HR Talk : 10 Steps To Better Organizational Alignment

Are all of your employees working 100 percent of the time on things that move
your strategy forward? In other words, are they aligned? No? Then your
organization is not alone. Yet, there are few things an HR can influence that
can have a profound impact on your organi­zation's performance. While using
performance manage­ment technology is recommended to get meaningful RoI, the
software can't do all of the work for you. Here are 10 best practices that will
help you drive better organizational alignment.

1: Know the goals

Get involved with executives and senior management as they plan the goals
for the year ahead. Try to understand the business issues and challenges that
are driving the goals. Once the goals have been determined, follow them up with
the people responsible for each of the goals, in order to better achieve them.

2: Get buy-in

Work with your executive team to help ensure all of them are on the same
page, and they support your efforts to align employees with the company's goals.
You will need their assistance to help communicate the importance of the
program, so that employees understand that the executive team stands behind it.

3: Cascade goals

Once the goals are set at the top level, they should work their way down in
the organization. Help by planning a multi-tiered rollout with bench­mark dates.

4: Ensure consistency

As goals are being created further down in the organization, HR can assist
by establishing standards for goals, and then monitoring the goals that are
being created to make sure they are consistent with those guidelines.

5: Hold everyone accountable

A manager needs to make sure goals are measurable with specific deadlines,
and then hold employees to those dates and deli­verables. Make sure a culture of
'settling' and allowing complacency to become the norm is not there.

6: Reinforce through development

Aligning and setting goals is only half the task. As an organization, it is
important to ensure that employees have the skills and tools in place to
actually reach the established goals. The best way to do this is through
development plans.

7: Work the gaps

HR should run company reports to monitor where the organization is falling
short at a higher level. Address those needs proactively by partnering with your
learning team to put an organizational learning plan in place that aligns with
the areas that need it the most.

8: Encourage year-long communication

Leverage system technology to send reminders to employees to update their
goals, and work towards instilling a culture of frequent manager/employee
communication and checkups.

9: Monitor compliance

Managers should be monitoring completion and updates of goals by their
employees, but we recommend HR to monitor overall progress and provide reports
to executives and department heads. This will provide a check and balance on the
entire organization.

10: Measure twice, cut once

Ultimately, goals should be a major component of your company's annual
performance appraisal. This is where employees are measured and ultimately held
accountable. Since these appraisals are typically tied to compensation, this is
where employees are rewarded for performance on goals. If the business drivers
dictate more severe personnel decisions, it is important to have accurate
information in the performance appraisal to make better informed decisions.

Make organizational align­­ment one of your major goals and you are
guaranteed to have a better performing organization than ever before.

Source: SumTotal Infosystems