You have already proposed a good strategy for the upcoming training program, but you don’t get the result you expect. When this happens, chances are, your strategy does not balance with your operation.
Most eminent organisations know that balancing strategy, purpose, and operation are a critical method that can turn process into sustainable profit. Laurent Chevreux and team, for example, believed that developing success within a company is a problem if there is no strategy and operation that are time-bound and target specific results. To illustrate, during the hiring process, you have implemented an autonomous strategy with the help of application and AI. And yet, you fail to bring in right candidates due to unspecified goal and lack of strategic operations. Consequently, hiring process run but unable to get talents for the right position. In the end, it will only waste cost, time, and energy on such case.
See also: 7 Steps to Implementing a Social Marketing Strategy in HR
So, how to get strategy or operation work for you? Or the right question, how to balance operation and strategy for company success?
Whether it is for hiring, development, training, company culture, leadership, or any goals, you should understand and specify your goals before deciding the strategy and operation you want to use. Take a training goal for example, then consider these questions.
Note: you might add some more questions that are likely in line with your main goal, as well as be critical in answering them.
After understanding and deciding the goals, then you can create operation and strategy to execute your decisions. But before that, you must have knowledge of what strategy and operation first.
Strategy and operation might sound interchangeable but they actually serve very different purposes. According to BSC Designer, strategic goals are more specific, measurable, and focus on long term goals, while operational goals are the same but it is actionable and focuses on short-term goals.
For example, within 2 years, you aim to get the whole team to be digital-ready, thus, it is included in strategic goal. Meanwhile, you also aim to train employees to be able to answer queries faster and more professional, hence, it includes in your operation.
| Strategy | Operation |
| Do things differently and do it right | Do things better and do it right |
| Focus on long-term goals | Focus on short-term goals |
| Align with company vision/mission | Align with strategic goals |
| Give coherence to operational goals | Give workable execution/plan to achieve strategic goals |
| Create long-term profitability | Create short-term profitability |
| Game of top managers | Game of line managers |
The crucial part of aligning both, come back to the first tip, is by setting as well as understand the core vision and mission of your organisation, then review it yearly. After that, while you do your homework to acknowledge those, you should multitask by designing strategy then put it into action with operations.
When designing your strategy, consider things that should be made available either by the manager or the whole organisation. Pick three of the five things that can likely target your vision better.
When pertaining strategy to action, make sure to prepare needed resources and give understanding to your employees such as what they can do to help achieve your strategy and purpose. Then, it should be a team or individual objectives. Let them discuss an actionable plan and execute it with resources you provide for them.
Read also: Advantages & Disadvantages of Matrix Strategy for Organisation
