Organizational Planning Framework

As national director of HR, I was tasked to prepare a planning framework for the management teams of AIESEC Australia's local branches. When discussing the details of what is needed in the framework, my President and I were clear that it needs to include both strategic planning & culture planning. While strategy is crucial for us to know how are we moving the organization forward, culture planning is meant to flesh out details of execution, i.e. what is the workplace environment we want to create for our people to be at their best and achieve?

For strategic planning, I drafted this basic flow:

This strategic planning flow is pretty straight forward:

We start with a core product strategy, i.e. to achieve our ambitions, what is the core strategy we would capitalize on.

Next we define our execution channel, i.e. how are we executing that strategy?

With our execution channel, we then define what are the activities that need to be done, and who is responsible for that.

For the person who is responsible, what are the Knowledge, Skills, Attitude (KSA) they need to be equipped with?

And finally, to ensure the person responsible can be equipped with the right KSA, what are the channels we would utilize to ensure they are properly upskilled, i.e. how are we ensuring our people are ready to fulfill their responsibilities.

While this might seem to be too granular of a planning flow, all the components are crucial for a cohesive plan. From my experience, for the sake of efficiency executive teams tends to skip steps in between, which often results in either strategic plans full of gray areas, or the team being confused about the big picture of the organization.

Moving on to culture planning:

Culture planning starts from:

What is the culture I want my local branch to have, i.e. how do we want people to feel when they come in for work?

When the culture is embed in the local branch, what are the key values people would exhibit? This helps further define the culture the executive team is envisioning for their local branches.

For each key values, how would it show up in the day-to-day behaviors of our people? While values are often lofty, behaviors are observable and concrete. This also helps further solidify the culture the team wants to nurture.

To put it simply, culture is the way things work here. It is how we approach our work, how we interact with one another, the norms and habits of an organization. While it is true culture is often lofty and hard to grasp, that is precisely why in culture planning we are breaking it down into the concrete observable behaviors. This doesn't just serve as an indication if culture is successfully nurtured, but also how are we going to go about nurturing the culture we want: Just nurture the right behaviors!

And finally to bridge the culture and strategic planning, we have this:

May no mind to what the arrows connecting, but more so what this image represents. What I want to capture here, is that the key behaviors we want to nurture in the local branches, needs to be reinforced in our execution touchpoints.

For example, if I want to nurture a workforce that relentlessly pursues continuous improvement, I need to run my team meetings to reinforce that, e.g. Have a 30 min in each meeting to talk about what we are doing and how are we going to do better next week.

Finally, putting it all together, we have this!

This flowchart summarizes the overall planning flow for the local branches, and is made into a google sheet workspace for each local branch manager. It is reflective of all that was discussed above, with an inclusion of defining the overall vision of the executive team.

With this big planning flow design, we managed to solve a core problem in local branch planning, which is culture planning is often neglected, even though it is arguably the most important aspect in organizational development.

Culture planning used to be neglected due to:

With this framework we are able to successfully set up our 11 local branches with a good plan to start their year with, which has led to not just organizational sustainability during the pandemic season, but also high reports of employee satisfaction during the year as the local branch culture was planned out in advance.