What are the benefits of team planning?

Building an effective action plan helps you reach your team and company goals. It allows you to reflect and plan key initiatives and milestones.

By identifying issues and opportunities, you can adapt and pivot. What’s more, Kahoot! allows you to do this with real-time feedback.

Engaging your team in the decision-making process allows for a happier and more cohesive team that feels empowered to deliver the strategy.

5 steps to effective quarterly planning

1. Recap the company strategy

After you’ve listened to the exciting new strategic roadmap, you’re probably wondering where to start when it comes to planning your individual and team goals.

It’s important to start by kicking off the session with a recap. As with many company-wide meetings, there’s a lot of content to digest in one sitting. Start your team planning meeting by giving everyone a refresher.

Simply combine your slides with quick quiz questions to see how much people remember. You can import a presentation from PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, or upload a PDF file.

2. Reinforce your content 

Once you’ve set the scene, it’s important to know if everyone understands the strategy and what you hope to achieve from the planning session. 

During your workshop, reinforce numerical goals shared in the company strategy and increase participation and engagement. You can use features such as slider, which lets team members pick a number using a predefined scale, or test your team’s knowledge using polls and quiz questions.

By asking a few questions at the start of your session, you are able to lay the groundwork for some insightful discussions and encourage everyone to participate without pressure. 

Remember, all participants can use anonymous names during the session, with the option for team admins to check how people have contributed at a later date using Kahoot! Reports. 

You can also run follow-up sessions to test your team’s knowledge of the overall strategy throughout the year to track progress and ensure your team is aligned.

3. Looking back on the first half of the year

It’s important to look back to learn and improve for the upcoming period. Retrospectives not only contribute to an engaging session, but also improve transparency and accountability across all teams. 

Using features like word clouds, brainstorms, or open-ended questions, allows you to visualize your team’s key takeaways on one screen and discuss some common themes.

Retrospectives focus on whether you’re on track to meet the company’s annual goals. Additionally, they allow for a deeper understanding of how your team is feeling, their favorite projects, and they offer chance to celebrate success.

4. Understanding your team’s priorities

We can all draw different conclusions from seeing a high-level strategy, so it’s crucial to ensure your team understands what it means for them individually. It’s also a great opportunity to find out what your team thinks the main priorities are for the next quarter. 

Kickstart prioritizing upcoming projects by encouraging some predictions around performance. Drop pin is a quick way to engage your team and get them thinking. For example, get the team to categorize a specific initiative on the impact vs effort prioritization matrix. You can do this by dropping a pin in one of the 4 quadrants: quick wins, big bets, incremental, money pit. 

Predictions can bring about some great insight, but it’s important to develop these ideas a little further. With brainstorms, you can oversee all your audience’s ideas displayed on the screen, ready to be discussed and voted upon live.

All ideas collected can be automatically and manually categorized and you can revisit them at any time.

5. Defining next steps

Once you and your team have had a chance to reflect on the last quarter, identify areas for improvement, and discuss priorities, you’ll then need to define the next steps.

A collaborative session helps you to define any pain points or things to consider that could impact whether your team achieves its goals. 

Kahoot! provides a great way for you to ask open-ended questions to identify any of these potential blockers and discuss solutions as a team. 

Perhaps what’s needed is better processes, closer working relationships with other teams, or improved communication. Turn your objectives into short priorities and objective statements that describe the future state of what it is that you want to achieve.

Getting feedback in real-time helps to shape the conversation and collect input that you can look back on and use for any follow-up sessions.

Looking for inspiration for your next planning session?

Set your team up for success by involving everyone at your next planning session! Kahoot! makes it easy to get aligned, set realistic goals, and identify new opportunities, wherever you’re working from. Start your team planning workshop with Kahoot! 360 today!

Feature highlights: What’s new for smart planning

• Slider: Let team members pick a number from the slider.
• Upgraded quizzes and polls: Add more answer options than ever with up to six answers!
• Drop pin: It’s as simple as dropping pins on an image.