Many a times, we see great strategies designed by organisations failing despite the many opportunities of growth presented by today’s fast-changing business environment. However, the strategies never fail because they were not crafted for the organisation. Rather, they fail due to lack of organisational alignment, which in turn leads to strategy clarification failure.
For a business to succeed and grow, the workforce must be aligned. Look at a business as a sports team. The coach understands that all the players must be on the same page for goals to be scored. Similarly, organization managers must ensure their workforces are aligned for the same goals.
Unfortunately, this alignment does not come easily or naturally; it requires planning, communication and hard work.
Organizational alignment helps a business in achieving:
• Employee Role Clarity
One of the most important factors of alignment in an organisation revolves around finding the right fit for existing positions. This is the most basic unit of an aligned workforce since every employee must understand their job functions. Hiring the right skills can boost an organisation’s success. Similarly, hiring the wrong persons can burn huge holes in the organisation’s pockets.
To achieve employee role clarity, the employer must identify the job fits while hiring. The candidates’ understanding of the positions as well as their skills must be tested beforehand.
• Organisational goal alignment
Humans are naturally driven by goals. However, this does not apply in business. As such, it is up to the management to make sure the workforce can accurately recognise the organisational goals. In this way, the employees will identify what is required of them towards achieving it. More importantly, they can devise ways of aligning their personal goals with those of the institution.
To achieve this, the management should make the setting of goals a process that is collaborative. They should help the employees to make SMART goals as this translates to top-down alignment with the overall company vision.
• Team engagement
After the employees identify with the organisational roles and goals, it is important to bring them together to create teams. Since each worker executes a different role towards the achievement of organisational visions, they should learn to work as a team.
In this case, the employee should understand what is expected of them by their workmates and supervisors. Once they are aware of the expectations, they can collaborate to create effective workflow.
To achieve team engagement, every employee must set goals that directly influence team objectives. This includes an understanding of both short-term and long-term visions. This concept is based on the fact that if a worker understands their role in the team’s goals, they become motivated.
• Strategy execution
The above factors combine mean the organisational strategy can be successfully executed. Since the executives, employees and teams know what they have to do towards the company visions, there are minimal chances of strategy failure. This is because every individual in the organisation has a role to play and there are no internal communication breakdowns.
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