We have talked about aligning one’s employees to goals and ensuring that all staffs play an active role in the business. Aligning all employees to your goals fosters understanding and ensures that the least ranking staff shares the general goal of the company and is willing to support it. When this occurs, the productivity is usually massive because the workers have found satisfaction and a driving passion for the job, making them put in 101% to ensure that the business goals are achieved. No matter the way your remuneration structure is compared to your competitors, having this deep connection with your employees will make them feel purposeful, and they will have the motivation to do extraordinary for your business.

Important Tips on Organizational Alignment

Align Vision and Mission

We have already discussed what a vision and mission statement is – A broader view of your company’s Long-term Goals and Objectives. Aligning employees to your mission and vision is essential, and the most basic way to do that is to get them to remember easily. Make your vision and mission statements concise; let them be easy to remember. Use yourself as the beta-test, “how long did it take you to lay it into memory?” then judge the scenario or others and try to make the statement concise, short, and easy to understand. Also, you could engrave them into the walls just after the entrance of the company’s building. Let them be reminded when they resume work every morning; you could also frame it and place it in the lobby and in work areas. Ensure that it gets registered in the sub-conscious of your employees. 

Become A Facilitator

For success in an organizational setting, it is important that you reach out to your staff one-on-one to help their weaknesses. Be more than just an employer, be a life coach. If your organization is too large for you to connect with each staff one-on-one, then you should assign team leaders, ensure that the weaknesses of your staff are catered for, let them know the reasons why they have been selected for a particular duty, and how that duty helps the company achieve its goals. Let each staff know his importance to the mission and vision of the company. 

Keep them motivated when they have been discouraged by tasks, deadlines, setbacks, and failures because these things are bound to happen. Issues from home may even affect productivity at work. However, if you are their coach, you can know about this beforehand and remind them about their great importance to the company to enable them to keep pushing.

Encourage Your Employees

In addition to coaching, one way to align your employees to your goals is to keep them motivated. As I have said earlier, ensuring that your staff share your enthusiasm about your goals is very important. You must employ astute management techniques to ensure that you are keeping your employees motivated. Do not be a selfish employer in your one-on-one discussions with your staff, ask questions, understand his needs, try to take care of them before putting forward the targets of the business and the Key results expected. If there are issues with your management style, and there is dissatisfaction, address it quickly and solve the problem before it spreads like wildfire. Ensure that you treat your employees in the best possible way, and this will naturally give them the drive to go the extra mile for you. Don’t be rigid in your approach to motivation; there is no “one-size fit all” strategy for motivating your employees. They are all different people; therefore, you need to approach them differently.

The human brain usually gets tired of routines. Quite unfortunately, most jobs have a specific pattern in which they employ. So your employees may simply lack motivation because they are bored; they need a new challenge. You may find yourself discussing the goals for the third quarter of the year, and you don’t get the energy you expect because they have gotten used to the roles, and it no longer excites them. So, how do you solve this dilemma? 

You must be able to nurture your employees to maintain the high level of momentum that they started with, with specific techniques, to ensure that the productivity remains at its peak and the drive to achieve these goals do not die.

Calls, Meetings, And Conferences

Ensure that you stay in touch with your employees and keep them motivated with meetings, calls, and conferences. Let them know the effort the company is making to achieve those goals, let them know the setbacks, let them know the wins, and more importantly, let them know how important they are to the firm and how their efforts have led to huge wins. This will imbibe some sense of responsibility in them, which they will like to maintain. This is the biggest key to make an employee remain committed. Make them feel part of the business and not a dispensable employee, and they will be challenged to put their best every time.

Conduct Surveys

Draw up a list of survey questions, use it to ensure if your employees really understand the vision and mission of the company. Ensure that each staff knows his role and his duty. If your staff is just performing tasks “as they come” without any real understanding of their role, there will be no feeling of responsibility. You must ensure that everyone understands their role, why they are appropriate for that role, and why that responsibility is crucial to the company vision. 

In your surveys, leave room for feedback. Ensure that you weigh in the opinions of everyone, and ensure that you allow them to know you did. Their lack of motivation may be a result of fear. They feel like it’s too challenging and may not be able to pull it off. Rigidity isn’t encouraged by business, so if you discover what can be changed to make the goal easily relatable with your staff, then you should make that change.

Create Workshops and Skill Training

One method that works is to ensure that your staff does not remain at a level of learning. Encourage development, both personally and professionally. The fact that they can learn new approaches and skills that can be employed in their daily work may just be enough motivation to move on. Encourage your employees to develop personally and professionally as part of your overall management strategy. Learning takes away your team from the boring daily routine, it gives them something entirely different to do, and they may just rediscover their passion.

Failures in Employee Alignment And Motivation

The main cause of failures in employee alignment is poor communication. When the employee doesn’t get adequate information and engagement about a task, he’s on to. Then there will be a disconnection from the company. This mental disconnection will lead to a lack of motivation, as the worker is just eager to close for the day and go home. Rapidly looking forward to the end of the month to get his pay, caring less about whether or not the company has goals, talk more of accomplishing them. 

It is important to keep a high level of communication among your employees, and in the 21^st century, there are many digital and social platforms for this. You can reach your employees across the world, even if they work remotely. Share all important information including organizational updates, product updates, executive updates, training and workshops, educational tools, and marketing tools, get their suggestions, inputs, and even constructive criticism

Ensure that your mode of communication can be accessed on mobile, let everybody be accessible on the application “on-the-go” many people usually check out instant information from their phones to see emails, and latest news, catch up with loved ones and see if there’s any information from work. Ensure you can carry everybody along, let everybody actively contribute, and don’t let them miss out on crucial information. This will lead to a strong bond and will make it easy to align your employees to your goals. Ensure that communication never lags.

However, as much as you want to be very transparent with information, you need to ensure that you are sharing the information with the right team. It is quite unreasonable to share all information with everybody. It will become a boring overload, and they may never pay any attention to the information that is specific to them. Ensure that your staff are not oversaturated. Ensure that they can engage with it. For example, there is some information that you will relay to the sales and marketing team that will get them very excited, but these goals may look so ordinary or even quite confusing to relate with for people in the design group. 

Ensure that the information you share is standardized. Don’t overload staff with information that are of no importance to them. You may even segment your staff’s digital communication platform based on their responsibility and roles and the information that will be meaningful to them and nothing else. Communication is only valued when it carries important information. 

Remember that communication is a two-way thing. You want to talk to them, and they want to talk to you. People get uninterested when they cannot participate in discussions. Endeavour not to just send updates. Ask for their inputs suggestions, and, encourage them to react, give comments about them. Let them ask questions and given observations, and It will even lead to discussions where you can just sit back and observe and write down important things. 

Apart from your segmented platforms, you may create a general platform where all segmented goals are discussed to see how progress is being made to the vision and mission of the company.

Achieving Your Personal Goals as an Entrepreneur

As a business owner, you definitely have a target for starting a business, which must be achieved. However, as I mentioned earlier, all your personal goals are hinged on self-development. I have read many books from best-sellers on their concepts of personal development and their various methodologies. It would be best to acknowledge that there is no “one size fit all” approach. There is no rigid path to fulfillment, if I was going into the US from China, and if you were going into the US from Germany, we would all arrive at the US successfully, flying through the air, but we will take different air routes, and we will get there at slightly different times. Forget about the “instructions” you have received and the “killer tips” on becoming the best in the business. The truth is, only you can discover the most successful method to use.

We are all endowed with different natural skills and abilities, which we need to discover in order to achieve a purpose. You may be endowed with organizational abilities, making you a natural leader, and some people do not possess leadership abilities but are very skilled in convincing people, hence making them very good negotiators and sales representatives.  In all, as an entrepreneur, you must discover what you can do, build on those strengths, and you will still be a success at your job.

Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs in the tech space, in many Mega companies in the United States, including Apple, Pixar, Disney, NeXT, and so on. Despite being so successful in the tech space as an entrepreneur, he didn’t have programming skills. It is said that “Jobs never wrote a line of code,” unlike Mark Zuckerberg, or Jack Dorsey, who are also successful in the tech space but are very good programmers and computer software pros. Jobs was primarily a good entrepreneur with unrivaled marketing skills. The co-founder of Apple – Steve Wozniak, was the innovator, the engineer, and the inventor. Jobs understood his strengths and utilized them properly to achieve his goals as an entrepreneur.

 If you have chosen to open a business in a particular industry, I believe that it is because you have a ton of things to offer the industry, which will, in turn, fetch you money. Therefore, it would be best if you identify your strength and the value you offer, rather than following the crowd, because “that is how they do it”- If you join them, you cannot beat them. Therefore, you need to observe your outstanding attributes and make them the front in your entrepreneurial journey. Identify your strengths, make them a foundation for yourself, and build on them.

You may also pay some attention to your weaknesses and improve on them. However, if you evaluate yourself, and this weakness has no direct effect on your business, you may treat it like it doesn’t exist because your goals do not recognize that particular weakness. Therefore, be sure that you work in capacities that will utilize your strengths, don’t pay attention to your weaknesses, and don’t assign yourself roles that will demand it. Avoid them as much as possible. However, in situations where you cannot escape from those weaknesses, take the conscious effort to improve them. If it’s a temporary situation, you may just cover up and rough your way through it; if it remains permanent, then you should work to turn your weaknesses into strengths.

This is the reason why you must focus appropriately on employing staff that solves a problem in your firm to enable you to have fewer reasons to use your weaknesses. It is very important that you walk on your clear, familiar path to reduce your chances of getting into these situations as much as you can. You are an entrepreneur, not a machine; you cannot do everything on your own. Ensure that your employees can save you from getting into a fix.

Even as an entrepreneur, you cannot do everything on your own. That is why you need employees to help you out in situations like these.

You may decide to just learn a particular skill that you find important for your job, but it will rip you of time that you can use to do other productive things. Even if you are a one-man business, you don’t need to do everything all by yourself. Focus on the tasks that can bring out the best of your productivity, and outsource other tasks to contract staff. You will save a lot of time, which can be invested in more important things than working on a task that isn’t your area of strength.

Time is infinite, but it is limited in supply. You only have 24 hours every day, and the average human being can only be productive for a maximum of 10 hours daily. Therefore, to ensure that you reach your goals the way you desire, then you must use your time judiciously.

Read Next: OKR, SMART Goals.

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