The Powerful Impact of Aligning Organisational Goals to Strategic Objectives

For any small and mid-scale organisation, the employees are its biggest line item expense and of course the organisation’s most valuable assets. In other words, a company’s productivity and profitability largely depend on the performance of its employees and organisational goals and strategic objectives.

Studies have proved that there is a significant increase in both business and the performance of the employees in an organisation, an organisation has set effective individual employee goals and aligned them with the organisational goals and overall strategy.

Business Impact of Setting and Aligning Organisational Goals across an Organisation:

1. Increased focus towards operating smartly and efficiently. When employees  clearly comprehend their individual goals and how they are aligned to the organisation goals, they naturally tend to become more involved with their work. They start focussing on finding ways to work even more smartly and efficiently. This boost in employee productivity automatically contributes towards increasing the operating margins and profitability of an organisation.

In order to achieve this, the organisation must have a performance management process in place so that:

• Employee engagement is increased by setting SMART goals
• Visibility is provided across all reporting levels
• Shared accountability is created amongst the employees by cascading goals from one individual to another as and when relevant
• Expectations are clearly communicated at every phase of completing a goal

2. Faster Execution of Organisational Goal Strategy.  When the goal visibility and goal alignment is tight; it facilitates faster execution of an organisational goal strategy by enabling the management team to effectively allocate more resources across projects. The overall efficiency also increases by ensuring that employees are not duplicating the efforts of others. Alignment of goal strengthens the leadership of an organisation by allowing its managers to:

• Clearly comprehend their responsibilities pertaining to specific goals
• Get rid of redundancies across job titles
• Focus their employees towards the most pertinent goals of the organisation

3. Diminishing Rate of Employee Turnover. Never underestimates the business value of having your employees engaged in their work. Recent have showed that organisations with large numbers of unsatisfied workers experience greater rate of employees being absent at work which results in lower productivity. This situation can be resolved by clearly aligning goals and creating greater employee ownership in your organisation. Alignment of organisational goals also enables you to establish a genuine pay-for-performance culture in your company.

Why do you need to set effective goals for your employees and your organisation?

To be effective, you need to set organisational goals which serve the needs of your company as well as your employees. The organisational goals need to contribute directly to both its long and short term business strategies. Goals for employees need to be objective, clear, and comprehensive.

For your organisation to achieve the alignment of goals, you need to clearly convey the strategic business objectives across the company. If there is greater visibility in the goals of inter-departments, it helps to speed up the process of alignment of goals. Since managers can view the goals of other department, goal redundancies and conflicts can be considerably reduced across the organisation. Sharing of goals also helps the heads of departments to look for ways to support each other better and identify areas where they may be unintentionally working against each other.

Once organisation goals are set , managers can move on to setting goals at their individual department level to support the overall business objective. Managers must clearly communicate to their team members not only the expectations but also how each task is expected to be accomplished. For the goals to be effective, they need to follow the norms of setting SMART goals.

Understanding the Essence of Setting S.M.A.R.T. Goals

S.M.A.R.T. goals have proved to be quite an effective method of motivating employees so that they can perform better. In order for goals to qualify as S.M.A.R.T, they need to be:

SPECIFIC: When goals are specific, people know what is exactly expected of them, and there is no room for misinterpretation. Specific goals clearly define who is responsible, what needs to be achieved, when a particular goal needs to be accomplished, what kinds of constraints are involved, and why it is important.
MEASURABLE: When you set goals, you need to also set certain specific criteria for to measure the progress of those goals. This helps your employees to be on track, work towards the target dates, and reach milestones that serve as ongoing motivation.

ATTAINABLE: If you set too lofty goals that are unachievable, it will de-motivate your employees instead of motivating them. On the other hand, if you set ambitious but realistic goals, you tend to inspire your employees to fully utilise their talents and all available opportunities in order to achieve these aims.

RELEVANT: You need to show your employees how a specific goal is relevant to them and the work they perform every day. If your goals are relevant, it helps your employees to understand their connection to the company’s objectives and the importance of their individual goals in a much better manner.

TIMELY: For your goals to be effective, they need to be structured around a specific timeframe so that they have a sense of urgency. This helps to motivate employees to begin working on their goals at the earliest.

How can you leverage technology to achieve the alignment of your Strategic Objectives?

If you engage your employees with their work via goal alignment, they tend to become even more committed towards the organisation and also achieve higher levels of job performance. However, it becomes easier to fully engage employees in this manner when they understand and accept the corporate goals and vision. In order to accomplish this seemingly difficult task, the managers need tools which can help them communicate and align goals effectively across the organisation with a lot more clarity. There are new breeds of web-based automated performance management system these days which can help you to increase the productivity of your employees and improve the bottom lines as well.

Automating your Performance Management System helps you to align your goals better

If you automate the process by creating, monitoring, cascading, and measuring performance against goals, the organisation can align its goals with the goals of its employees in the most effective manner. Listed below are the top reasons to implement such a system in your organisation:

1. Sets a more effective and efficient goal-setting process

The task of setting organization-wide goals is more difficult than actually accomplishing them. If your organisation deploys an automated performance management system, the company can significantly reorganise its entire goal-setting process.

Performance management solutions with the help of technology help managers to set goals that are SMART. Automated systems also offer role-based goal libraries. The goals found in these libraries can be easily customised to suit your needs. Automated performance management systems help to keep the goal-setting process on schedule. They send automatic reminders to managers and also provide reports of the progress back to them.

2. Expedites completion of organisation goals

If you provide everyone employee with the unified vision of success, automated performance management solutions including goal alignment, you can help your organisation achieve its corporate goals faster. These systems increase the visibility of your goals and boost shared accountability, enabling both your employees and managers to:

• Comprehend how their individual goals are aligned with the company’s business objectives
• Achieve more in much less time by providing greater visibility into both individual and organization-wide goals

3. Boosts shared accountability amongst employees with cascading organisational goals

If you cascade and align organisational goals across multiple employees, you can generate an atmosphere of shared responsibility and contribute towards the success of your company. An automated performance management solution helps to simplify the task of setting shared goals and makes the entire organisation work together toward the same objectives. An automated solution also helps to align goals and cascade them and thereby boost shared accountability.

4. Accelerates performance improvements

If you wish to improve the performance of your employees, you should provide them with clear and consistent feedback. With the help of an automated goal management solution, you can pull the performance data on each goal and tie them directly to the employee’s appraisal facilitating accurate and fair evaluation.

Automated systems enable managers to stay in touch with their employees more easily. It allows them to immediately reinforce progress and to send employees for training in order to get their performance and deadlines back on track.

5. Uses collected data more effectively

The automated solution helps to gather feedback and stores it conveniently online where can be utilised by the relevant authority. It helps you to track your organisational goal progress, identifies key strengths, weaknesses, and other employee performance related trends, determines competency gaps, and closely monitors employee ratings.

6. Improves the quality of employee feedback

Automated solutions comprise of integrated coaching tools that offer professional advice towards promoting employee achievement at an individual level. These automated solutions have made it easier for managers to offer actionable feedback and improve the relevance and quality of feedback as well. It helps the employees to have a clearer understanding of what they need to do to be successful at work.

7. Boosts the company’s business returns

If you automate the performance management process of your organisation, it can help you to facilitate huge returns and generate an increased ROI via increased employee productivity, improved employee retention, and optimising employee compensation.