How to Engage and Align Your Employees through Corporate Goals

What’s the best practice you can implement to maximize profitability while retaining top talent?

Effective goal alignment in support of a well-defined business strategy is the single most important step. Goal alignment improves and accelerates operational expectations and helps you to quickly progress from planning to execution. It builds morale and ultimately retention, creating employee ownership in your organization’s success and resulting in a more highly engaged team.

Your productivity can be directly traced to the performance of your employees working to achieve individual goals, which in turn support broader company goals. With this top-down alignment communicated throughout your organization, you increase everyone’s ability to work harder, smarter and more effectively.

Defining Goals

Before you can align employee and corporate goals, you have to know what those goals are.

• Goal setting must be collaborative. Success is based on a cooperative synergy between a manager and their employees. Once company-wide goals are established, individual goals should be created to support the bigger picture. Major functions and responsibilities should be addressed within the SMART framework, whereby goals are specific, measureable, achievable, relevant and timely.
• Monitor progress. Managers must be continually aware of employees’ progress toward goals so they can step in with coaching assistance or resources as needed. Employees also must track their own progress. This keeps them informed and involved and is helpful at performance appraisal time.
• Appraisals should include listening, observing, giving constructive feedback and providing recognition. Feedback helps ascertain what an employee has already learned. Then a plan can be created to help them develop critical skills. The same development plan allows your company to create a talent pool for strategic succession purposes.
• Pay for performance. A robust pay-for-performance approach is key to retaining top talent and driving operational improvement. At its core, pay for performance aligns your employees with company goals and objectives, motivates them and rewards those who go above and beyond. It also helps develop underperformers to become better contributors.

Advantages of Goal Alignment

Effective goal alignment strengthens your leadership and creates strong organizational agility. You can use it to communicate expectations, document progress and identify employee strengths and weaknesses.

• When team members execute on individual goals that are aligned with company plans, they share responsibility for reaching the same objectives. When goals are aligned and someone misses one, it’s easy for management to identify the issue and get things back on track.
• Goal alignment builds employee engagement. There’s a strong correlation between a successful company and a solid goal-setting process. Your entire leadership and management team should be part of a system to help each employee set and achieve goals. By including the entire workforce, you set the stage for a greater sense of loyalty, community and commitment. Engaged employees not only tend to stick around, but also are motivated to help improve the bottom line.

As you develop and implement your best strategy for goal alignment, employee engagement and related success factors, consider partnering with an executive recruitment and consulting firm that knows and understands your unique business challenges. Read our related posts or contact BrainWorks today to learn more.