Aligning Organizational and Workers Interests

A key factor in the retention and engagement of employees appears to be the alignment of employee interests with organisational interests so that employees are acutely aware that their self interests will be served much better by contributing toward the organisation’s interests. You may well find in some circumstances interests cannot be aligned and this will assist in your selection process, as well as whom you should retain. A range of strategies come to mind, such as increasing employee ownership in planning, balancing power, group wide reward structures etc. Do you consider the alignment of interests essential to retention and engagement? If so, how do (or would) you seek to align employee and organisational interests?

All employees in the organization need to have an understanding of the entire organizational mission and vision and goals—not just those of their own division or work unit. They need to understand where divisional missions might interrelate and where working across boundaries could maximize problem-solving and improve effectiveness and efficiency. Overall agency mission, vision and goals should cascade downward through the division all the way to individual work plans and every employee should see how what they do plays an important part in the success of the mission. It also helps when all workers see appreciation from the top management layer or organization head. This could be done by regular video messaging or work community forums. Communication should always invite ideas, suggestions and feedback from those who actually are involved in day-to-day business transactions as they are most readily aware when process changes need to be changed or customer satisfaction needs to be addressed.

Alignment is essential to sustained high performance

• Alignment is the connection between strategy and execution
• Aligned employees make sound judgments about their work priorities
• Aligned teams agree on their goals and work as one
• Aligned organisations are agile and adapt quickly to change
• Without alignment, results are left to chance

Aligning employees with company goals is essential to any business leader with a big vision for the future. Employees who identify as aligning the mission and vision with their own roles in your company are likely to work intentionally to help you get where you want to go. Getting everyone on the same page is not as simple as stating that it needs to happen. It’s about creating a company culture around your mission, vision, values and goals.

Many persons feel confused about the difference between a mission statement and a vision statement. Organizations such as the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) believe that if you want to align mission and vision, you must first understand the difference:

• Vision is the role you see your company having now and in the future.
• Mission is how you live out that role.

It’s essential to keep your vision and mission statements succinct and easy to remember for your employees. If you cannot remember your vision and mission statements off the top of your head and recite them, they are probably too long. Instead of paragraphs, use a short sentence or phrase.

For example, a therapy practice that provides mental health services to survivors of abuse might have a vision statement similar to:

• Creating a loving community for survivors and their families
• Empowering survivors to become thrivers who help others heal
• Equipping survivors to live the lives of their dreams

These vision statements clearly state what the practice’s role is as it works with clients.

The mission statement for this same therapy practice might be one of the following:

• Providing healing support, recovery resources, and healthy-brain tools for living
• Providing biofeedback, neuro-feedback and group support for survivors and families
• Offering trauma-aware psychotherapy, biofeedback and yoga for total well-being

These easy to remember mission statements describe how the therapy practice lives out its mission. It becomes the litmus test for everything the business and its employees do. Anything that fits the vision and mission of the practice is up for consideration, while everything else is axed.

Setting SMART Goals: Big and Small

When your company’s mission and vision are clear and aligned with purposeful values, it’s much easier to set effective goals and engage your workforce to make them happen. Start by setting SMART goals that are:

• S – Specific
• M – Measurable
• A – Achievable
• R – Relevant
• T – Time-based

Start with your company’s larger goals and then work down to each employee’s individual goals. For example, your skin care company might have a goal to roll out a new gentle facial cleanser in the spring of next year that will appeal to your sensitive-skin client base and bring in Rs. 25,000 of additional revenue in the first year. This broad company goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based.

When that is your overall company goal, you can determine what role each department or employee plays. For example, your product tester might have a SMART goal to produce three sensitive-skin facial cleanser formulas for testing by the October company meeting. If it’s only June, this gives the tester a few months to work on the goal by breaking it down into monthly, weekly and daily tasks.

Coaching in the Workplace

One way to help employees break their larger SMART goals into weekly and daily tasks is to offer individual coaching in the workplace. The process of aligning team goals with organizational objectives involves aligning individuals with their part in the bigger picture.

Coaching sessions help employees tap into why they are doing their work and how their “why” connects with your company’s mission and vision. For example, if you want your sales employees to increase sales as part of a larger plan to offer them future leadership roles, you might help them:

• Discover that their “why” is helping their children achieve their dreams
• Conclude they only need to make Rs. 2500 more in sales per week
• Feel relieved that they only need Rs. 500 more in daily sales
• See that they make Rs. 50 in sales for every five customer interactions
• Choose to talk with one more customer per hour to exceed their goal

When this employee becomes discouraged, motivate them again by reminding them of their “why” and how simple it is to get where they are going through small changes.

Vision Boards for Motivation

In addition to coaching, one way to align mission and vision with employee performance is through vision boards. Aligning team goals with organizational objectives requires allowing everyone to experience and own the direction you’re headed. Motivational speaker Jack Canfield believes that vision boards are an integral tool in that journey.

Engage your employees in creating a visual representation of where you are going as a company and leave that vision board on display. In addition to this, provide time for employees to create their own vision boards. They might take the first five minutes of each workday to look at their vision board and envision success to keep their momentum and sense of inspiration up.

Choosing Motivational Strategies

Aligning team goals with organizational objectives is also about intentionally choosing management techniques to align team behaviors to the company mission. Corporate training website Knowledge Hut recommends several well-known motivational strategies:

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Take care of intrinsic needs before offering extrinsic expectations

Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory: Reduce job dissatisfaction and then increase job satisfaction

McClelland’s theory of needs: Coach each employee based on whether they are driven by their need for achievement, affiliation or power.

When you choose a motivational strategy, stick with it long enough to assess its effectiveness before trying something new.

Sustaining Momentum for Success

When you use management techniques to align team behaviors to the company mission and people genuinely buy in to company goals, there is a great sense of momentum. If you want to get where you are going, it is essential to nurture this feeling of momentum. If you fail to do so, you might find it slowly dying and productivity going down.

According to the experts at Forbes, ways to sustain momentum include:

• Daily team meetings
• Weekly motivational calls
• Coaching calls
• Small quarterly conferences
• Large yearly conferences

Encourage your employees to develop personally and professionally as part of your overall management strategy. Learning new things has a way of exciting people in ways that repeating the same daily routine cannot compete with.

Evaluating Progress and Shifting Goals

When you use management techniques to align team behaviors to the company mission, it is vital to complete regular reviews of your progress. This is made easier when you intentionally practice SMART goal setting within your organization. When you first set SMART goals, you might find that you thought something was realistic when it wasn’t. Perhaps circumstances changed, or you were overly optimistic.

During a review, look over what was possible and adjust your SMART goals for the next time around. For example, a restaurant might plan to increase dine-in customers by 20 percent in the first quarter, but then larger economic conditions cause take-out customers to increase instead. Goals for the next quarter can adjust to increase take-out customers rather than dine-in customers. This results in the kind of flexibility businesses need for economic health in a variety of circumstances.

Steps to Aligning Employee Expectations with Organizational Goals

Step 1) Assess the Baseline Situation – First, set a baseline by assessing how effectively business objectives are currently aligned with employee expectations. Are organizational values being embodied consistently? If not, where is the disconnect? Use turnover data as well as data from performance assessments, employee surveys and business financials to better understand where each side stands.

Step 2) Zero in on Problem Areas – When looking at employee surveys, identify problems that appear in patterns. If communication is a key organizational value, yet responses from a number of employees in a specific department point to communication challenges, then a broader problem exists. Take a deeper dive into that department’s business. How are the financials? Is turnover high? What does employee performance look like? How is the unit leader rated? Develop an educated hypothesis that explains what may be going on, and get ready to share it with business leaders.

Step 3) Present Your Findings from a Business Angle – Inform business leaders of the challenge you’ve identified on the employee side, and demonstrate how solving the problem could help drive revenue, drive sales, reduce expenses or accomplish another business goal. Be ready to offer a number of potential solutions and ideas for how to execute them.

Step 4) Don’t Jump the Gun – It’s tempting to start solving a problem as soon as you’ve identified it, but don’t rush. Once you’ve given business leaders several options for dealing with an employee challenge, let them decide the best way to proceed. You’ve armed them with the advantages and risks associated with each option—now leave it up to them. Better to have commitment from leadership, than to have a solution fail due to poor execution.

Effective Leadership

Organizational alignment is not accidental. Creating it requires open, multi-directional communication. It needs leaders to set clear and ethical goals for themselves and others. It requires leaders to give honest and timely feedback with the objective of enabling individuals to raise their own performance levels (and not just criticize or lay blame).

Effective leaders are able to combine diverse views and ideas and coherently synthesize from them what’s best for the organization. More importantly, they are able to inspire even those whose ideas are not adopted to see why the chosen option is better than what they had proposed and commit to that path.

Creating organizational alignment is a critical responsibility of an organization’s leaders. Indeed, the same leaders who define their organizations’ visions create roadmaps to get there and make course corrections along the way. Alignment is also related closely to the leader’s ability to inspire his or her followers with the energy and zeal to chase their common dreams.

Organizations need strong leaders to create and sustain alignment because not every member buys into (or remains bought into) the leader’s vision and strategy at all times. New employees need to be persuaded to buy into the vision.

An external or internal event may shake the team’s faith in the leader or the strategy being executed. The leader needs to invest time and effort in realigning employees with the vision. Such corrective actions may relate to culture, reward systems or even change in the leader’s personal behavior, communication and leadership styles.

Management literature is replete with leadership theories, models and styles. At the practical level, however, leadership is all about getting people to do what they need to in the best interests of the organization.

To achieve this, sometimes leaders must act like Tom Sawyer. [Remember how Tom gets his friends to willingly paint the fence on a hot afternoon by making the chore seem like a privilege?].

At other times, leaders simply need to play the role of a shepherd directing a flock of sheep towards a destination. By placing the fastest sheep right at the front of the flock, the shepherd gets the entire flock to move forward quickly and also keeps the sheep from wandering off in different directions.

Similarly, leaders must paint a picture of a more desirable future (the vision), and get people charged up and convinced that this future is worth the effort (buy-in) so that everyone in the organization constantly thinks about how best to get to the destination (alignment that drives innovation, service, etc.). However, leaders must know what role they need to play given the situation and the people they lead.

At regular intervals, effective leaders must gauge the degree to which there is alignment within their organization and take actions to optimize it further as necessary.