How to Review Your Quarterly Goals

Do you set quarterly goals for your workspace?

With the end of Q3 fast approaching, it’s a great time to review your quarterly goals.

With this year being a wild ride for most, it can be easy to lose focus on our overall business goals and stray off track. Quarterly goals can support us to gain back our focus and set us off on the right path.

The end of a financial quarter is the perfect time to review, reflect and plan for the rest of the year. This short planning session is great for evaluating your workspace’s progress and for you to create a solid strategy for going forward.

“Quarterly reviews enable the company managers to assess results and realign goals, strategies, staffing, and other resources in a more thoughtful manner”, says Open View Partners. “The entire process keeps the executive team better informed of each department’s activities, progress, goals, and needs; keeps the department heads accountable and responsible; and keeps all departments aligned toward the company’s strategic goals.”

So why should you set quarterly goals for your coworking space in the first place?

According to Signature Analytics, quarterly goals are not only essential but beneficial to your business’s productivity and success as they:

1. Establish accountability – Quarterly goals help workspace operators to prioritise their workload thought the year, while giving them the ability to track their progress along the way. These goals also enable workspace managers to keep track of employee progress and performance while initiating overall accountability.

2. Ensure metrics remain relevant – reviewing your KPIs during your quarterly review will ensure that your space continues to measure what is working and be able to highlight areas where adjustments are needed. The data you pull from your metrics will enable you to update your goals with confidence.

3. Help maintain sustainable growth – reviewing your quarterly goals helps you to keep your efforts on track. By frequently checking in with your progress, you will be able to able to keep up with what is performing well, and what needs to be tweaked, enabling you to establish critical processes in the earlier stages of success. By keeping track of your goals in this way, you will be able to maintain sustainable growth ultimately.

4. Help to visualise the big picture – not only does setting quarterly goals make long-term goals feel more attainable, but they support you to achieve success by setting a clear path to the bigger picture.

Before you start planning for the next quarter, ensure you take time to review your previous quarter thoroughly. When you examine where you have been, what you’ve accomplished, and consider aspects you may have missed, you will confidently be able to realign your plans with your long-term goals.

“Keep in mind that as we grow and change, the best path towards our goals can shift (and that if we’re planning effectively, we’ll always be changing our plans)”, states Productive Flourish. “Sometimes, even the goals themselves can shift. This is where quarterly reviews come in to help you stay on track (or relocate your track completely).”

Questions to ask yourself as you review your quarterly goals:

Q. What successes did you have? – be sure to acknowledge your wins! What specific actions worked for your space? What made these actions so successful? When you can get to the bottom of what made something work, you will be able to repeat it in the future.

Q. Did you have any setbacks? – was there anything that didn’t quite work out the way you had planned? Why do you think that was? What can you do differently going forward to try again? Identifying your setbacks and the cause of them will help you to avoid similar situations as you advance.

Q. Have you established any best practices? – from the successes you named earlier, were there any regular routines that worked well for you? Are you able to carry these practices forward and keep them going for future success? When we create best practices and follow them through, we can almost guarantee future triumph.

Q. Did you have places of stagnation? – were there any parts of your plan for this quarter that fell flat? This is the time to question whether this action is worth pursuing. Sometimes our plan contains elements that are actually “dead weight”, and they take up more time and energy than what they are worth. As you move forward, question whether these stagnating actions are something you can let go of for now and focus your energy on other parts of your workspace strategy.

Q. What will your plan be for going forward? – Now you have reviewed your quarterly goals, analysed what you have achieved, and identified areas of improvement you can make informed decisions for your plan for the next quarter.

As a workspace owner, when you set yourself yearly goals, it is imperative to review your plan along the way. Make sure you analyse your progress, determine what changes have come to light, and adjust your strategy accordingly, then you will be on track to succeed.