Addressing the Challenge of Aligning Goals Across Your Organization

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In today’s market, the need to align your workforce so you make the most of your resources is considered table-stakes. There are two common models for implementing organizational goal management: the people centric model and the organization centric model.

In a people centric model, goals are assigned to individuals starting at the top of the organization hierarchy. Goals are "cascaded down" as each employee is given goals that help their manager or supervisor achieve his/her goals.

So for example, the VP of Sales and Service might have a goal to: Increase customer satisfaction to 90%. The Director of Customer Service who reports to the VP could be given a linked goal to: Reduce the response time to customer email queries to 1 day. A Customer Service Manager who reports to the Director might then have a linked goal to: Provide training to all their staff to increase product knowledge.

 

The Challenges of People Centric Goal Alignment

There are three inherent challenges with the people centric model of organizational goal management.

1. Goal setting must proceed in a descending hierarchy, with everyone waiting for their managers' goals to be set before they can set their own. This linear, hierarchical process can take significant time.
2. Employees only see the impact of their contributions to their manager's goals, not to the organization's overall goals.
3. If a person leaves the organization, or moves to a new role, the hierarchy of cascaded goals is broken and must be reestablished – which can be a time-consuming task for everyone involved.

 

Organization Centric Goal Management: A Better Way to Achieve Organizational Goal Alignment

Halogen's employee performance appraisal software makes it easy for organizations of all sizes to use the best-practice organization centric model for aligning employee goals.

In an organization centric model, goals are set for the organization overall, then broken down across the organizational hierarchy; sub-goals can be set for divisions or business units. Organizational goals are assigned an owner for reporting purposes.

Using Halogen eAppraisal, employees throughout the organization can see these high-level goals and can link their individual goals to them as appropriate. A link icon indicates that the goal is linked to and/or copied from a corporate goal. Clicking on the link icon displays the actual corporate goal, as shown below.

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Following our earlier example, the organization would set itself a goal to achieve 90% customer satisfaction. Ownership of the goal is given to the VP of Sales and Service for reporting/communication purposes. John, who works in assembly, can link his goal to achieve less than 5% defects to the customer satisfaction goal. The Customer Service Manager can link his goal to improve his department's response time on customer phone calls to an average of 1 minute, etc.

The VP of Sales and Service can set a status flag for the goal and communicate progress on that goal. Everyone who has a personal goal that is linked to the customer satisfaction goal can see the status flag and progress update, which helps to give them a sense of contribution and direction.

Click to enlarge image

 

Advantages of the Organizational Centric Model

There are several strategic advantages to this approach to organizational goal management:

• Goal setting for everyone in the organization can begin as soon as the high level organizational goals are created.
• Goals can be linked across the organization, allowing for more breadth of contribution and a more detailed understanding of the intricacies involved in achieving the goal.
• Goal links are not affected by changes in staffing or organizational structure, because high-level goals belong to the organization, not an individual.
• Employees at all levels of the organization have clear visibility into how their work impacts organizational success, enhancing their accountability and engagement.
• Executives can easily see individual goals that are linked to organizational goals and can monitor progress on these.
• Changes to business priorities can be managed easily and do not restrict employees from working on common goals.
• The focus is on organizational success rather than individual success.

 

Learn More About Ways to Achieve Organizational Goal Alignment

Read A Practical Approach to Aligning and Managing Employee Goals, a Knowledge Infusion white paper.

 

Read How Others Have Successfully Aligned their Workforces

The San Diego Zoo rolled out a new strategic plan and needed to develop goals for all employees that were aligned with that strategic plan.

One of Savvis' original goals in implementing a new employee performance management system was to align corporate strategy with individual employee performance so they could better harness the power of their workforce.

 

See for Yourself How Easy it is to Align Goals in Your Organization!

Take a quick product tour to see the power of Halogen eAppraisal.

Try our software for free and see your forms and process working in our system.