TL;DR: Business rhythms are the bedrock and infrastructure for organizational productivity. Full stop.
A business rhythm (or a ‘rhythm of business’) refers to the recurring, regular, and structured business activities that occur across an organization. Typically, a business rhythm is leveraged for managing execution toward an organization’s priorities, objectives, and initiatives while ensuring accountability, streamlining communication, and enabling efficient decision-making.
Business rhythms already exist within most organizations; think of these as the recurring rituals, events, meetings, reports, cycles, and cadences that occur across any organization. Your weekly sync with your manager? That’s a business rhythm. Part of the weekly sales and marketing pipeline deep dive? That’s a rhythm. Your company has a monthly town hall to discuss results? Thats a…You get the idea.
Depending on an organization’s size (and it’s operational maturity), their rhythms may vary in complexity and frequency. Within smaller startup companies a small team may be able to tackle all key priorities in one weekly sync. In larger organizations, there are likely dozens of rhythms occurring simultaneously that vertically touch every altitude of the business and span horizontally across every team and department.
You can take this concept right up the chain to an organization’s fiscal calendar and the quarterly results-oriented periods most companies operate within. Managing business rhythms efficiently is table stakes with today’s heightened expectations for efficient streamlined growth.
Common Business Rhythm Examples
Here are some examples of frequent business rhythms we tend to see across our customer base:
- Weekly and monthly business reviews (WBRs, MBRs)
- Leadership & ELT syncs
- OKR reviews
- Strategic planning cycles
- Organizational training
- Company events and all-hands
- Cross-functional reviews
- Department-wide syncs
- Team syncs and 1:1s
- Initiative and project deep dives
- Daily/weekly standups
- Board meetings
- Individual performance cycles
Translated into more commonly used vernacular, we might see business rhythms take shape into frequent meetings or events such as:
- The Weekly ELT Sync
- Marketing’s Weekly Deep Dive
- Sales’ Forecast Review
- The CX ‘Voice of the Customer’ Review
- Sales & Demand Gen’s Pipeline Review
- Sales and CX’s Expansion Review
- Product’s Roadmap Review
- The Monthly Town Hall
- and so many more…
In more mature enterprise organizations it’s common for organizations to have hundreds of these different individual events or activities each quarter.
The Purpose of a Business Rhythm
Strong operational maturity breeds good hygiene across the business which leads to more predictable results and improved agility. Here are some of the ways business rhythms strengthen an organization’s operational maturity:
1. Consistency and Predictability
Regularly scheduled reviews, syncs, and updates provide structure and consistency to teams and individuals. Teams and individuals know what to expect and can govern their work accordingly around fixed points in time. This provides a known set of expectations and allows for preparation in advance.
2. Alignment and Accountability
With a known set of priorities, objectives, and initiatives, and recurring moments to discuss these activities (the rhythm(s), we can break down information silos and create better alignment across teams. Consistent communication with dedicated ownership fosters more accountability across an organization.
3. Frequency of Assessment
A rhythm of business should be tailored to support the goals and priorities of the organization. After all, that is why we all come to work every day – to achieve a specific mission or set of goals, and thus, our business rhythms should keep our goals and priorities top of mind. Consistent and ongoing monitoring of key performance indicators is generally understood as a best practice to produce results. We can’t understand how we are progressing or performing towards an intended target without frequent measurement. A dedicated business rhythm for a specific team or group to discuss blockers, call out status, discuss challenges, and get peer feedback can enhance agility and organizational success simply by providing the venue for discussion.
4. Efficient Decision-Making
Organizational agility can be distilled down to how quickly an organization can make decisions. Given most decisions are data-driven, it’s often challenging to collect and synthesize data, apply the correct context, and make the correct informed decision. ‘Context’ as it may apply to a given metric or KPI (or a customer, a project, a roadblock) can be difficult to surface from individuals deep in the organization. Other forms of contextual data can get stuck in our enterprise systems that aren’t easily accessible in a self-service manner. Often, this context is highly valuable when it comes to understanding organizational performance. A regularly scheduled business rhythm where KPIs and metrics are known and synthesized in advance – paired with the contextual nuance of the teams and individuals responsible for driving those metrics – will increase velocity in decision-making and enable alignment around the correct set of next-best actions.
In Summary;
Introducing business rhythms to your organization – or enhancing and streamlining existing business rhythms – is good practice for any organization. Generally, smaller or younger organizations may have fewer rhythms given headcount and layers of management are reduced, but the criticality and impact business rhythms have on organizational performance is consistent across all organizations.
Reach out to Brev for more support or direct Q&A, we’re always here to provide guidance and support.
Brev.io is a SaaS company in Seattle. Brev. is short for brevity, a key driver in effective business communication. Brev is also short for business review 😉
