1. Link individual goals to company priorities
It almost seems too obvious to state, but companies work best when everyone works toward the same goals. Yet in practice, achieving alignment can be elusive. A 2015 survey by Harris Interactive and Franklin Covey reported that only 2 in 10 employees had a clear idea of how their tasks and goals align with the business’ top priorities. And a 2017 survey by Deloitte and Facebook found that only 23 percent of businesses believe their employees are fully aligned with their corporate purpose.Given those stats, your organization probably suffers from at least some alignment disconnect as well. To correct this, corporate priorities need to be visible and transparent to every leader, manager, and employee. And, given the pace at which things change today, goals need to be revisited more than once per year. The McKinsey study found that 62 percent of companies with effective programs revisit their goals more than twice per year – sometimes even on an ad-hoc basis.Many of the best programs use technology to ensure goal visibility and alignment. BetterWorks gives visibility - company-wide - to everyone’s goals where everyone can see how top corporate priorities cascade down into team and personal goals. Individual contributors can see how their efforts contribute to the greater good and can connect with others across functions who are working toward the common objective.2. Effective coaching from managers
Managers are tremendously important to employee performance and engagement. Data from Gallup’s State of the American Manager confirms this: Managers account for up to 70 percent of the variance in their employees' engagement. And while many managers think they are effective coaches, the data shows that most are not. This is especially true of managers in their first managerial roles where the majority did not receive training or ongoing mentoring on how to be a good manager themselves. The way HR and leadership can improve the quality of your managers’ coaching is to a) ensure that conversations between managers and employees are actually happening, and b) provide them with prompts for good questions to ask and feedback to give. Here are two ways companies can do this at scale:Use an HR software to systematize communication. People are busy, and it’s hard to stay on top of every manager to ensure they’re coaching every employee. Purpose-built technology solutions like BetterWorks help HR teams ensure the right conversations are happening. Plus, when they include a mobile app, two-way engagement becomes lightweight and easy.
Coach the coaches. Managers need formal training on how to be better coaches. And like all good coaching, it can’t be a one-off seminar – it must be continuous. Managers need ongoing, 360 feedback on how they’re communicating and whether that communication improves employee performance. They can also be reminded, via notifications, to shift their feedback away from focusing on what went wrong toward what can be better. DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2018 research found that if managers simply talk more about the future in any development conversations, they can improve employee performance up to 25 percent.
