Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Get Started on Action Planning

Our platform makes it super easy to take all the data you’ve gathered and transform it into meaningful actions. 

Here are some questions you could ask yourself before you begin:

How Does My Plan Feed Into My Wider People Objectives?

Your action plan doesn’t stand in a vacuum. You need to make sure it makes sense in the wider context of your HR or People strategy. Otherwise, your team might be pulling in different directions. 

Considerations:

• What are the most important areas for me to focus on? 

• Have I identified any key weaknesses or easy wins from my surveys?

• What are the key objectives for my wider organisation and how will my plans feed into these?

Actions you could take:

Involve key stakeholders in your action planning conversations early to help streamline your process. You might also want to map out all the potential focus areas before pinpointing the most important and pressing ones. Our enriched insights or our customer success team help you identify what sort of improvements will have the biggest impact. 

What Data Do I Need Before I Get Started?

It’s important to know whether you have all the data you need to get started with your action plan. You don’t want to go crashing in, if you haven’t identified the key pain points and objectives for your action plan. 

Considerations:

• Would it be helpful for you to do a deep dive employee survey to make sure you’ve isolated exactly what your people need, in the areas you’re hoping to look at? 

• Do you need to supplement your quantitative data with qualitative insights? 

Actions you could take:

Implement always-on listening, such as our Employee Voice tool. Using our Close The Feedback Loop tool can also help you gain further insights. Our Cross-Theme Analysis tool could also help you isolate comments which pertain to your focus area. 

Consider what other engagement software you may need to integrate with your HR suite for maximum impact.

Who Should Be Involved In My Action Plan?

We work with some very lean people teams, but even if you have a whole host of you, we know HR and People specialists are busy people. Involving other stakeholders and potential allies in the planning process will save some headaches later on. 

Considerations:

• Who in my organisation has skills or experience within this area?

• Who are the key stakeholders at board or leadership levels? Would they want to be involved?

• Could I involve team members from across the organisation?

Actions you could take:

Set up focus groups of individuals from across the organisation. You might also want to involve other team members, for example, people from your finance team who will need to sign off on a budget. People are more accountable for things they have played a part in creating.

What Will Timelines Look Like For This Project?

Creating clear timelines will not only help you and your team dedicate the correct amount of attention to a project, but it will also help you communicate with your wider organisation that you’re acting on their feedback. Your team will be eager to know what is happening and this can keep up momentum, too. 

Considerations:

• How much time and bandwidth do I/my team/other stakeholders have to devote to this?

• Who needs to sign off before we can implement any plans and what does their availability look like?

Actions you could take:

Ensure you check in with stakeholders to ensure they have the necessary time and availability. Creating a clear plan in advance will help manage capacity.  

What Might Stop Us From Achieving Our Goals?

It might seem negative to think about roadblocks before you even start planning. But identifying where there might be bumps in the process before you get too far along will help you create contingency plans. 

Considerations:

• What resources will I need to implement this?

• What restrictions will we be working with? 

• What other projects are happening simultaneously which could conflict with this work?

Actions you could take:

Create best-case scenarios and contingency plans to help minimise the impact of potential roadblocks. 

What Does Success Look Like?

Having a clear idea of what success looks like, when it will happen, and how you will communicate this to your team from the outset will help you to supercharge your people strategy. Success comes in many shapes and forms, so try to think just beyond the financials.

Considerations: 

• What would be my ideal outcome from this piece of work? 

• What are my people looking for us to deliver?

• What would be the tangible outputs from this project?

• What would be the ideal impacts from this piece of work?

Actions you could take:

Sharing what success would look like with your organisation early in the process can be really helpful for showing you’re taking accountability for delivering on feedback. 

Creating Your Action Plan

Once you’ve considered all these questions, you’ll be ready to start formalising your action plan. Although you might not have every single answer, you’ll have a crack team around you and the beginnings of a solution. We’re with you every step of the way. Within our platform our Knowledge Hub is full of information which will help you go from insight to actions. 

Within the Knowledge Hub you’ll find a helpful framework to help contain all the answers to these questions and build your action plan. We also have a whole section on action planning to help you focus your attention and come up with an empathetic and strategic plan. 

Our platform empowers managers to drive action plans at a local level, as well as supporting HR and leadership teams in creating holistic organisation-wide data-led strategies. Although teams drive their own actions, The Happiness Index supports in the development of frameworks to ensure efficacy and efficiency. Our Customer Service team works with your organisation to achieve your goals.