You’d be surprised how often we see day-to-day activities disconnected from long-term vision.
The culprit? Failed execution of a plan. Inherently, a strategic plan is designed to help bring together the key day-to-day actions and longer-term priorities that tally up to achieve your vision of success.
We emphasize the importance of daily actions because they add up to weekly actions, monthly achievements and failures, quarterly results – and ultimately annual performance.
To help bridge the gap between short- and long-term targets, we recommend implementing MetricMondaysTM into your organization’s meeting structure.
What is a MetricMondayTM?
A MetricMonday is a retrospective review of your organization’s performance for the previous week. It is the heartbeat of making an agile process work for your organization. We recommend integrating it into your weekly staff meeting to review business health metrics and drive your weekly priority setting.
4 Steps to Start Leveraging MetricMondaysTM
Step 1: Identify weekly targets that ladder up to annual performance and overall organizational health.
The pivot point for success is identifying a handful of leading metrics to drive your weekly actions and support overall organizational health. Lead with these types of metrics:
- Metrics that quantitatively indicate performance against your overall goals.
- Establish weekly data and reporting processes. Keep it simple, but you want weekly data.
- Create metrics with weekly performance targets.
Free Guide to Establish Your Weekly Health Metrics
Step 2: Use 30 mins of your weekly staff meeting to report on performance and set action.
Reporting on performance data weekly provides you with objective, real-time results to adapt to real-time shifts happening. Weekly management will drive planning processes in the future. Instead of another meeting, take over part of your staff meeting. Here’s how:
- Keep it to 7 to 10 overall metrics. Understand teams might have deeper levels of data.
- Assign teams and/or individuals to own, report on and recommend action as needed.
- Set expectations that the reporting is about overall performance, not individual accountability.
Step 3: Make weekly progress against the long-term performance visible to all.
Accountability for visible results and deliverables will keep remote teams effective and productive. Use a dashboard that shows weekly results, historical performance and most importantly, progress against goal. Specifically, use a dashboard that:
- Is accessible to everyone inside your organization – remotely and from anywhere.
- Can reflect current performance, year-to-date performance and the delta to the end-of-year goal.
- Is easy for teams to update on the fly with or without data automation.
Step 4: Hold a quarterly "Retrospective & Refresh" to deep dive on performance.
Planning one-time per year with quarterly reviews is a thing of the past. A weekly review process needs a pause once a quarter to deep dive on performance. So, replace the second staff meeting of each quarter with a multi-hour deep dive on performance. Use a "Retrospective" process to:
- Determine where you performed well and where you fell short. Most importantly, to ask why on both achievements and low performance.
- Refresh weekly targets for the next quarter, as needed.
- Establish team priorities and individual commitments.
- Ask if anything in the environment changed to warrant a shift in your overall strategy.
Need More Help? Download our free guide for MetricMondaysTM.
Ready to implement MetricMondaysTM in your organization? Get our free full guide on how to establish your own. In this guide, we’ll cover:
- Why You Should Leverage MetricMondaysTM
- Frequently Asked Questions about MetricMondaysTM
- How to Adapt Your Current Plan to Narrow the Focus
- Establishing a Weekly Schedule for MetricMondaysTM
- How to Run Your MetricMondaysTM
