Align employee goals with corporate objectives and reap the rewards of a more streamlined, growing strategically-aligned business.
Why should you align employee goals with corporate objectives?
Organisational goals are a powerful tool in your organisation and help people and organisations achieve more and faster. It will come as no surprise when we tell you that aligned organisations achieve higher levels of performance. This is because all of their contributions are focused on driving measurable objectives. When you align your teams, resources and processes this reduces wasted time and efforts. With everyone on the same page and working towards the same corporate objectives, your organisation will be in sync. Some further benefits of aligning goals with company objectives are:
- Clear direction
- Performance motivation
- Effective evaluation
Despite this, HBR research found that 95% of employees do not understand or are unaware of company strategy. Research also shows that line managers are not doing enough to communicate the company strategy with their teams. Poor strategic alignment within an organisation can have all sorts of implications, such as team members feeling a disconnect and feeling that their managers don’t give them clear directions. All of which is clearly not going to be good for morale and employee engagement. Employees that have regular conversations with their line managers are generally going to be more highly engaged and motivated. Any misalignment between employee performance and business objectives will ultimately slow down company growth. To avoid this pitfall, it’s important to link employee goals to those of the larger organisation. An employee goal should always support the organisation’s bigger picture. If employee goals are not in alignment with the bigger picture, your job as a manager is to guide your employees until their objectives benefit both the organisation and themselves. This is a win-win for both parties. It’s handy then that employee goals and objectives are usually easy to align with organisational goals. Improving a skill that’s vital to the employee’s job, training to expand an employee’s responsibilities, or coaching an employee to get them ready for a leadership role, are all examples of objectives that could support organisational goals. Your line managers need to communicate the synergy between the employee’s daily responsibilities and the objectives of their employee’s team, department, and organisation as a whole. This provides the employee with an understanding of their value to the company and how their efforts help achieve organisational goals. A good way to see how well you’ve communicated the organisational goals to your team is to conduct a regular survey. You can ask questions like:
- Do you understand how your contributions impact the business?
- Do you know the company goals?
- Do you see the connection between your work and the organisation’s long-term objective
Over time, your employees will understand how their efforts align with company goals, pushing the business closer towards strategic alignment.
How to align employees with company goals
Goal setting is an important mechanism for providing ongoing and year-end feedback. By establishing and monitoring targets, you can give your employees real-time input on their performance while motivating them to achieve more. How can you set employee goals that will motivate and engage your team and drive their performance all year round? To successfully align goals with employees’ objectives, be sure to include your staff in the goal-setting process. They shouldn’t be set top-down, but instead should be a collaborative effort in order to get buy-in from all team members. When employees participate in setting goals for themselves, they are more likely to be invested in their performance from the beginning and are more accountable to the results. Set goals for continuous improvement. If you’re unsure of where you’re going it will be difficult to set measurable goals. What is the overall business objective and how can your employees’ goals help the business to get there? Make sure your employees understand the context and know the businesses objectives, when they have sight of this and understand the priorities, they can then set more effective goals that will have a bigger impact.
Where does TBG come in?
It’s important to set the right type of goals, we might be biased, but we recommend setting OKRs, a well practised and proven goal setting-framework. The OKR framework helps employees aim high and break down the goal-setting process into manageable, concrete milestones. If you’re struggling to align employees goals with corporate objectives, believe us, you’re not alone. Reach out to our team and we can provide some support with your goal-setting process.