Employees who understand their roles and how they contribute to overall company success tend to be more invested and feel more valued. That engagement can lead to more productive and satisfied employees.
One way to proactively ensure employees feel fulfilled is by creating a strategy on an operational plan template, a tool that can propel your company’s short and long-term success. Before we share what this template looks like, however, it’s always good to refresh ourselves on its purpose and how it can drive results.
What is an operational plan template?
An operational plan template defines company goals and creates detailed outlines for how each employee, team, or department contributes to efforts. A smaller business may use these templates to outline an employee’s daily tasks while larger organizations might create outlines on a department or team level.
An operational plan template provides a framework for detailing your organization’s daily tasks and connecting them with company goals.Why should you use operational plan templates?
Operational plan templates provide a transparent view of your company’s daily procedures and highlights how each department’s roles contribute to a smooth operation. By using an operational plan template, you can understand how your company ticks and develop a solid structure to ensure all cogs move in the same direction. An operational plan template:
- Helps define employee roles and how they contribute to your organization’s goals
- Provides detailed instructions on daily operating tasks
- Creates an understanding of how different departments’ roles come together to achieve goals
- Potentially leads to higher job satisfaction for increased employee productivity
- Defines short and long-term goals
- Provides guidance on realistic deadlines for specific goals
- Helps you draw conclusions about resource needs and make financial projections
- Allows everyone within your organization to always be on the same page
- Creates transparency within your organization, leading to greater trust and loyalty among employees
You can increase the benefits of operational plan templates by including as much detail as possible when designing or using them. Though you may also want to create custom templates for specific uses, having examples on-hand can help inspire which areas to focus on for your business operation.
What are some examples of operational plan template
Operational plans are important to businesses in a variety of contexts. An entrepreneur might create an operational plan so they have a series of guideposts and a better understanding of the company mission, vision, and values when launching a startup. A well-established business might use an operational plan as an overall path for the future. The following operational plan templates can help you create a robust business structure:
Single-use operational plan template
You can apply a single-use Operational Plan Template to goals, visions, or transitions outside normal operations. You might create a single-use operational plan when you start your company, expand to an additional location, or undergo rebranding. Other goals that may call for this type of operational plan include:
- Expanding your company’s online presence
- Offering your products or services online
- Hitting a specific sales milestone, such as reaching your thousandth sale
- Closing any skill gaps in your existing workforce
- Increasing efficiency in a specific department
Having a plan for one-time or short-term company goals can help you define, achieve, and measure success. Individual departments may also create single-use operational plans to drive specific efforts. Human resources, for example, may create a hiring plan.
Ongoing operational plan template
An ongoing operational plan template defines long-term organizational goals. It can create transparency into how your company delegates and achieves daily tasks under normal conditions. The beauty of an ongoing operational plan is that you can update it as you achieve goals or gather new research and metrics that support more informed decisions. For example, if you conduct new research that determines that one of your goals cannot be met with the resources you have available, you can update your ongoing operational plan to indicate the challenges and steps to take to get your organization’s goals back on track. An existing operational plan can easily grow and change with your organization.
Map your road to success with monday.com’s operational plan template
Our customizable template lets you create documents that suit your organization’s unique needs and goals, whether you’re working toward a one-time objective or detailing ongoing daily operations. Pair the template with other work productivity tools on monday.com to make business planning streamlined and effective in real-time. On monday.com you can:
- Automate recurring tasks: monday.com lets you automate routine tasks to make better use of valuable resources, such as notifying managers when you complete a task, saving on time and resources.
- Integrate essential tools into one platform: If your company uses multiple tools for project management, planning, or metrics — such as Slack, Google Calendar, Data Studio and more — accessing them from a single Work OS saves time and prevents confusion.
- Collaborate with your teams: Our Work OS allows you to seamlessly collaborate with your teams or departments in-person or remotely through updates, tagging functions, automations, and other features built for fostering communication
- Monitor performance: Our project monitoring dashboard lets you view all tasks and projects from a single screen, making it easier to see where you stand on goals and deadlines.
Using the above features plus several others, our operational plan template pairs help you better understand your goals and map the road to success in detail. But of course, an operational plan template isn’t the only business planning resource necessary for success. There are several other templates that can be more useful for specific applications.
Related templates to operational plan templates
An operational plan template can help you detail daily tasks and assign them to employees. From there, other operations templates can help you increase productivity and manage specific aspects of your plan. Let’s take a look at a few supplementary templates.
Facilities request template
Your facilities management and operational teams are constantly in motion, working hard to go over questions, complaints, and work requests. Our facilities request template can help ease their workload by streamlining requests. Use the facilities request template to:
- Centralize facilities requests: Compiling all facilities requests in one place makes managing things easier. On monday.com, relevant employees can check on the status of requests, saving time on back-and-forth emailing.
- Track completion time for each request: Our facilities request template has a time tracking column showing how long a request took to complete. This can help you set internal processes and future expectations accordingly.
- Track every ticket from one place: View all your tickets and where they currently stand. You can use this information to help identify bottlenecks so you can apply proactive solutions to workflows and processes.
Finance request template
Our finance request template helps you stay on track by setting deadlines and receiving notifications for due dates. It also helps you gather finance requests in a single location for an at-a-glance financial summary, while color-coding and other visual cues can indicate priority requests.
Business plan template
Business and operational plans work hand-in-hand to support your company’s vision and goals. You can use a business plan template to outline your goals and detail how the company will work toward them. Our business plan template provides a breakdown of every applicable section for easier plan creation.
A business plan and operational plan serve similar purposes, however, they’re two separate but complementary documents.
A business plan details long-term goals and the tasks or milestones necessary to achieve them. An operational plan details the daily tasks required to be successful with long-term goals. Get more information about what’s included in an operational plan in our FAQs below.
FAQs about operational plan templates
What should you include in an operational plan?
An operational plan should include:
- An executive summary that provides an at-a-glance overview
- Clear, well-defined goals and objectives and time frames for them
- The day-to-day activities required to bring those goals to fruition
- Quality standards and key performance indicators to help measure success
- A process for monitoring progress
- Requirements for staffing and resources
Ongoing operational plans should focus on the daily details required to keep the company moving forward. One-time operational plans should concentrate only on specific short-term objectives.
What is an operational plan example?
An example of an operational plan is a document created by a clothing manufacturer to lay out a plan to increase its presence on social media. The company may have noticed that referrals come from social media and it wants to capitalize on this trend. The basis of its operational plan may include:
- Objective: Increase social media presence
- Category: Single-use plan
- Required resources: Social media training, contest prizes, additional dedicated man hours, advertisement funds
- Tasks: Run A/B testing on social media advertisements, research trending post formats to recreate them, plan and execute referral or engagement contests, increase company engagement on social media with fans/customers
From this starting point, the operational plan would detail each of those tasks, including how to allot resources and employees. For an outline of what to include in an operational plan, check out monday.com’s operational plan template.
How do you write an operational plan?
To write an operational plan, you should:
- Identify important goals, milestones, or objectives
- Determine key initiatives to help achieve those goals
- Define key assumptions you’re making about challenges
- Decide how you’ll measure success
- Clearly outline responsibilities and tasks
- Assign responsibilities and tasks to team members
- Create reasonable deadlines
- Define necessary resources to accomplish tasks
- Provide training as necessary
Align daily tasks and goals with monday.com’s operational plan template
An operational plan template lets you align daily tasks with your company’s short- and long-term goals. Using the template simplifies plan creation by ensuring you don’t miss a single detail.
Once your plan is ready, put it into action with our powerful Work OS. Ensure team members can see tasks and other information in views that work for them, and manage assignments and workflow automations on monday.com to make it easier to complete the tasks required to reach your goals.
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