Preparing for an Annual Session
Learn how to make the most of Ninety.io's Annual Session and ensure a smooth and successful experience.
Plan for your annual meeting by having your Ninety account tools prepared in advance.
Before gathering your team to run your Annual Meeting, there are a few items within Ninety that you should prepare in advance. While the Quarterly and Annual Sessions work similarly to the L10 in that they are integrated with the other Ninety tools, cleaning and reviewing your information before starting Day 1 saves your team valuable time.
Pro Tips
- Create To-Dos for your team to prepare
- Customize your Annual Session meeting agenda
While your account comes with standard L10, Quarterly, Annual, Focus Day®, and Vision Building® Day agendas, section changes, and custom additions help cater the tools to fit your team's needs. The Team Health sections, for example, only include a few pointers on what the section's intention is rather than an editable tool. A suggestion may be to customize the agenda so that the default Team Health section is a much shorter period, allowing your team a brief overview before diving into a custom Team Health section where you can embed a shareable link to your group's chosen team-building tool/assessment.
Additional suggestions for custom sections may include a shareable link to your team's CRM data or a slide deck on your team's growth model. Click here for more information on how to customize your meeting agenda.
Rocks
Given that a Quarterly Session is essentially built into the Annual Meeting, all team members should come into the meeting prepared to review their current Rocks and create new ones for the following quarter. All Rock information should be current, including status, details, and any additional comments to aid in explaining the Rocks (in)completion. Any predetermined Rocks for the following quarters should be listed on the Long Term Issues list toward the top along with the incomplete portions of any current Rocks.
Issues
Ideally, the Short-Term Issues List should be reviewed during the last L10 of your quarter so that any relevant Short-Term Issues are moved to the Long-Termy relevant Short Term Issues are moved to the Long Term Issues list. Additionally, all participating Annual Meeting members should think through, add to, and edit your team's Long Term Issues list prior to your session. During this time, Rock Candidates and the most relevant LT Issues should be sorted toward the top whole Issues that may no longer be relevant can be moved toward the bottom or archived. It is essential to only de-prioritize and archive your issues. Lastly, similar issues can now be merged to be better prioritized.
SWOT
If this is your team's first Annual Session, the SWOT portion of your VTO page may not yet contain any information. If this is the case, a large portion of the SWOT section in your agenda will be dedicated to creating this analysis. Before your session, your team would benefit from an overview of what a SWOT is and how it is used. It may also be helpful for each team member to come to the meeting having populated a single strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat or having assigned a single individual to each of the four sections.
If your team has already created a SWOT analysis, a to-do for all team members to review the existing version and add any new items they think may be relevant will ensure everyone is already on the same page once the meeting begins. Links to outside resources and articles relating to your team's SWOT can be added in a custom section before or after the SWOT portion.
Test Run
Lastly, to ensure a smooth Annual Session without technical difficulties, the facilitator and/or scribe should start and attempt to run a mock Annual Meeting in Ninety.io once the agenda is complete. Not only will this help familiarize you technically with running an Annual Session in the software, but it will also help identify any issues with the customized agenda that may need to be resolved before running the session with your team. Once finished, utilize the "suspend" button in the bottom right of the meeting time instead of selecting the "Finish" icon within the conclude page. This will prevent a confusing meeting recap email for your team and allow you to delete the mock meeting from your Annual Meetings history.
For more information on running your Annual Session within the Ninety.io platform, please check out Running an Annual Meeting.