Moving from performance management to performance alignment is a surefire way to boost productivity and make sure you are on the right track.
Excellent performance management practices can keep your team engaged — but it may not be enough to reach your objectives. You also need to ensure that their performance is aligned with company objectives.
Shifting from a performance management perspective to performance alignment is easier than you would expect. You simply need to review your workplace culture through the lens of alignment and make strategic decisions that will enhance your performance, and ensure that everyone in your company is focused on the same goal.
In addition, spending energy on alignment brings additional benefits, including fostering employee engagement, collaboration, improved feedback, and streamlined systems.
But before we jump into how you can begin to focus on performance alignment, let’s look at the differences and similarities between alignment and performance management.
Performance management is when you create and maintain a work environment that encourages productivity and employee engagement. This includes setting clear job descriptions and expectations, efficiently onboarding new hires, offering feedback, and designing effective benefits packages.
Performance alignment is a bit different. When you are working on performance alignment, you are ensuring that your employees are working in conjunction with organizational goals.
Both performance management and alignment deal to some degree with creating an inclusive and productive company culture. But alignment focuses more on creating not just a productive environment, but one with clear direction and expectations.
Compare the differences in mindset when asking questions about your organization and current performance:
The problem is that as your organization grows, it becomes difficult to ensure that your teams are aligned with your overall objectives and can execute them. The good news is that it’s far from impossible to align your employees’ performance with your company goals and culture.
If you can get performance alignment right, it pays off.
Performance alignment has several benefits. Not only does alignment help employees better execute their tasks, it gives them clear benchmarks — which gives them a better sense of involvement. When priorities and responsibilities are clarified, work becomes streamlined. And you open the door for increased engagement, boosted productivity, and greater satisfaction for both employees and managers — all while getting work done.
When it comes to performance alignment, everyone really needs to participate. HR, owners, managers, and staff across departments are all important and play a part.
As we’ll see in this guide, communication and regular feedback across all levels play a large part in ensuring that employee performance is mirroring company objectives.
When it comes moving more towards performance alignment, there are several things to consider. Some aspects may overlap with general performance management. Ideally, you’ll take stock of your current performance management and see where you need to make changes.
Before we jump in, it can be helpful to already have a solid performance management system in place. While you will notice some overlap between the 2 concepts, it can help to have already established:
If you haven’t made the shift to these practices yet, that’s okay. You can include them in your alignment strategy.
First, it’s essential that organizational objectives are clear and concise. It would be impossible for managers and employees to follow them otherwise. In addition to the employee handbook, consider keeping a clear 1-page list that includes your organization’s mission statement and current goals.
But you also need to better understand your company’s structure. Traditionally, organizations use a top-down structure, with complex and siloed hierarchies and decisions filtering from the C-suite down to local teams. Mapping out your company’s structure can better help you understand where you can create clear and consistent communication channels between departments and levels.
Secondly, you’ll want to review your current employees and their performance. Before you can begin to understand where you need to realign, you need to better understand who you already have on your team and their challenges. This can help you understand if you need to:
Since a key aspect of performance alignment is helping employees make decisions that not only benefit their current team but the overall company mission, this part is crucial.
Having a strong performance management system in place can help you with performance alignment. Otherwise, you’ll need to start your system from scratch. To boost your current system, managers can:
First and foremost, performance alignment is not about HR. Not really. For an effective performance management and alignment system, you really need to have managers on board with any changes that need to be made. And since managers also directly supervise employees, you’ll want to ensure that they fully understand your organizational objectives.
If you are a local business with a small staff and no general manager, you’ll want to delegate more employees. This helps you on 2 fronts. First, delegating tasks to employees boosts their engagement and productivity. Second, it frees up more time for you or your manager to focus on more important organizational tasks.
In addition to the delegation, you should also encourage innovation and give your managers or star employees more room to make on-the-spot decisions. This gives them a stronger feeling of responsibility and allows them to make changes that make sense for their specific team or situation.
Next, you’ll want to have one-on-one discussions with every employee. During this session, you can better understand their challenges and gain their perspective. In doing this, you can better link company objectives to their daily work routine and their overall career objectives.
Some tips for better bringing employees into the fold are:
But there’s another benefit to linking employee goals with company objectives. Aligning employee goals with the company mission will likely boost their engagement. Engaged employees generally have higher productivity, better customer service, and lower rates of absenteeism. In addition, an engaged workplace is 21% more profitable.
SOURCE: Gallup
Remember how we said performance management is about creating a productive and positive work environment? Once you’ve gotten feedback from your employees and managers, it’s time to start acting on their information. Enhancing your work environment will only help your employees better devote their time to their objectives.
But that’s not all. You’ll also want to regularly recognize employee achievements in and outside of work, and ensure that teams and departments have opportunities to communicate and bond. While this doesn’t seem to directly relate to performance, ensuring that departments aren’t siloed is a great way to boost productivity, motivation, and company culture. This, in turn, is likely to help your employees better align with the overall mission.
There are also other techniques you can use to boost office performance and focus. Some ideas include:
You may also want to encourage both employees and managers to track their time. Be clear that it isn’t mandatory and it won’t factor into their performance reviews. However, tracking time can be a great way for individual employees to monitor their own productivity and better manage their time. For example, multi-tasking without tracking time can reduce productivity by over 40%. Even if timesheets won’t be officially used, your employees will definitely benefit from seeing how they actually spend their time.
Next, you’ll want to reinvest in your employees. Assisting your employees through training, reskilling, or upskilling is an excellent way to both motivate them while also realigning their abilities to match their work objectives. And the numbers back this up.
40% of employees will leave a company due to poor training within a year. Yet companies who invest in training may not only keep more employees, they’ll also see up to a 24% revenue boost.
Training and investing in furthering your employees’ careers not only benefits them but what they learn comes back to the company. Which means you may be more likely to reach your objectives faster.
Nowadays there are many ways you can provide training options to your employees. You can:
Collaboration is the key to success. To ensure fluid communication and full productivity, it’s important that it’s not just employees who are working together. Managers should also be collaborating with their team, and different departments should have solid methods of communication.
To further your collaboration efforts, you may want to:
Don’t forget that collaboration and clear communication starts with point 5: fostering a welcoming work environment. If an employee feels that the office is an open and welcoming place, they are more likely to interact with coworkers and create innovative solutions without losing sight of the main organizational goal.
You may decide you need to bring on new hires. This means your recruiting and onboarding process should begin with the end in mind. What kind of employees do your managers need and how well do their skills and personality match your organizational objectives? And where do you need to fill in the gaps?
When it comes to recruiting, you need to focus on clear and concise job descriptions that mirror your organizational objectives.
Onboarding is a bit more intensive.
Getting onboarding right is critical. It may surprise you to know that 60% of companies fail to provide new hires with milestones. This means alignment isn’t even in the picture — these new hires don’t even have a general objective to measure productivity. But investing in your onboarding process brings clear rewards. With a standard process, you can observe up to a 50% greater productivity level from new hires. And managers stay happy, too — with a 20% increased satisfaction rate when an organization has a solid onboarding program.
In other words, performance alignment isn’t something reserved for more established employees. Your new hires need to understand how they connect to the company’s overall objectives from day one.
To make things easier, it can help to have a streamlined onboarding process that includes extensive training and an introduction to company culture.
It’s also important to reassess your benefits packages. Helping your employees by providing benefits that match their needs can help increase their productivity and allow them to better focus on company objectives.
Some ideas for benefits that won’t break the budget outside of healthcare are childcare, flexible working hours, birthdays off, mental health days, and working from home. What you end up choosing will entirely depend on your workforce. But ensuring that your benefits match the needs of your employees is a surefire way to improve performance, productivity, and confirm company culture.
If you rely on independent contracts, you can also offer portable benefits. Some examples include:
There’s a lot of paperwork. And if you add in performance feedback, it’s easy to be overwhelmed.
Digitizing your performance management system is one way to make alignment easy for everyone involved. It’s possible to integrate continuous feedback, peer reviews, organization hierarchies, benefits enrollment, and onboarding to create a seamless experience for managers and employees alike.
There’s several benefits to shift to a digital performance management platform besides saving time:
Using a digital platform makes it easy to realign performance as your objectives change. And going digital is the perfect way to streamline your operations and spend less time doing busywork.
Finally, performance management and alignment aren’t one-time deals. You’ll want to evaluate and readjust regularly. The good news is that continuous feedback and communication with employees is a great way to motivate them.
Weekly one-on-one chats, group meetings, and quarterly reviews are just some ways you can check in to ensure everything is working smoothly. And if you’re working with an online platform, you can automate scheduling and feedback so that you have more time to focus on strategizing instead of collecting data.
But your only focus shouldn’t be on feedback. While regular feedback is crucial for success, you’ll also want to watch for changes in company mission and goals. You’ll want to also shift your performance strategy when necessary. When you need to realign employee performance, you’ll want to explain the changes one-on-one and in a group, as well as try to relink employee goals to the new objective.
After all is said and done, it’s important to remember that performance alignment is an ever-evolving journey.
As organizational objectives change, you may find yourself realigning performance goals. And depending on your team, you may need to tweak performance management tactics. However, a competent performance alignment system can provide serious long-term dividends.
Increased employee engagement, higher retention, boosted revenue, and a better understanding of your organization are just a few of the byproducts of organizational alignment. Even if your company’s mission changes over time, having a solid performance alignment process will allow you to quickly adapt your organization to meet any challenge and achieve your goals.
1. Understand your organization
?2. Take stock of your employees’ performance
?3. Focus on your managers
?4. Link employee goals to company objectives
?5. Foster a welcoming and productive work environment
?6. Invest in your employee skills
?7. Boost collaboration
?8. Revise onboarding and recruiting
?9. Realign your benefits
?10. Go digital
?11. Reevaluate regularly
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