How to develop a meaningful Individual Impact Plan for each employee?
Customized individual impact plans (I.I.P.s) empower employees to operate at their highest potential and it gives them a roadmap for what is the one thing they can do the following month to positively affect their own performance, but that will also help to move their department and their company forward.
An I.I.P. is made up of three categories: Clear, Actionable and Relevant.
First Clear - is the What and the Where in terms of the one metric we have defined for an individual to focus on. This metric should be something that the employee can achieve on their own and is not reliant on any other team member's performance. It is totally in their own personal control.
Once that metric is defined, then we also need to specify the Where. Where is this metric accessed? Is it in your CRM system, within a platform like Jira, or it is tied to a specific report?
Actionable is the How. This is an opportunity for the manager to coach the employee on the ways that the metric can be achieved. There may be an article to reference or training videos, so a link here could be very helpful.
And finally there is Relevant - the Why. Why is this metric important and how do my individual efforts either benefit the business or slow it down? If the employee does not make the metric, what are the real effects to the business on a wider scale? So here we tie the relevance to one out of four financial metrics. The manager would pick the most appropriate one.
In the end it is important for employees to realize that they don't work in a vacuum - that their hours spent and the energy expended does makes a difference. When you put together a customized I.I.P. for your employees and they work to achieve them, they need to know that their work really does matter.