Making Organization - Centric Alignment Work - Eight Steps to Getting StartedMarch 10th, 2007 |
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Today we’ll look at the steps you, as an HR leader, can take to get workforce alignment initiatives moving in your organization today.
Here’s eight steps to help get you started:
Step 1: Meet with Business Leaders
- Discuss the company’s major fiscal year strategy.
- Identify the top four to eight organizational goals that support that strategy.(Some companies refer to these as Key Performance Indicators.They also may categorize goals into a balanced scorecard.)
- Educate business leaders on how alignment can connect employees directly to organizational objectives.
- Outline how business leaders can gain better insight into how organizational objectives are connected across managers and employees.
Step 2: Build Cascading Organizational Objectives
- Map organizational objectives across organizational hierarchy. That is, what are the objectives of each business unit or department, and how do they relate to company strategy?
- Validate how organizational objectives roll up and link to overall company strategy.
Step 3: Capture & Cascade Goals in Performance Management System
- Identify roles and responsibilities for capturing business unit and lower level initiatives into the performance management system.
- When entering organizational objectives and lower level initiatives into the performance management system, be careful to articulate objectives in a way that employees and managers understand their meaning and purpose, further enabling them to set targeted employee goals aimed at organizational success
- Update organizational objectives as changes occur throughout year (versus an annual event).
Step 4: Evangelize the Organization’s Strategy and Objectives
- Prior to allowing system access, announce fiscal year strategy, objectives and initiatives to employees (e.g. use business unit “all-hands” meetings at beginning of fiscal year).
- Educate how reward systems are tied to meeting organizational objectives.
Step 5: Build Aligned Employee Goal Plans
- Develop manager skills for setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, results-oriented, (r also means realistic) and time sensitive) employee performance goals.
- Once employees have set individual goals linked to organizational objectives, provide a process for employees to develop required competencies to achieve their individual goals, thereby further ensuring organizational success.
- Define a process that facilitates goal setting within specified timeframe (e.g. require goals to be set within 45 days of the new fiscal year).
- Identify employees with missing goals and take action.
- Provide alignment insights and measures to executives that highlight key goal alignment trends, such as how many goals are aligned with each initiative or strategy, as well as how employees are executing towards expected progress for each initiative. An automated system should provide a dashboard that provides this information in real time.
Step 6: Communicate Progress
- Update the workforce on how the organization is proceeding towards objectives; public companies often provide updates after earnings announcements.
- Keep management aware of employee goal progress; if using an employee performance management system, leverage system workflows to automatically notify employees and manager of goal progress and/or due-dates.
- Work with business leaders to understand aggregated analysis of goal progress. That is, what is the status of goal completion for specific initiatives?
- Re-align and/or re-communicate objectives where necessary.
Step 7: Coach, Develop and Re-Align
- Provide tools for employees to document and track goal progress that can easily be monitored by managers.
- Design business process for periodic status meetings between managers and employees.
- Establish the point at which the goal plan is formally re-visited during the performance period (e.g. mid-year review); update if necessary.
Step 8: Close the Loop (Pay for Performance)
- Ensure the performance review process provides manager tools to clearly differentiate performance, enabling a clear distinction between performance categories (e.g., top performers, medium performers and bottom performers).
- Clearly demonstrate the relationship between organizational success, funding of reward pools (e.g., bonus) and distribution to employees based on performance.
Successful workforce alignment is achievable today. Regardless of industry, company size, or business complexity, organization-centric alignment can be incorporated into your HR strategy and implemented to drive the ongoing success of your organization.
Tags: HR, pay for performance, performance managementRelated posts
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