Leadership’s Guide to Effective Goal Alignment

Goals are essential to growth and success, but it’s even more important to make sure goal alignment occurs between company, team, and individual employee goals to promote the desired growth. Unfortunately, miscommunication and work silos can defeat attempts to align goals across the spectrum.

Research showed that while the leadership of multiple companies believed that goal alignment was at 82% within their company, data showed the true alignment was at 23% on average.  This disconnect can lead to employee skepticism of your company goals and skepticism of strategies implemented to reach these goals.

While goals may be individualized for employees and teams, they should be aligned with company goals to meet the needs and strategies of the organization.

Importance of Aligning Goals

Aligned goals set the course for your company’s strategy. These aligned goals provide manageable benchmarks and checkpoints to ensure everyone is on the same page and meeting the true needs of your company.

1.     Increased Employee Engagement

Goal alignment allows your employees to feel more involved. They better understand what their roles are and how they fit into your company. Aligned goals also help create camaraderie and collaboration between teams, developing stronger connections between employees.

With clear goals, you have built-in tools to analyze performance. This allows your leadership team to recognize efforts and provide needed resources where necessary.

2.     Increased Employee Productivity

With clearly aligned goals and a better understanding of their roles and responsibilities, your employees will have increased productivity. In fact, aligning goals across your company can increase productivity by up to 22%.

3.     Prioritized Schedules

When your employees have goals aligned with company needs, they can prioritize their schedules based on those needs. When your company, team, and employee goals are aligned, employees can determine what is most important to work on, making it easier to create daily work schedules that promote growth.

4.     Increased Profitability

Increased engagement, productivity, and organization promote increased profitability. When everyone is working together for common goals, there is less waste and efforts lead to better results. This alignment can increase profitability by up to 15%.

How to Ensure Goals Are Aligned

Goal alignment starts from the top down. This means your leadership team needs to agree on the top priorities for your company.

Organization Goals

Determine your company objectives and the goals necessary to meet those objectives. Make sure to set clear, SMART goals that can influence the goals of your teams and employees.

This process includes determining any gaps that could be detrimental to the established goals. Analyzing potential issues will allow you to determine the tools and resources necessary to fill the gaps and complete your goals.

Team Goals

Once your company goals are established, share these objectives with the full leadership team. Managers and team leaders should have the opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback before goals are shared with all employees.

Make sure your leadership team understands what the overall strategy is for your company. Work with managers and team leaders to help them establish team goals that align with company goals.

This is another chance to analyze potential gaps and determine the best ways to fill those gaps. Team leaders will have a better understanding of the resources necessary to meet team goals.

Employee Goals

True goal alignment happens with your employees. Without employee participation, no manner of strategy will take effect. This makes employee feedback essential to the success of your company, team, and employee goals.

Once your full leadership team has had the chance to review your goals, it is time to share company and team goals with all your employees. Employees should understand how their work affects the overall company strategies.

Have management work with their teams to determine specific employee goals that work with the team and company goals.

Review Goal Progress

Providing feedback to employees helps to ensure goals are completed successfully. 85% of employees report being more engaged when they receive feedback, and 73% report being more willing to collaborate with better feedback.

Your leadership should review goals and goal completion during all meetings and performance reviews. Keeping this communication open allows you to make any adjustments necessary to employee and team goals to ensure they continue to follow the needs of your company.

Communicate Goals Regularly

Communicating company, team, and employee goals should be part of all company communication. This includes:

• New Hire Onboarding
• Training and Development Initiatives
• Performance Reviews
• Coaching Sessions
• Team Meetings

When communicating goals, make sure you understand and provide the necessary resources to help employees meet their own and team goals.

It’s also important to recognize success as goals are completed. Let employees know they are appreciated for completing individual goals that promote the success of team and company goals. Share these successes with all your teams to motivate employees to keep moving forward.

Ongoing Goal Alignment Reviews

For successful goal alignment, you need to review your goals at all levels regularly. Make sure you have the right tools in place to analyze progress and determine potential weak areas.

Regular reviews help you see if any important tasks are forgotten or mismanaged. Take time to review team and employee goals to ensure they are still aligned with company needs.

Make sure no individual employees or teams are feeling overwhelmed with their assigned tasks and be prepared to rearrange tasks when necessary. Without regular reviews, it is easy to misalign task assignments.

Make sure assignments are evenly distributed and make sure they are assigned to the best people for the job.

You should also review company goals at least once a year, if not more often. Make sure the goals for your company continue to meet the current and future needs of your company. While it can seem time-consuming to complete regular reviews of your goals, failure to do so can lead you to focus on the wrong goals.

Remember, every company is different, and their goals will be different. Make sure all goals are aligned to meet your company’s needs.

Planning for Success

Goal alignment is a good first step in developing a company infrastructure designed for your business’s success. Communicating these goals clearly and conducting regular reviews will help you ensure you focus on what is most important for continued growth.

Creating collaboration through your HR practices helps you develop and retain top talent that drives true success. Do you need help reviewing your current HR infrastructure practices to ensure they meet the needs of your company?

Learn more about how we can help you build the best infrastructure, talent, and ongoing processes for goal alignment and company growth.

Written By: HR Solutions Team and Penny Clark, Marketing Specialist