Working toward company goals and working toward company values shouldn’t be two different ideas. For peak performance, the journey for employees should be one and the same. But business strategy can get lost when employees lose connection with the purpose of their work, and how they can improve. In a time when connectivity matters more than ever, companies need technology that enables employees to execute on business strategy by looking for cultural alignment with individual strengths. Supporting teams with engagement tools and developing employees to reach their goals gives purpose to performance — for the individual and the organization.
There’s growing pressure for companies to better define their business strategy by centering it around a strong purpose. In doing so, the company benefits by establishing a North Star that guides its interactions with the marketplace, customers, employees, and the community in a way that provides a greater context to its overall impact on society. In other words, a clearly defined purpose gives meaning to the intentions behind business decisions — besides sustaining a profit.
An article in Harvard Business ReviewOpens a new window explains that putting purpose at the core of the strategy can also help a company stay relevant in a rapidly changing world, and deepen ties with its stakeholders. What the article doesn’t go into as much detail around is the importance of the employee’s role in fulfilling a purposeful strategy, and a company’s ability to support them to do so (note: I didn’t say “inspireâ€). After all, it’s the role of the employee to produce outcomes that drive business results.
So, if getting your existing workforce on board with a redefined strategy is the first challenge, the second would be enabling them to execute on that strategy. What’s your strategy there?
For many companies, it might start with communicating an aspirational vision. Something high level like, “Within five years, we’ll improve 1 million lives.†From that vision, the company will create goals or milestones to shoot for and measure success against. This is where things get tricky, as the company will depend on their employees to reach those milestones.
To hit those goals — and successfully execute on the strategy — employers should be prepared to help individuals understand where they can contribute, the value of contributing, and how they can support. They need to be able to answer the question of, “What’s in it for them?†Only then do employees feel like there is meaning to the work they’re doing.
Learn More: 5 Performance Management Trends to Expect in 2021
Technology’s Role
In the dispersed and digital work environment, companies will need to implement technology to get everyone rowing in the same direction. Now, tech probably won’t play a big role in identifying a purpose or setting the strategy (if you need help there, you can start by defining company values and let them be the backstop for decision-making). But, tech can — and should — play a large role to fully enable employees to execute.
Enablement isn’t just about using technology to improve engagement or performance management or career pathing or learning. It’s about connecting all aspects of the employee development experience, and tying it to the strategy in a meaningful — and integrated — way. With technology to help connect the dots, measuring success can be contained to a simple metric: business performance.
The Performance Equation
Ideally, a platform that enables people to execute the organization’s business strategy effectively will support the following critical areas of the performance equation:
1. Talent Mobility:
If a company is reliant on its people to produce results, it must be able to identify how talent can be best utilized. Traditionally, business leaders let org charts do this for them. The problem with that top-down approach is that it takes no consideration of every individual’s full set of capabilities or the skills they desire to gain. Instead, roles are created and people are put into those roles based on historical performance, tenure, and maybe a dash of nepotism or favoritism.
To execute on a purpose, talent mobility has to be forward-looking. To start, employers need tools to identify employee strengths and interests. These insights can be captured with skill assessments to understand an employee’s full experience and competencies (known and unknown).
From there, the system will help generate new job descriptions and build a path to reach the qualifications needed for the role (or future roles). This path will take into consideration the employee’s existing performance indicators, and provide a development plan to help fill in the gaps to reach the next step.
The key is the employee plays a big role in building the career path, and the employer can validate how well the development plan aligns with company goals, and the value it brings to delivering on the strategy. This gives the employee a guiding purpose for their individual contribution and supports the desired outcomes for the company’s purpose.
2. Goals/OKRs :
Organizations need to be transparent and communicate clearly their strategy translated into organizational objectives. Teams and employees then need the ability to put goals in place and into action that are aligned to those organizational objectives. If the right approach and tools were used to create a meaningful career path (see above), there should be no issues when it comes to motivating employees to own goal-setting. The system they use to set goals needs to provide the ability to invite others into ongoing goal discussions, and continuously update progress with ease.
Additionally, managers will have visibility into individual and team progress to help them better support employee needs. By drilling down into the connections between goals and the work that’s being done, managers can help employees prioritize tasks and drive efficient actions toward critical milestones. To keep momentum positive and help employees overcome obstacles, the system must make giving and receiving feedback easy, from all valuable sources.
Learn More: How Remote Teams Benefit From OKRs
3. Learning and Mentoring:
As employees set out to reach goals that align with the company’s needs and their own aspirations, there will be moments when growth is inhibited by factors such as inexperience or lack of skill, or less tangible aspects of work and life that can lead to plateauing. To mitigate these moments, the platform in which employees set and track goals needs the ability to provide learning resources to quickly promote skill growth, and mentorship to sustain that upward trajectory.
Legacy learning and training programs often have low utilization rates due to the employee having no say in the content they’re being asked to consume, and no understanding of the value of growth in a specific area. If the proper steps are taken to establish the meaning behind employees’ work, companies won’t have a problem with people wanting to learn.
Peak business performance is the result of employee development being fully aligned with the company strategy. To connect the two, employees need to understand the impact their work has on the company’s goals, and the impact company goals have when it comes to delivering on a broader purpose.
When that is clearly defined through talent mobility and goal-setting, and realized by continuous growth, employees find meaning in the work they do. By implementing technology that supports all areas of the employee development experience, employees are enabled to execute on the business strategy — and drive the organizational purpose forward.