Creating Your Annual Plan

As the year draws to a close and we embrace the holiday season, it’s important that as healthcare leaders, we also ensure we utilize this time as a valuable planning season.

We may have major projects that we’re sprinting to complete before year’s end, or may find our organization comes to a bit of a lull with employees out for vacation and various vendors and clients lightening up on the throttle to close out the year.

Whether we’re in sprint mode or the holiday slow-down, we must find a way to carve out some time and set our plan for the year ahead.

Why We Plan

Planning is an essential practice, especially for healthcare leaders, that helps us intentionally create our future and set the direction for where we’re headed.

Taking the time to plan can be especially beneficial in stressful seasons when we feel most overwhelmed—and most unable to slow down and strategize. Planning can help us take a mound of worries, overdue deadlines, and competing priorities and reorder our work to regain a sense of calm and control.

When we establish a plan for the week, month, quarter, or year ahead, we can make order out of the chaos and make what seemed absolutely unmanageable seem possible and achievable.

The Benefits of Planning

In addition to helping us regain a clear focus and calm mind, planning helps provide focus and clarity for our teams.

Establishing a plan gives our team a clear roadmap of where to go, what they need to accomplish, and what they must do to win. When done well, a solid plan also provides guardrails and guidance for how to respond to the unexpected.

Our teams need not fear uncertainty when they have a clear and prescriptive plan to help them navigate change and realign their work to meet the ultimate goal.

The Pitfalls of Failing to Plan

Without the clear guidepost of a well thought out and strategic plan, however, decisions become more complicated and nuanced—depleting our team’s energy, distracting them from the goal, and opening the door for conflict and division.

Failing to plan can also cause us to unnecessarily waste valuable time and resources as certain efforts may be duplicated, some essential tasks may be ignored, and we may be unprepared to seize valuable opportunities when they arise.

Getting back on track in these situations may require costly overtime, last-minute surcharges and fees, and time and energy diverted from more important priorities.

Having a thorough plan and diligently working that plan can help us avoid those unnecessary and expensive mistakes.

The Need for An Annual Plan

While most organizations strive to create a global strategic plan that may guide the organization over the course of 3-5 years, each department and division should also strive to create an annual plan.

An annual or yearly plan provides a more manageable framework that offers enough range to include large projects and initiatives, but isn’t too broad or long-term to be immediately actionable.

The annual plan helps break down important strategies from the organizational strategic plan and block out how we’ll make progress on each important goal. It can be developed to fit within our organization’s revenue cycle, allowing us to pair our efforts with the necessary budgets and cash flow.

It can also allow us to better manage expectations with our employees—creating enough work to frame out their year and offering a baseline and standards to guide performance evaluations, rewards, and compensation.

The annual plan can also map the cadence and rhythm of key project sprints around system-wide events, high-volume seasons, special promotional activities, and holidays.

What to Avoid When Creating Your Annual Plan

 An annual plan is only successful if it becomes a living, breathing document that’s regularly consulted throughout the year and actively guides your departmental workflow and activities.

An annual plan does no good if it’s left collecting dust on the shelf. To avoid building a plan that is irrelevant and unused, here are a few mistakes to avoid:

• Waiting too long to create your annual plan: If you wander into January or February without a clear and actionable annual plan, you’ll establish a tone of disorganization, inefficiency, and chaos. Make sure your annual plan is complete and ready to go by the end of December so you can launch into the new year strong.

• Creating goals that lack clarity and specificity: Unfortunately, strategic planning can tempt many leaders into abstract thinking and goals that might sound impressive but are very vague, unclear, and impossible to accomplish. Get an outside review from a critical thinker who can challenge your goals and ensure you wrestle your tactics down to very specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely tasks that can actually be completed and are descriptive and defined enough to be delegated.

• Planning in a vacuum: Don’t try to complete your annual plan within a silo and get blinded by the tasks and to-dos of your department only. An effective annual plan will fit into the greater organization’s goals and activities and adapt to any pressing needs and challenges affecting the entire system.
  
  
• Not sharing the plan with your leader and team: If you create the most impressive annual plan, but do not share it with your leader and team, you can guarantee you’ll never accomplish what you planned. Once your annual plan is complete, make sure you’ve scheduled time to validate your goals and priorities with your leader and then educate and train your team on what’s expected for the year to rally their participation, excitement, and support.

Creating Your Annual Plan

So, what exactly should be included in your annual plan? Different organizations, service lines, and departments may have varying priorities, but as a guideline for your work, here are four key areas you should consider when creating your annual plan:  

1. Personal and Professional Goals 

To kick off your yearly planning, we highly recommend you start with your own personal and professional goals.

As the leader of your team, you'll serve a foundational role in determining your team's success throughout the year and you'll want to make sure you've built in goals that challenge and inspire you enough to buoy you through difficult times.

Most importantly, the more you grow and develop your skills as a leader, the more you have to offer your team and the better you'll be able to support them in their growth and development as emerging and aspiring leaders. 

When plotting your personal and professional goals, consider:

• Who do you want to be in 1-3 years? 
• Where do you hope to grow in your career over the next 1-3 years? 
• Where do you want to be in the next 1-3 years? 
• What's your trajectory/leadership pathway to get you to that desired destination?
• What do you need to do to be ready to accept the challenge? (research, training, coaching, help from a strategic advisor)
• What will you have to give up to get to where you want to go? (limiting beliefs, bad habits, competing commitments)

Spend some time visioning your ideal future and then determine which goals you'll need to pursue this year to begin creating that future. 

Note key action steps and milestones you may need to track throughout the year and then find a partner with whom you can share your progress and receive support and accountability. 

2. Departmental Goals 

Once you've established your personal and professional goals, shift your focus to any departmental goals and priorities that your team should pursue throughout the year. 

• Think about your main goals as a team and how they'll serve the greater organization
  
• Assess your current team's strengths and weaknesses and plan ahead for any obstacles or roadblocks that will come your way
  
• Note any opportunities to help your team grow and develop their skills and review how the workload is currently assigned and if any work needs to be rebalanced to better fit everyone's skills
  
• Once you've got your goals determined, chart any key milestones and deadlines and make sure you've assigned project owners to get each project across the finish line
  
• Make your plans concrete by adding them to your annual plan and be sure to share your plan with all key team members, getting help from a project manager or assistant to schedule in all necessary meetings and to-dos

3. Organizational and Culture Goals 

Your departmental goals will likely be based around common outcomes such as quality, service, operations, finance, and community, but many of these goals are lag measures in an organization—outcomes that occur downstream from preceding initiatives and activities. 

Initiatives such as recruitment, retention, leadership, and innovation serve as the roots of your organizational culture and must be nourished to produce the desired fruit of improved quality and service, a healthier and more stable financial state, streamlined operations, and a broader and more engaged community. 

Because these initiatives are root causes of our culture and lead measures to our desired outcomes, all leaders must devote time and energy to planning around these important initiatives and striving to activate their department to make improvements in each area. 

To begin building your annual plan, determine how you'll drive growth in each culture strategy. Consider: 

• What's working well in each area? 
• What's missing and where is your team's, department's, and/or organization's current approach falling short?
• Which metrics and outcomes are you tracking to monitor progress and success? 
• What feedback and input can you review from internal and external stakeholders to illuminate what needs to be addressed?

Use the results from your assessment to create your top three goals in at least these four areas: recruitment, retention, leadership, and innovation. 

Other root strategies that will feed your culture include your organization's mission, vision, values; your DEIB strategy; and your patient experience strategy. 

However, to prevent your team from being spread too thin, work to build your plan around only recruitment, retention, leadership, and innovation at this time.

You should be able to find key projects that will greatly impact these areas and create a measurable impact within the course of your year and will help elevate your organization and improve your culture even if your department doesn't have obvious system-wide influence.

4. External/Community Goals 

Finally, you'll want to take time considering external/community focused goals. 

While your culture strategies are going to help build your organizational culture from the inside out, this area of planning will ensure you're considering how your organization is perceived from the outside in.

Viewing your organization through a consumer-focused lens will help you ensure you're addressing what matters most to your patients and customers and are driving loyalty, retention, and satisfaction among those you serve. 

To determine where you stand, we recommend evaluating your organization's efforts in four key areas: 

• Building Brand Awareness: How is our brand currently being presented? How can we improve brand awareness, exposure, and reach?
• Enhancing Engagement: How can we enhance engagement and interaction with patients, future customers, and potential recruits?
• Improving Your Organizational Reputation: How are we viewed in the community? What can we do to improve our organizational reputation?
• Driving Strategic Growth: Where can we drive strategic growth? How can we leverage partnerships, seek new opportunities, expand our services, etc?

Challenge yourself to empathize and deeply understand your customer and community to explore what can be improved in each area. 

Try to get three goals in each category: brand awareness, engagement, reputation, and growth, and, as always, be sure to note any key deadlines, partners, project owners, and major milestones.  

Gaining Alignment: Sharing and Distributing Your Plan

With goals and strategies outlined in these four key areas, you'll be ready to begin validating and confirming the contents of your annual plan. 

Bring the draft of your plan to your 1:1 check-in with your leader, consult your fellow executives in the C-Suite, and/or get approval, when applicable, from senior leadership and the board. 

Once you've received the go-ahead from above, create multiple opportunities to share the plan with your team. You'll want to educate and train them on the top priorities and initiatives for the year and get their insight on how to break each strategy and goal into a workable project plan. 

Help your team feel engaged and excited about the transformation you're creating by enlisting their support with major projects and offering emerging leaders opportunities to stretch their skills and find new ways to shine.

Establish frequent check-ins and a regular cadence of measuring and reporting your success and let your plan guide and inform your decisions throughout the year. 

If you need assistance formulating or implementing your annual plan and driving strategic change forward, contact our team.