No matter your organization's size or industry, it’s essential to ensure that you have an organizational strategy structure, and process. When configured correctly, it sets your business up for success to keep growing and achieving company goals and objectives.

Creating an organizational strategy ensures everyone is on the same page. This aligns your team’s efforts and interests regarding investments, priority setting, and overall metrics. This can help improve productivity in an organization, as everyone knows what they're working towards.

Definition organizational strategy

What is organizational strategy? An organizational strategy is a business blueprint that specifies how resources will be allocated to guarantee operational sustainability and business growth.

‍Strategies set longer-term objectives and define the path a company plans to pursue within its competitive landscape. It defines what relevant goals, objectives, and activities the company should be looking into.

Additionally, it also specifies what resources will be invested into it. Organizations can set plans within their strategy that have to be completed in the shorter term, typically within monthly/quarterly periods.

See the completion of these plans as building stones towards achieving the overall strategic direction, typically on a timeline from 1 to 5 years.With that in mind, it’s important to reiterate the importance of having a clear and well-laid organizational strategy.

This allows your team and departments to align efforts and resources through a shared vision of long-term goals, and resource availability. This can be especially relevant in remote work environments, where you don't see everyone on a daily basis.

Make your Organizational Strategy SMART and easily accessible

The previous section provides the foundation to define organizational strategies and explains why they are essential to any business. Next up, it’s time to dive deeper into what information is compiled into an organization’s strategy.

Organizational strategies have to be SMART

To create an effective organization strategy, an acronym to remember would be SMART:

1. Specific

There must be a clear outcome. Articulate clearly what you are trying to achieve and leave no room for interpretation so everyone is on the same page. For example, you want to grow your month-over-month (MoM) business signups or reach a certain sales target.

2. Measurable

Have a quantifiable goal that your team should achieve. Define which data metric you want to prioritize and attach a number to it. In the example of MoM business signups, you might want to reach >=10000.

3. Attainable/Achievable

Consider current resources and metrics. What different activities are you going to invest in to reach your goal? Let’s say you currently have 1000 signups MoM. To what extent are you able to scale current activities or have the bandwidth to engage in new growth projects?

You can use this step to break down the number into different resource investments.

4. Relevant

Make sure that the organizational strategy is relevant to the mission and vision of your team. In this example of MoM signups, growth is often seen as a positive metric, but your business might want to focus on diversifying its offerings or upselling current customers depending on the organizational mission and vision.

5. Time-bound

Along with breaking up the goal into segments, setting deadlines or target dates to help you stay on track as it lets you create the building stones of your strategy: yearly, bi-annual, quarterly, or monthly plans. In this case,

Establishing the different activities within a plan on your project management or task management tool will help you visualize your strategy's temporal aspect.

Make sure your organizational strategy is easily accessible with task boards

Common organizational strategies are one-and-done. Teams forget about them and measure their efforts only once the deadline of the strategy has arrived. This can become an issue when team efforts slowly become misaligned with the organizational strategy.

Make sure that work stays aligned with your ultimate objectives by keeping the strategy present and integrated with day-to-day activities. Effective organizational strategies should be easily accessible and visible throughout the timeline wherein it is implemented.

Instead of using never-ending PowerPoint presentations, complicated Excel models, or multi-page documents, you can use a task board. Task boards are available in multiple remote work tools and are an easy solution to visualize your company’s goals and see who contributes to what metric.

Task boards are often easier to access for team members and make staying organized at work easier. They are also better incorporated into current workflows, and more intuitive to manage, especially compared to more traditional tools. We’ll quickly explain how in the next section.

Define your organizational strategy on Rock in a few simple steps

Now that you know how to create SMART, dynamic, and easily accessible strategies, it’s time to give them a proper home.

Create a space on Rock for your organizational strategy and invite all major stakeholders to join. Besides key decision makers within your team, you should also invite investors, mentors, and other advisors that provide valuable input into your organizational strategy.

Next up, open the Tasks mini-app. It includes full-fledged task management functionality with list, board, and calendar view. You can change the names of lists in a space to something that aligns with your organizational strategy.

For example, you might want to separate them into departments: marketing, sales, accounting, customer success, etc. Alternatively, you could also separate them by outcome: acquisition, retention, and upselling.

Now that you have your lists, you can add the different elements of each pillar with a dedicated task card. Individual tasks can be a representation of each SMART goal that you are trying to achieve within a timeframe.

You can set deadlines, assignees, labels, add a description, followers, and more. It’s also possible to leave comments under each card if necessary to discuss progress, challenges, or victories.

Now that you have your organizational strategy fully defined on Rock, you can use the Tasks mini-app to view progress through filters and deadlines. Additionally, you can discuss progress and other organizational strategy-related topics with chat, topics, and notes in every space.

For example, if you want to start a discussion with everyone in a space regarding a certain metric, you can just @mention the respective task and allow everyone to quickly catch up on what you’re talking about.

If you’d like to store certain conversations, you can also convert messages into task comments with Tap to Organize.

Connect your organizational strategy to day-to-day workflows

Everyone can now see and engage with your organizational strategy. People can leave comments and discuss up to the most granular level with comments on tasks.

But that’s only the start of it. Remember this part mentioned earlier: “Teams forget about them and measure their efforts only once the deadline of the strategy has arrived”.

Specific communication strategies can be implemented to avoid that.There are two ways to do this: labels or cross-space @mentions.

Implement your organizational strategy throughout your workflows with labels

Labels are a strong ally when making sure that work is aligned with your strategy. Try connecting each task in a project space with an organizational goal or objective you’re trying to accomplish. This also makes asynchronous work easier, as employees don't have to sync up with a manager in order to align tasks.

Can’t think of a task being connected to any strategic points? Then it might help to either rethink the task to be completed or one of the pillars in your organizational strategy. You can also filter by labels, which allows anyone to quickly check what activities are currently in the pipeline for each organizational objective.

How to leverage cross-space @mentions to achieve organizational strategies

Remember how you can @mention anything in a chat (i.e. tasks, notes, topics). You can do the same for tasks across spaces. This can be a great way to connect tasks to different elements within your organizational strategy.

In your organizational strategy space, you can add a checklist or bullet point list with all the tasks that went into improving a certain metric. When the deadline passes, you will have access to all the documentation and discussions that went into the current output for that metric.

On a project space level, you can @mention the task from the organizational strategy space in the checklist, description or comment section of a space. This way everyone can quickly navigate from individual activities to the overall strategy you are trying to accomplish.

Use this strategy to keep a shared vision of the what, when, who and why.

Conclusion: Be transparent with your organizational strategy

Many organizations store their organizational strategy where it’s not easily accessible. When this happens, the daily projects and tasks you begin to work on become misaligned with the goals and objectives of your strategy.

Transparency helps keep a shared vision and might even encourage more cross-departmental communication.

A multi-modal task management platform like Rock makes it easy for organizations to manage tasks, documentation, and discussions regarding projects and strategy in one place. This allows any stakeholder to check up on the company’s progress towards every goal and what to-do's have been created for each goal.

A transparent and accessible organizational strategy also makes it easier for teams to pivot in case specific projects are not working or are not generating the intended outcome. This can improve work performance over the long term and make sure everyone is focused on what generates the highest impact.

Try Rock for free now.

Whatever your company size or needs are, Rock is there to help you ensure that your organizational strategy has a home and that your company’s projects and tasks are well-aligned within those strategies. You can create an account and invite unlimited people for free. Get started today!