5 Actionable Tips on Aligning Individual And Organizational Goals

Tips on Aligning Individual And Organizational Goals

Teams of any kind in any work need goals to function. So firstly, everyone in the team should know a common direction to walk in. 

It’s a little disappointing to know that many organizations don’t track their goals, and some don’t have appropriate goals. Only about 16% of the customer-facing employees clearly understand their alignment with the business priorities.

Even if your team understands and regularly involves in goals management, there can be other barriers, such as lack of clear communication, employee engagement, formation of silos, etc.

But there are ways to tackle this. And you must make effective goals management part of the work culture, especially if you have a startup.

Aligning your team is the only way to achieve ambitious growth rates for a new business.

Aligning Individual and Team Goals

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Five actionable tips you can use to motivate employees to work towards important company goals:

Make sure you write your problems down before you start to fix the team alignment issues.

Assess the situation by meeting and discussing it with everyone on the team. Goals or, more specifically, OKRs (Objectives and key results) are for everyone.

Allow suggestions from all team members, don’t judge, and think about the most important business priorities.

Make an OKR champion and include everyone in goal setting process

OKRs are not new to business teams. There is sufficient evidence to show the capabilities of effectively using OKRs.

So there are people who specialize in setting and using OKRs for business growth. There are OKR coaches and champions. 

An OKR champion is a person from your organization that leads this goals management framework. They know how to link business strategies with company objectives.

It’s easy to choose OKRs for everyone when the idea of alignment is unclear. But it takes team efforts and experience (provided by OKR experts) to assign OKRs that impact your business.

To ensure proper team alignment with the essential business goals, include every team member in the discussion. The team should get enough time to relate their goals to the business.

This process also builds accountability in the team when they involve in it. Thus, lifting individual performance.

Use strategically planned goals that target growth.

Positive Results are essential for employee motivation and engagement.

When the workers know their contributions make a difference, they develop automatic motivation to achieve more.

Planning a goals framework that hits the most wanted business targets is necessary. For example, a SaaS startup is all about a year-on-year increase in growth rate. Otherwise, it would not stop burning money.

Employee morale shoots up when they hear good news about the business. Maybe decent fundraising goes through, or the business raises record revenue; it lifts the team’s spirits.

Use a dedicated goals or OKR management tool

There is a lot of noise around employees. Office talks, spreadsheets, using a bunch of tools, meetings, etc., tend to distract them.

You need a dedicated tool that reminds and lets your team manage OKRs on the go. A good thing about such software is that they have multifunctions and it’s on the cloud.

For example, the JOP (Joy of Performing) OKR tool comes with performance management System and employee engagement tools with other useful commonly used integrations.

The tool and its associated mobile app also make remote management easy. So it’s pretty helpful for hybrid workers too.

Set dynamic goals and conduct regular meetings/check-ins

Goals management must be dynamic. You can’t set goals; sit back and review them yearly.

A year is a long time. You get new team members, variable market forces, product changes, and changing priorities.

Reviewing goals and related employee performance is obvious, but frequency and efficiency differentiate successful practices from failed ones.

Holding regular check-ins (weekly is best) ensures you know about the team’s progress and removes any roadblocks in the way.

You should involve everyone when you adjust and set new OKRs for the next quarter. The meetings also bring out personal motivation factors of the employees.

This repeating behavior of the team makes the alignment with organizational goals clear.

Measure the performance, keep transparency and give growth opportunities to the team

This part is crucial. You must know what percentage of the OKRs the team has achieved.

This activity gives valuable insights to the team: 

  • Poor performers and reasons for the undesirable progress.
  • Identification of barriers in achieving outcomes and common feedback.
  • Uncover other factors for slow progress, such as poor employee engagement or ineffective communication.
  • And most importantly, are these OKRs well aligned toward organizational goals?

Many organizations also use this metric to review the performance of the team members. It is not a holistic measure of performance, but it plays a part in that.

A fair and transparent display of everyone’s progress inspires healthy competition.

Winning teams are those that grow business and themselves. Build a culture where employees can find more personal growth chances.

Need more assistance regarding aligning individual and organizational objectives? Reach out to us here! 

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Gaurav Sabharwal

CEO of JOP

Gaurav is the CEO of JOP (Joy of Performing), an OKR and high-performance enabling platform. With almost two decades of experience in building businesses, he knows what it takes to enable high performance within a team and engage them in the business. He supports organizations globally by becoming their growth partner and helping them build high-performing teams by tackling issues like lack of focus, unclear goals, unaligned teams, lack of funding, no continuous improvement framework, etc. He is a Certified OKR Coach and loves to share helpful resources and address common organizational challenges to help drive team performance. Read More

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