Every Employee Should Be Familiar with the OPSP – Discover How to Get the Word Out

The One Page Strategic Plan (OPSP) is the best-known and most widely used Scaling Up tool. Designed to drive alignment, accountability and focus, the OPSP compiles answers to seven critical questions that must be answered if you hope to accomplish anything: Who, What, When, Where, How, Why and Should/Shouldn’t.  

Everyone within your organization must understand and remain focused on these key answers to ensure that their actions and decisions align with organization goals. Therefore, the OPSP should be distributed to every employee. This article will outline several ways to communicate your OPSP throughout your organization in both structured and organic manners. 

When to Communicate Your OPSP 

The OPSP is one of the key tools that should be updated during your annual and quarterly offsite meetings. During these strategic planning events, senior leadership will revisit and update organizational priorities. The OPSP is used to ensure that all employees are on the same page regarding the organization’s strategic direction. 

After quarterly meetings, you’ll notice a general feeling of curiosity and excitement throughout your organization, especially once your Scaling Up efforts start to build momentum. Your team will know that bold initiatives are being planned. Unspoken or voice aloud, the top question on everyone’s mind will be “What happened at the off-site – and what are we focusing on this quarter?” Your OPSP provides the must-have summary of what you want your entire team to focus on. 

General Guidelines for OPSP Communication 

Because of the OPSP’s importance in keeping your entire workforce aligned with and focused on organizational priorities, it’s essential that the plan grabs attention and its points are absorbed deeply. To ensure this, keep these three guidelines in mind: 

• Make communication “sticky.” The more ways you communicate about your plan, the better. People have different communication preferences. Some prefer written material. Some prefer audio or video. Others prefer experiences. The more ways you deliver your message, the greater your chance of grabbing any single individual’s attention – and the more likely your message will be to sink in. 
• Be intentional, structured, and involve a lot of people. Your senior leadership team should update the OPSP before leaving the offsite. Departmental managers should then carry the message outward to their teams. Repetition and consistency are key to ensuring that everyone is on the same page. Marketing, corporate communications, and sometimes human resource departments are most often tasked when creating communications about the OPSP. However, every manager bears responsibility for cascading communication about this important tool. 

• Get excited. Scaling Up requires effort beyond the day-in-day-out operations of your organization. To get employees eager to tackle the work ahead and unleash the possibilities their focused efforts could create, communicate with excitement about your OPSP. Paint a picture of a thrilling future and what it will mean to them, your customers, your shareholders and even the world to achieve your priorities. 

7 Ways to Distribute Your Message 

When planning how you’ll distribute messages about the OPSP, think variety. Use different communication modalities to reach as many people as possible using their preferred method of communication. Here are 7 ideas: 

• Host a town hall. Within a week of concluding your off-site meeting, hold a town hall meeting (in person or virtually) with your entire organization. Walk your team through the updated OPSP. Better yet, distribute copies of the OPSP to every attendee. 

• Create a video that discusses the organization’s priorities, metrics, and future plans. Distribute the video in an email, play it at key meetings, link to it in your company newsletter, play it in a breakroom – use as many channels as possible to get the video in front of your employees. 
• Talk about the OPSP in a weekly employee newsletter. Each week, have a brief message focusing on one of the elements of the OPSP. 
• Create a “situation room” for weekly meetings, and display your OPSP prominently for easy reference. 
• Print your OPSP on posters and display them in employee break rooms, locker rooms, lunch rooms, coffee stations – wherever they might be gathering and lingering. 
• Create a scoreboard. Keep everyone up to date about where the organization stands in terms of achieving key initiatives with easy to read scoreboards. You can use the Scaling Up Scoreboard or even a simple spreadsheet. The idea is to have a place where anyone can see at a glance what progress has been made.  

• Make it fun – and bring your OPSP to life. Here are three ideas that will appeal to experiential learners. 

• Allow employees to nominate peers who best demonstrate the organization’s core values. Pick a winner for each of the core values, and feature them in your company newsletter. 
• Encourage departments to hold a friendly trivia contest where employees form teams and earn points for correctly answering questions about the OPSP. 
• Hold an “Around the OPSP” scavenger hunt. Give participants a “passport” and invite them to visit stations around your company where they’ll have to answer a question about the OPSP. Each successful answer earns a stamp in the passport. Everyone who completes the passports gets a gift, as well as gets entered into a drawing for an even bigger prize. 

Mistakes to Avoid 

As you work on communicating your OPSP, here are a few tips to help you avoid common pitfalls: 

• Start communicating – and don’t stop. Avoid the temptation to communicate in fits and starts. It will take time and repetition to get your message disseminated throughout your entire organization. Your unofficial title is CRO – Chief Repeating Officer! You’ll become tired of your message long before the majority of your employees are even aware of the message you’re trying to send. 
• Accept imperfection. Don’t wait until your message is perfect to start communicating. Just get started, and tweak your message with the feedback you receive. 
• Be structured and disciplined. Communication about your OPSP should be scheduled on your calendar as faithfully as you book your off-site meetings. 

How do you know when you’ve achieved your goal of communicating your OPSP? Simple: You’ll notice that employees at all levels of your organization are talking about its components – core values, metrics, key initiatives and more – as naturally as they talk about their families, hobbies, and daily to-do list. When your messaging has become a part of your culture – and a part of them – pat yourself on the back for a job well done.