How do you deliver that New Year Resolution?
Personal resolutions tend to be about going to the gym more or eating less, but what about in business?
The beginning of the year tends to be when leaders review their vision for their business and set annuals goals/targets. But what then? Close your eyes and hope?
Within a business every single employee must understand how they fit in to the delivery of the company’s goals and for the business to succeed each and every one must buy into the goals. Without this you have void between the leadership’s vision and the rest of the company.
So how do you fill that Avoid?
This is a challenge our leadership team faced in late 2019 so we set out on a journey to map out how we go from a top level vision to having agreed objectives set for each and every one of our 240 team members.
We started with our vision, our mantra that described what we do as an agency. For us this was a challenge as we have several different expertise’s that are rarely found within one agency. We started over 50 years ago as a brochure agency and then 20 years ago we started to pioneer the use of CGI in marketing communications within the automotive industry. With the growth of the internet we were soon leading the way in building and creating content for highly complex vehicle configurators. More recently we have collaborated with Epic Games using UE4 to bring immersive experiences to market. With all these skills we risk trying to say too much. We finally setting upon the line ‘We bring products to live through high quality visualisation, configuration, personalisation, engaging storytelling and immersive experiences’. A bit of a mouthful, but it does what it says on the tin.
So this gave us the foundation upon which to develop our goals. We had five areas what we wanted to set goals. They were business performance, clients, staff, innovation, and delivery. We developed top line goals that were not too specific and did not have metric that were immediately measurable. “What! “I hear you cry, “where are the SMART goals”. Hold on, don’t worry we applied the SMART approach but not at this stage. Our idea was that the Leadership Team set top line goals and then the topic experts within our Senior Management Teams created SMART objectives to support the goals. This way the Leadership Team set the overall direction and the Senior Management Team could refine them and set the more specific elements.
From there we cascaded the objectives across all the departments so we could empower team leaders and individual team members to develop their own objectives that supported the direction that the agency is going. We are now at the stage of formalising each team member’s objectives.
I can’t yet tell you whether this has worked but the initial feedback from the team has been very positive and people feel engaged and part of the agencies plans.
Watch this space for how it goes.
by Richard Wright
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