Office English / Plans and strategies

Do you make long-term plans at work?

It's quite easy to make long term plans that you haven't thought about very thoroughly. It's more difficult to make detailed plans that you've thought through really well.

I find it quite hard to make long-term plans myself because I'm not very organised. I find it hard to see into the future and make a structured timetable of events. I'm not very good at that.

In this episode we'll talk about plans and strategies.

So Phil, today we're talking about plans and strategies. What do we mean by strategy at work?

Well, a strategy is a plan to do something, but it's a very detailed plan to do something. So you've probably got lots of steps and perhaps different ways that you want to do something.

Mhm. Yeah. And it's what you want to do but also how you want to do it. So it usually involves some deadlines and targets some success criteria, but it can also be a particular way of approaching a problem. So, for example, a sales strategy, you might want to increase your sales at a company. The strategy is the way that you approach that problem. How do you do it?

Yeah. And so today, we're going to discuss how to come up with plans and strategies and also how to decide whether they're working or not.

OK. Let's imagine you've been asked to come up with a strategy to improve results in your team at work. Maybe your bosses want to increase sales or improve productivity. What words and phrases can we use to talk about plans like this, Phil?

Well, we've got the what. Which is thinking about what you want to do and what you can achieve. So, for example, you might say we're aiming to cut costs by 25%. And you could call this an objective. We also might call them success criteria. And these are the things that when you meet them, you'll know that your strategy has worked.