Make Every Employee Count with Organizational Alignment
By Adam Miller

The Right People Doing the Right Job at the Right Time

In order to achieve a competitive edge, you must ensure that you have the right people doing the right job at the right time. Establishing organizational alignment ultimately ensures that your workforce is focused on achieving the overall organizational goals.

Complete alignment is a vital component for any company looking to maximize the performance of its workforce and is achieved by setting enterprise-level goals, coordinating business unit and individual employee goals, and day-to-day activities, in order to meet the company's overall objectives. Rolling out a successful organizational alignment initiative ensures that each employee has a clear understanding of the organization's goals and how meeting their individual goals help to achieve organizational success.

Once employee goals have been identified and aligned with your organization's objectives, the company now needs a solution to help manage this initiative with the ability to provide the appropriate training so that employees have the necessary skills to successfully achieve their assigned goals. This ability to closely manage employee development empowers employees with the skills needed to achieve their goals and gives them the ability to identify their contribution to the organization. Your employees now feel that they play a significant role towards organizational success, which results in more satisfied employees and increased retention rates.

Dynamic Alignment is Key to Maintaining Your Competitive Edge

Dynamic alignment, or the ability to quickly adjust organizational alignment to your organization's changing business priorities, is important. Because your company, its people and even its opportunities are constantly changing, dynamic alignment is crucial in order for your business to keep up. Without dynamic alignment, the process would become stagnant and eventually ineffective.

That being the case, you must implement a strategy that manages alignment to keep up with the competitive landscape. Once you have successfully implemented a solution you must then roll out an action plan that includes the immediate ability to alter the organizational hierarchy, and the goals of your workforce to reflect ongoing changes without skipping a beat. Global organizations, in particular, can greatly benefit from such a flexible alignment processes in an effort to remain agile and maintain a competitive advantage.

Successful organizational alignment is attainable today. No matter what industry, what size, or how complex your organization; on-demand HCM technology solutions make it possible to seamlessly integrate cost-effective yet robust technology applications to help you drive a successful alignment process across your entire enterprise.

Want to Align? You're Not Alone

At first you may question how such an extensive alignment program can be achieved by a large and complex business. Couple this with the fast paced and ever-changing landscape of today's business, and successfully aligning your entire organization effectively may seem daunting.

Historically, technology has not been sufficient at handling such complex organizations. Many of today's businesses still use manual organizational alignment and goal tracking processes that feed off of a multitude of processes and data base sources. Manual management of organizational alignment and goals is difficult, time-consuming and often ineffective as goals are set, but quickly forgotten. Because the data is captured in various sources, or not tracked at all, you are unable to extract the information you need to ensure that your employees are performing the most mission-critical tasks.

This painstaking lack of consistency, where different departments with different goals are managing and tracking progress and training, and utilizing several different software applications, results in the inability to share data and to achieve departmental goal alignment. Ultimately, this inconsistency in not only technology, but in organizational and departmental objectives leads to employees working toward lower priority tasks and objectives. Until recently, there was no solution in sight, mostly due to the fact that the different technology platforms available did not lend themselves to automating complex alignment processes. Today, robust HCM technology solutions enable you to more successfully and more efficiently align your organization, granularly from the top down, ensuring that all employees and departments are on-task, aligned with organizational priorities, and meeting goals.

Finally, the unavailability of effective technology solutions to manage the goal alignment process, and the insufficient data to track goal achievement and deficiencies within companies have hindered organizations. Businesses are unable to connect their training initiatives to their workforce's weaknesses, and have therefore missed the benefits of knowing exactly what skills each employee needs. Organizations therefore have instead assigned training based on observations created in a vacuum.

Human Capital Management Helps You Successfully Align

Today, a dynamic alignment strategy can be achieved, even by the most complex organizatons, by selecting the right technology. The challenge of aligning a disparate organization's goals across all departments can be addressed through the implementation of organizational and individual performance goals that can be tracked and managed with an enterprise-wide technology solution. The technology solution you chose should be flexible enough to enable your organization to set customized measurement standards, set cascading goal alignments and to configure automated workflows and business units to match the current landscape of your business processes.

Once goals are clearly identified throughout your company, individual goal assignments can be established and rolled-up into departmental and corporate objectives. By connecting these individual goals to departmental goals, with the overall focus on achieving corporate objectives, your company will be better aligned to track, analyze, and improve productivity as it relates to ROI. Implementing strategic alignment initiatives and leveraging technology to systematically streamline the training and development process ensures that your employees are efficiently spending their time and talent, working towards the same set of corporate objectives. Developing and aligning your company talents against a prioritized set of goals, will lead to a more efficient means of attaining growth targets.

In addition, targeted training can be identified and matched to current staff skill sets and goals. By linking training to performance and aligning the organization against a common set of goals, your HR department with be prepared with better developed employees. In turn, this will lead to stronger performance data that can be used in the creation of more strategic HR programs that are tailored to better meet overall company objectives. Well-aligned training programs and performance data can then be used to help determine performance-based compensation, succession planning, recruiting needs, and can help to manage your organizational alignment, all in an effort to achieve a competitive edge.

Leveraging Alignment with On-Demand Technology and Analytics

Today's Human Capital Management (HCM) technology solutions should provide you with easy to understand 'at-a-glance' analytics that clearly indicate the status of your organization?s progress, at any point in time. The ability to quickly review who's meeting and exceeding goals, and more importantly who's missing their goals is crucial to proactively addressing weak performance within the organization.

On-demand technology not only supports these dynamic at-a-glance reports, and seamless integration of training, goals and competencies, but the on-demand platform also supports rapid realignment. On-demand supports rapid realignment as an organization can quickly change goals being tracked, business workflows, assigned tasks and goals 'on-the-fly' without any re-customization of the software. The ability to rapidly re-align without cumbersome customizations to the software is necessary in order to respond to the changing market conditions and the changing priorities of the organization.

The flexibility of the on-demand model's open architecture also lends itself to today's global economy and provides value-added technological capabilities that will maximize your organizational alignment efforts by making the process not only possible, but more seamless. At the same time, integrated, and on-demand human capital management will ensure that every one of your employees plays a significant role toward achieving your overall corporate mission.

Alignment Leverages Every Employee for Optimal Workforce Management

Organizational alignment not only enables the organization to clearly define its objectives, but ensures that the entire organization is working towards those objectives. As employees work toward achieving individual goals, an integrated human capital management solution provides measurements and tools to analyze performance and dynamically identify strengths and weaknesses. Once identified, your organization can leverage their HCM technology to proactively ensure training resources are allocated efficiently. Leveraging an integrating learning and performance management system based on organizational goals and performance, employee development becomes a strategic tool for maximizing workforce productivity.

Adam Miller is President and CEO of CyberU

Reprinted from LTI Newsline