Goal Alignment – Increase Employee Engagement and the Bottom Line

Between multiple departments and hundreds, perhaps even thousands of employees, what is the simplest practice you can put in place to maximize your profitability? Implementing effective goal alignment throughout your organization in support of a well-defined strategy is one of the most important things you can do.

There are many reasons to implement goal alignment, but let’s focus on those with the greatest business impact:

• Improves and accelerates operational execution. Move quickly from strategy planning to strategy execution.
• Increases employee morale and improves retention. Creates ownership in the organization’s success, resulting in more engaged employees and increased retention rates.

Goal setting allows for a quicker execution of company strategy. Without good alignment to strategy, every bit of forward motion is a struggle. With everyone working together towards the same objectives, your company can execute strategy faster, with more flexibility and adaptability. Essentially, goal alignment strengthens your leadership and creates organizational agility.

Using goal alignment to communicate expectations, document progress, and identify employee strengths and weaknesses enables management to act and make strategic decisions rapidly. By ensuring that your employees understand what your organization is trying to achieve, and how his or her role— and performance — contributes to the organization's core mission, you can focus their efforts on your company's most important goals.

Clearly communicating aligned goals ensures that valuable time is not wasted on unrelated tasks. It is important for everyone at an organization to understand how their work supports the short and long-term goals of the company. When employees execute on individual goals that are aligned with the overall organizational goals, they are effectively sharing the responsibility for reaching the same objectives. When goals are aligned and someone misses their goal—managers can identify it simply and step in with necessary coaching or additional resources to get back on track more easily. 

Managers can make a positive difference in an employee’s performance, but only if they are crystal clear on organizational needs or else their well-intentioned coaching may miss the mark.

There is a strong correlation between a successful company and an effective goal setting process, and you are the owner of that process. Managers and the entire executive team should be a part of the system to help each employee set goal—thereby, fully engaging your workforce and encouraging everyone across the company to focus and successfully achieve these goals together. By including all members of the company, the stage is set for each employee to feel a greater sense of loyalty and commitment to the company and to perform at higher levels. Engaged employees not only plan to stick around—helping to lower your recruiting costs—but they are also enthused and motivated to impact your bottom line. During difficult times their energy and effort can help your organization not simply survive, but thrive. 

Strategically minded organizations have deeper strategic insight into their employees and use that insight to proactively put the right workforces in place to effectively respond to urgent marketplace needs. Measuring essential factors that mark the difference between success and failure in specific jobs will allow your organization to put the right person into every position, allowing them to utilize their talents without limitations. This leads to greater job satisfaction, improved morale and employee retention because your organization is staffed with a workforce of people who are highly productive, skilled and committed to doing their very best.

Your company’s productivity and profitability can be directly traced to the performance of your employees working to achieve individual goals, which in turn, should be directly aligned to support broader company goals. With top-down alignment, communicated throughout the organization, you increase everyone’s ability to cover more ground, faster. It’s the difference between pursuing a path together as a well-oiled machine or as individual parts flying off in multiple directions.