How Enterprises Can Use Data To Create Internal Alignment
We hear it all the time — data is everything in modern business. But how can data help create internal alignment among employees and remove siloes within an organization? In this article, Seth Elliott, COO, Gtmhub, discusses the answer in detail.
Mission alignment differentiates the enterprises that succeed from those that struggle. Gtmhub’s Mission Alignment Index reveals just how many companies struggle. According to the report, 31% of the world’s largest brands fail to align their workforces behind their missions.
Why Does Internal Alignment Matter to the Modern Enterprise?
When strategy and execution are misaligned, employees are set up to fail. Unclear objectives lead to a lack of purpose. And this kind of disconnected, disillusioned workforce can’t possibly produce ideal business outcomes, let alone care about organizational success.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. With clearly articulated missions, employees can find purpose in their daily tasks. And connecting specific roles to bigger goals drives business outcomes. In fact, more than 90% of purpose-driven organizations deliver growth and profits at or above industry average, according to Strategy& research.
With Growth and Profitability on the Line, Why Isn’t Mission Alignment More Successful?
Strategic alignment is deceptively challenging. Aligning an enterprise around one strategy requires each employee to understand the organization’s mission, key performance indicators (KPIs) and objectives and key results (OKRs). Leaders must translate high-level strategy into tactical roles and responsibilities, connecting each employee’s daily tasks to an overall vision for success.
Without the right tools, communication around mission alignment can become a corporate game of telephone as strategy flows down through organizational hierarchies. And achieving alignment gets increasingly complicated as organizations scale, remote employees join the ranks, and enterprises cross geographic and cultural borders.
Like many modern enterprises, my company Gtmhub is globally distributed, operating out of several offices and employing people across eleven time zones. While OKR software is the core of our business, we also need an OKR management style to create internal alignment within our own company’s decentralized teams.
An OKR approach encourages internal alignment by creating a framework for teams and individuals to set ambitious goals with measurable results. These targets support an organization’s overarching mission, which means every person and every task helps move an enterprise forward. And that’s real alignment.
This kind of approach has been around since the 1950s, but adding technology to the methodology has made it increasingly effective and popular. Modern solutions enable successful OKR adoption across today’s dispersed or high-growth enterprises by creating a common understanding of a workforce’s shared purpose and strategy. Data-driven OKR technology advances this idea, providing actionable insights to improve strategic alignment.
See More: The Role of OKR Software in Engaging and Retaining Employees
Advancing Alignment With Data-driven OKRs Technology
Metrics provide a single source of truth for how individuals and teams align with organizational goals. True to the OKR philosophy, any and every role in the enterprise benefits from these metrics as they provide real-time data and insights into performance at every level.
Executives get the analytics needed to break traditional annual planning cycles far too slow for the digital age. Accurate, real-time data can reveal the success or failure of business decisions and help business leaders remain agile. Backed by data, leaders can set and rapidly revise strategy and focus as the definition of success changes.
If an enterprise deems the OKR mindset critical to mission alignment, managers must ensure employees engage with the organization’s OKR strategy. Management-level stakeholders can uncover highly engaged and thus highly aligned teams by looking at OKR review frequency and KR achievement. Conversely, they can drill into low engagement or explore those with low KRs to identify which teams or individuals need attention and improvement.
Employees at every level can see how they’re performing and progressing toward the individual, team, and organizational OKR achievement by accessing data on user-friendly dashboards. Most enterprises make this performance data fully transparent, helping people understand how their OKRs affect their colleagues’ OKRs. This transparent approach encourages execution and alignment around common, high-level goals.
Smart dashboards can also help organizations themselves create mission-aligned OKRs. Advanced platforms automate deep analysis of OKRs, auditing these goals to ensure they follow best practices for mission alignment. Are the agreed-upon OKRs punchy and focused? Do they support the overall mission?
High-growth, data-driven companies don’t rely on a nebulous measure of success. They rely on metrics. And an OKRs platform bridges the strategy-execution gap while providing data indicating how an enterprise is performing at every level. This actionable information measures success toward achieving mission alignment and enables the agile, data-driven decision-making needed to accelerate business growth.
How are you leveraging data to create internal alignment among your employees and remove siloes? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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