Everyone makes strategic decisions in their households to help things run smoothly. Chances are high that you have some actionable plan for your household that details when you’ll pay your bills, how you’ll accomplish chores, and when errands or appointments need to take place. Some people choose to keep their household plan in their head while others opt to write it down — maybe you’ve laid out bills in an Excel sheet, listed chores in a chore chart, or put the weekly schedule on a whiteboard where family members can access it. When you combine all these things, you have an overarching strategy that lets your household run smoothly and efficiently, even with so many moving parts.
In many ways, this plan is your household’s organizational strategy. For businesses, an organizational strategy serves the same purpose, letting you know when things need to be done, what resources are necessary to get them done, and who will do them. Today, we’ll talk more about what an organizational strategy is, why you need one, and how you can successfully create one for your business.
“Organizational strategy” is a part of our Project Management Glossary — check out the full list of terms and definitions!
What is an organizational strategy?
An organizational strategy is a strategic plan generally developed by the leadership team detailing how your business will allocate resources (like inventory, time, and funding) to support all its business activities. General business activities might include:
- Creating or purchasing inventory to meet market demand
- Supporting infrastructure
- Growing or upgrading your infrastructure
- Marketing your brand, products, and services
As a project manager, you can use an organizational strategy to understand your resource needs and make more informed decisions on where those resources will go. This can help your project stay on track and ensure your team has the tools, time, and funding it needs to complete assigned tasks.
Why do businesses need an organizational strategy?
Your business needs an organizational strategy for many reasons, like:
- Enabling better resource allocation: Your most valuable resources — like time and funding — are limited. Making the most of your resources is crucial in ensuring your company’s success and ability to grow. For projects, better resource allocation could support your team in exceeding goals and deadlines.
- Setting company-wide direction: Achieving goals is simpler when everyone is working towards the same one. When you have an organizational strategy to set your path as a company, you’ll see more significant growth and better results. You can use this same strategy to clearly define the project’s desired outcomes within a project, so everyone is working in that direction.
- Simplifying decision-making: Your organizational strategy should provide the answer to many decisions before they even arise. When you need to make a decision, the easiest way to make a choice is to go in the direction that makes the most sense based on your predefined goals. You can simplify decision-making across the board by removing many of the what-ifs.
To reap the most benefits from your company’s organizational strategy, it helps to understand how it works.
How does an organizational strategy work?
When creating an organizational strategy, you create a long-term plan that will form the building blocks of everything your company does. It’s a good idea to involve the whole leadership team in your company’s strategy. This will ensure all departments are efficiently aligned toward the same purpose.
For the best results, try dividing your organizational strategy into three distinct categories before you start outlining the actual plan. These three categories include:
- Corporate-level organizational strategy: This will represent the primary purpose of your company or the general direction it should be moving.
- Business-level organizational strategy: This part of your strategy will be more detailed than the corporate level and include actionable steps on how you’ll achieve the primary purpose or goal.
- Functional-level organizational strategy: This part of the plan will include the step-by-step tasks and day-to-day functions that allow you to achieve your goal, including detailed information on allocating resources.
Once you’ve developed your company’s organizational strategy, it works to give you a competitive advantage by:
- Being the foundation for all decision-making, big or small
- Aligning your whole company towards a singular goal
- Creating greater transparency in how and why your company operates
- Providing clear instructions for resource allocation, including how to best schedule work hours
- Increasing productivity and efficiency by decreasing confusion, questioning, and related downtimes
Organizational strategy in the development and execution phases
When developing your organizational strategy, the most important thing is to take your time determining the direction your company needs to go. Remember that the ultimate goal should be realistic and achievable based on where your organization currently lies, and you should figure out how to measure your results.
Executing your functional strategies can prove challenging at first. To be most effective, try making small changes that your company’s employees can adjust to instead of significant, sweeping changes that might be challenging to adapt to. In addition, support your employees with the tools, time, funding, and training they might need to implement your company’s new organizational strategy.
The five types of organizational strategy
There are five types of organizational strategies your company may choose to develop and implement. These include:
- Competitive strategy: This strategy aims to gain a competitive edge in your industry or region. When outlining a competitive organizational strategy, you’ll primarily use initiatives, business approaches, and marketing tactics to reach potential clients.
- Corporate strategy: A corporate strategy is generally used by diversified companies to define long-term goals or initiatives across the board. A diversified company is one where one larger corporation has several smaller companies beneath its umbrella.
- Business strategy: You might use a business strategy if you’re hoping to build up your company’s branding or market positioning with your products or services. This type of strategy will cover different tactics you could use to compete in your market, outlined in action plans.
- Functional strategy: A functional strategy will focus on one aspect of your business that you believe would benefit from improvements. For example, you might apply a functional strategy to your management department to improve scheduling.
- Operating strategy: Operating strategies detail how specific sectors within your company function daily. You can also use them to define the goals of each department in reference to a larger overarching goal. For example, suppose your company’s goals are to increase brand recognition and awareness. In that case, your marketing department may have an operating strategy that increases the use of brand imaging.
Regardless of which of the five organizational strategy types you use, it helps to have the right tools for developing it. Using the right platform for developing, managing, and executing your organizational strategy can help you increase transparency, improve performance, and see faster results.
Create your organizational strategy with monday.com
Creating an effective organizational strategy takes time and effort. But, monday.com’s Work OS can help make the process a little simpler by:
- Enabling real-time collaboration: When developing your organizational strategy, you can collaborate in real-time with your leadership team, no matter where they’re at. You can also leave notes that you can color code to denote priority level, so everyone stays on the same page.
- Creating a central workspace: A central workspace can take a lot of hassle and potential errors from creating your organizational strategy. You can store your documents virtually and allow access to anyone who needs them, so things stay organized and nothing gets lost.
- Integrating with your favorite productivity and marketing tools: Many of your favorite tools can be integrated into the monday.com work OS to minimize the number of applications you need to access while working on your organizational strategy. Just a few examples of potential integrations include Stripe, Slack, Google Drive, and MailChimp.
- Providing all the information you need on one customizable dashboard: Every organizational strategy is unique, so the key performance metrics and benchmarking data will look different. You can customize your dashboards to show the information most important to your company’s goals and overarching direction to see everything at a glance.
By now, you likely have a working understanding of an organizational strategy and why it’s so important. However, we’ve answered a few FAQs below in case you still have questions.
Frequently asked questions
What is an example of an organizational strategy?
An example of the purpose of an organizational strategy would be to increase the range of products and services you offer. Your strategy might include objectives like:
- Do A/B product testing samples to choose between product ideas
- Run an email campaign to get customer feedback about what products or services they most want to see
- Have a team brainstorming meeting to come up with new product or service ideas
- Allocate additional resources to create, develop, and market new products
What are the five organizational strategies?
The five types of organizational strategies include:
- Competitive strategy
- Corporate strategy
- Business strategy
- Functional strategy
- Operating strategy
Why is organization strategy important?
An organization strategy is important because it aligns your company towards a singular goal. Doing so can help increase transparency in your company’s operations, improve results, empower better resource allocation, and make for easier decision-making.
Align your company towards a singular goal by developing an organizational strategy at monday.com
An organizational strategy can help align your company’s goals and create more transparency in how your company operates. It also serves as a valuable tool to empower better decision-making and resource allocation. The monday.com Work OS can help make creating your organizational strategy easier by providing a singular platform for everyone to collaborate and access the necessary information.
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