Understanding the EOS® Organizational Checkup™: 20 Questions to Upgrade Your Business Strategy
As EOS® experts, we’d love to tell you how simple the framework is. And while we believe that EOS® can be straightforward, we also want to acknowledge that implementing a new system for your company comes with complexities.
We offer our blog as a comprehensive resource for the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®), helping you to understand the framework and how the tools can address your specific business goals. The EOS® Organizational Checkup™ is a foundational example of how EOS® keeps you on track with your long-term goals and positions your organization as an industry leader.
Measuring business health is a practice shared by many successful business leaders, who use the Organizational Checkup™ to gain insight into what’s working and what’s not. This powerful tool is used to validate an organization’s alignment and ensure the processes are in place to help the entire team build traction. Using that information, leaders can realign their approach, restructure their team, or make other changes to foster more success in the new year.
Understanding the Core Components in the EOS® Organizational Checkup™
The EOS® Organizational Checkup™ is based on six core components. By viewing your organization through a holistic lens, business leaders get to the root of problems and inefficiencies, rather than treat surface-level symptoms. The Organizational Checkup™ invites you to take a closer look at each of these facets in closer detail.
Vision: The vision is the guiding direction for your business. A cohesive and collaborative approach to your vision is necessary to ground your organization’s day-to-day. The checkup will ask you to reflect on whether your team is aligned with this vision.
Process: To achieve your vision, you need the right processes in place. Think about the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization’s operations. Are they consistent and scalable?
People: EOS® gives us the “Right People, Right Seats” perspective to ensure that all team members have the skills, desire, and capacity to succeed in their roles.
Issues: Running a business is never without problems, and EOS® isn’t a miraculous solution to make your issues disappear. However, it does encourage leaders to implement a streamlined process to deal with issues as they come up.
Data: EOS® directs us leaders to make decisions based on data rather than emotions. The Organizational Checkup™ asks you to look at your process of collecting and interpreting organizational data.
Traction: This element brings all the other ones together. Does your team have the discipline to execute your vision? Organizational traction brings accountability and productivity into the conversation.
How the EOS® Organizational Checkup™ Evaluates Your Business’s Health
An Organizational Checkup™ isn’t just the responsibility of your Visionary or Integrator. The best practice is to involve your entire leadership team—along with department heads—to get the most comprehensive perspective of your organization’s well-being. Some companies may even ask every staff member to complete the checkup.
With a total of 20 prompts, the evaluation involves ranking your organization on a scale of 1-5, where 5 indicates the strongest performance. These prompts cover various facets of the EOS® core components. The collective responses provide an encompassing perspective on the business.
For example, one of the prompts is this: "Our Accountability Chart™ is clear, complete, and constantly updated." In response, team members gauge their opinion on the effectiveness of the Accountability Chart by giving it a numeric score.
The collective responses to this question provide insight into both the company’s processes and people. A high average score could indicate that your team is effective, they work together well, and there is a clear balance of responsibilities. A low score may mean that your team struggles to understand their roles or the chain of command isn’t clear.
Each prompt targets another aspect of business health. Together, they offer a comprehensive view of your organization's effectiveness.
For a detailed overview of the prompts featured in the questionnaire, you can access our FREE Express GAP Analysis PDF. Simply complete the form below!
Interpreting Your Organizational Checkup™ Results
The results of your checkup are meant to be grounding. They bring the present back into focus, so you can see the disparities between where you are and where you want to go.
After completing the questionnaire, you will receive the summary of your scores along with actionable feedback based on each of the EOS® core components. The scores are broken down by each component and presented as a percentage point, and the results should help you understand your strengths and weaknesses as an organization.
Here are a few tips for interpreting your results from the EOS® Organizational Checkup™.
Highlight what you are doing well. These are aspects that you can celebrate and capitalize on.
Look for where you scored consistently low. Topics that were universally scored low require attentive focus. These are areas to focus on in upcoming L10 meetings and prioritize making an action plan around.
Dig into discrepancies. Topics that have a wide range of scores (some high and some low) indicate a dissonance within your organization that needs to be addressed. It could be a simple miscommunication or be indicative of a more pervasive issue.
We encourage clients to aim for a score of 80% on their Organizational Checkup™. This range indicates a solid foundational practice of all size core components.
Where to Go From Here: Building an Action Plan Based on Your Organizational Checkup™
Once you've completed your Organizational Checkup™, it's time to transition from assessment to action. This guide outlines how you can leverage the data from the checkup results to create shifts in your organization’s operations.
Review the checkup results with your leadership team to ensure everyone understands the priority areas for improvement.
Establish objectives for each identified area of improvement. Consider framing some of your quarterly ROCKS around these topics and assigning them to the most relevant people and departments.
Assess progress by consistently tracking relevant KPIs for each target area.
Practice transparent communication to keep your team informed about potential changes and expected outcomes.
Of course, these steps are an oversimplification, and the actual process of improving your Organizational Checkup™ scores will require more nuance. Additionally, many of these shifts require a level of operational expertise that most businesses struggle to implement. In these cases, outside guidance can be a game-changer. Reaching out for support to implement shifts based on your EOS® Organizational Checkup™ is often the catalyst for powerful change.
Operational Support From an Interim COO
The EOS® Organizational Checkup™ is a tool to ensure that your organization’s work resonates throughout your team. The checkup helps companies identify their successes and pinpoint areas for improvement. By providing a score for each of the six core components, the results help you shape your priorities for the upcoming year. In the efforts to optimize all the elements of your organization’s health, operational expertise is key to implementing strategic changes.
This is where additional support can help unlock your potential. By hiring an interim COO to temporarily support your executive team, you get access to top-tier expertise that can revolutionize your business. They may work independently or alongside your existing COO to provide specific EOS® guidance and coaching, helping you create an actionable strategy to improve your Organizational Checkup™ score.
Whether it's refining processes, optimizing team structures, or aligning with EOS® principles, GCE’s interim COO services offer a tailored approach to refining processes, optimizing team structure, and improving EOS® alignment.
We don’t just measure success; we guarantee it. Contact us today to explore how our interim COO services can support both your long-term vision and day-to-day operations.
