize on growth opportunities and long-term success during the strategy development process.
The insights gathered here can also strengthen your case during a presentation to the board of directors, showing that your strategy is backed by real stakeholder data and broad alignment.
You can collect data from various stakeholders through:
Government policies, laws and regulations are subject to change. Your business strategy and industry can be impacted when laws are made, modified or removed. These laws may include, but are not limited to:
More importantly, adapt your strategies to the regulatory landscape and boundaries the law sets. This will help you minimize risks, ensure compliance and seize opportunities that arise within your niche.
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) is a popular tool for strategic planning that helps businesses assess their internal strengths weaknesses, external opportunities and threats. It’s divided into four quadrants as represented in this diagram.
Companies that use SWOT analysis can make informed decisions and develop effective strategies. It’s also effective for goal-setting, assessing and managing risk and achieving a competitive edge.
These are the internal attributes and resources your organization has that help you achieve a competitive advantage or smash your goals. Strengths include a strong brand reputation, a talented workforce, innovative products or services, efficient processes and financial stability.
Weaknesses are also internal factors ( characteristics or limitations) that hinder your ability to perform effectively or meet your goals. Weaknesses include inadequate resources, outdated technology, poor leadership, or a lack of market presence.
Opportunities are external factors and low-hanging fruits in the business environment you can leverage to drive business success. These could include emerging market trends, changes in consumer behavior, technological advancements, new partnerships, or untapped market segments.
Threats, like opportunities, are external factors, but they represent potential challenges or risks that can hurt the organization. Threats include economic downturns, increased competition, regulatory changes, natural disasters, or negative publicity.
Visme’s SWOT analysis generator makes this process a breeze. With our intuitive editor and extensive template library, you can easily create and share your SWOT analysis with your team, contractors, clients and more.
SWOT analysis is more of a collaborative process that requires brainstorming. With Visme you and your team can brainstorm with ease on a limitless canvas that grows with your strategy.
Take advantage of our online whiteboard tool and collaboration tools to ensure key team members are not left out of the process. Team members can leave their ideas, draw annotations, resolve and reply to comments and much more.
Bonus: We’ve created a detailed blog post on conducting a SWOT analysis, plus 31 editable templates to get you on the right path.
There are three organizational strategy types: corporate–level, business-level and functional-level. Each of these strategies can be created separately with their own strategic goals, actionable steps and milestones, which feed into the big picture.
These individual strategies form the building blocks and are important in guiding the functional units that make up the organization.
In this section, we’ll discuss how to create an effective organizational strategy, plus organizational strategy examples. These steps can also be applied to create corporate, business and functional-level strategies.
An effective organizational strategy should seek to answer the following questions:
For goal setting, we recommend adopting the SMART goals framework to set you up for success.
SMART goals should have all of the following elements:
Using the SMART goal framework, your objective may be to increase your annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 30% within the next fiscal year by expanding into new industry verticals and improving customer retention.
After setting goals, the next step is laying out a plan for how you'll achieve them. This step is split into three main parts.
To achieve the revenue goal in the examples we shared above, your strategies could include:
Using the organizational strategy example we shared earlier, here's a snapshot of what your action plan may look like
Made with Visme Infographic Maker
Breaking down strategies into tactics and actionable steps like these allows for better planning and flawless execution of your organizational strategy.
Now that you have laid out a strategy and action plan, how will you track the success and effectiveness of your organizational strategy? That’s where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in handy.
Besides helping you track performance, KPIs provide a way to determine whether or not the strategy is on track.
Keep in mind that KPIs aren’t one size fits all. It depends on your strategy, industry, business size and a whole lot of other factors. For example, the KPIs for measuring your financial scorecard will differ from those for people, processes, operations, customer success and other departments.
Using our example, here are some KPIs you can track.
Provide stakeholders and colleagues with a snapshot of your business performance and goals using the template below. With Visme’s data visualization software, you can present data using charts, graphs, maps and widgets. And if you have data outside of Visme, you can easily import and use that for data storytelling—all with a few clicks.
Change is inevitable, so your organizational strategy shouldn’t be set in stone.
When creating your organizational change strategy, ensure it is flexible to adapt and change when needed, responsive to market conditions, do scenario planning and aligned with organizational culture and values.
For example, you may need to pivot, adjust goals and try new approaches based on new information, customer feedback, or changes in the market landscape. This can be daunting, especially when you have limited resources to accommodate these shifts.
So, how do you navigate these challenges?
As a leader, the buck stops with you. You’re not just responsible for the strategic planning but to ensure it’s implemented and successful.
You’ll also need to create a collaborative and open work environment where team members can do their best work.
Here are some ways you can do this.
1. Work with team members to create a shared mission, vision and strategy goals that inspire and guide everyone.
2. Prioritize active listening, empathy and understanding to establish rapport and trust with their team members, customers and stakeholders.
3. Establish open and transparent communication channels. Use collaboration tools like Slack or project management software to share updates, progress and documents related to the strategy. Also, create a communication plan to eliminate silos and communication gaps
4. Clearly assign roles and define responsibilities to team members and encourage input from everyone. Conduct strategy workshops or brainstorming sessions involving cross-functional teams to gather diverse perspectives.
5. Empower team members with the resources and training required to execute assigned tasks with pinpoint accuracy.
6. Evaluate your team member's performance and provide regular positive and constructive feedback to them to help them grow and develop professionally.
Communicate your goals and plans to your stakeholders with this stunning communication plan template below.
Struggling to come up with ideas for your communication plan? Take advantage of Visme’s AI writer to generate new content ideas or proofread the existing text. Just submit a prompt that’s related to your subject and you’ll get results in seconds.
Figure out the skills and competencies you need to execute your strategy. This will help you identify skill gaps and steps that need to be taken to close them. This may include training programs, succession planning programs, mentorship initiatives and formal education sponsorships. With the help of this training plan template, you can build a strong organizational learning strategy and boost employee engagement and retention.
Visual aids are effective in driving learners’ interest and engagement. By adding animations and interactive elements and design assets like icons, graphics and illustrations, you can create an interactive learning experience.
Visme has a comprehensive library of stock photos you can choose from. You can also use our AI image generator to whip up professional-quality images, art, illustrations and other graphics.
In a study by Deloitte, 86% of business leaders admit succession planning is not only urgent but a top priority. Set up a reliable succession plan and groom top talents within your ranks to fill critical positions using the template below.
After you’ve broken down your strategic initiative into tasks, you must determine the resources needed to execute them.
Multiple resources go into executing your strategic initiatives, such as financial, human, technological, physical and intangible resources.
Write down all of the resources required to execute your action plans. Estimate what each resource will cost and place them in order of priority if you’re on a tight budget.
When allocating resources, it's important to prioritize initiatives that have the highest potential impact on your long-term objectives. Tools like the Eisenhower Matrix can help you categorize initiatives based on their urgency and importance.
Next, develop a budget with estimates for each period (month, quarter or year) using the template below. Make sure to accommodate unexpected changes that may happen along the way.
After creating your budget, you can share it online with stakeholders or simply download it in multiple formats and share it offline.
Now that you have all the resources you need, it’s time to get stuff done. Depending on your strategy, various models and frameworks are available to ensure flawless execution.
You can use models like the Balanced Scorecard, Six Sigma Agile Methodology, Waterfall and Critical Path Method to ensure flawless execution. The right model depends on your organization's specific needs and goals.
Create timelines, milestones and deadlines to help you track progress and ensure you're on schedule. In addition, create progress reports or status reports to give key stakeholders a snapshot of your progress.
Keep your reports on brand with Visme’s brand wizard. Just input your URL and the wizard will pull up your brand assets so you can add them to your document.
Easily customize your reports for different stakeholders with dynamic fields. Place custom fields in different documents and change the content with a single click when sending to multiple recipients.
The process of creating and implementing an organizational strategy isn’t all sunshine and roses. Along the way, you may encounter obstacles that could hinder your ability to achieve your goals. These challenges could be internal (e.g., resource constraints, lack of expertise) or external (e.g., market shifts, regulatory changes).
Overcoming challenges and adapting strategies is a dynamic and iterative process. It’s about being flexible and resilient enough to adjust when faced with unexpected obstacles or changing circumstances.
Once you’ve identified these setbacks, you can deploy problem-solving methods such as brainstorming, root cause analysis, the fishbone method, Standard Operating Procedures and more.
Solving these problems may require modifying your strategies accordingly as challenges appear and reallocating resources to support the revised strategies such as shifting budgets or technology to where they are most needed.
Continue to monitor progress toward your goals and keep an eye on strategies that are not working as intended. This allows you to detect challenges early and make timely adjustments.
Finally, consider each challenge as a valuable learning experience and use it to improve their future decision-making processes.
An organizational strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how an organization will achieve its long-term goals and objectives. It serves as a roadmap for making decisions, allocating resources and guiding the actions and initiatives of the organization as a whole.
An organizational strategy has several essential elements, including
The organizational strategic approach refers to the framework an organization deploys to develop and execute its strategies as well as guide decision-making, resource allocation and actions to achieve its goals and objectives.
Depending on their size, industry and goals, there are several different organizational strategic approaches that organizations can use, such as:
The three levels of organizational strategy are
Here are the five main types of organizational strategy you can use:
Developing an effective organizational strategy is a staple for any business that wants to achieve long-term success. Companies that get it right enjoy improved performance, business growth and competitive advantage.
Keep in mind that an effective organizational plan isn’t set in stone. It’s an iterative and collaborative process that requires ongoing attention. That’s why it’s a good idea to use a tool like Visme that helps you easily handle every part of the process.
With Visme’s wide range of customizable templates, you can create strategies and plans for all areas of your company, including sales, marketing, operations, human resources, training, communication and more. Facilitate collaboration and communication and get stakeholders’s buy-in using our design collaboration tool.
So, don't wait—contact our sales team to start crafting your winning organizational strategy and watch your business thrive!
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