Tips Alineamiento

Whitepaper

10 Things HR Can Do to Help Align an Organization’s Goals
A SumTotal White Paper
While performance management technology offers useful tools that help you align your workforce to company goals, it can’t do all of the work for you. Discover ten steps that can save you time and expense as you work to drive better organizational alignment. In this paper, you’ll learn:
• The ten mostimportant things to consider before you embark on

STRATEGY

organizational alignment project
• How to position HR in the process—and what role HR

professionals should play
• Best practices for avoiding common pitfalls, such as planning

a multi-tiered rollout to help goals work their way down an organization

Executing an effective goal alignment process is a critical part of asuccessful performance management initiative.

Introduction
Are ALL of your employees working 100% of the time on things that move your strategy forward? In other words, are their workloads fully aligned with business objectives? If your answer is no, don’t worry. Your organization is not unusual. Yet there are few things HR can influence that can have such a profound impact on your organization’sperformance. While using performance management technology is recommended to get meaningful ROI, the software can’t do all of the work for you. This white paper offers proven best practices that will help you drive better organizational alignment.

10 Steps Toward Greater Alignment 1. First, know the goals.
Get involved with executives and senior management as they set the coming year’s goals.Try to understand the business issues and challenges driving each goal—and once they’ve been determined, follow up with the people most responsible for each goal to gain further insight.

Whitepaper

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10 Things HR Can Do to Help Align an Organization’s Goals

2. Get buy-in.
Work with your executive team to ensure everyone is on the same page, and make certainthey support your efforts to align employees with the company’s goals. You will need their assistance in communicating the importance of the program, so that employees understand that the executive team stands behind it.

3. Cascade goals.
After goals are set at the top of the organization, they should work their way down in the organization. This won’t happen by chance or osmosis! Facilitatethe process by planning a multi-tiered rollout with benchmark dates (i.e., Week 1 = Executive objectives, Week 2 = Department head objectives, etc.). Because the organization’s strategy is both high-level and strategic, you can’t expect someone in the mailroom to establish perfectly aligned goals if his or her department has not already matched its own goals to the corporate goals.

4. Ensureconsistency.
As the goal-setting process trickles further down in the organization, HR can assist by establishing standards and then monitoring the goals that are being created to ensure they are consistent with those guidelines. For example, you can ensure each goal meets ‘SMART’ criteria (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound), while also recommending a minimum and maximum numberof goals for each employee.

5. Hold everyone accountable.
A manager needs to make sure goals are measurable with clear-cut deadlines, and then hold employees to those dates and deliverables. Although unexpected events may occur that affect a due date or even change a goal, HR should work with managers to prevent a culture of ‘settling’ where complacency becomes the norm.

6. Reinforcethrough development.
Aligning and setting goals is only half the battle. As an organization, you need to help ensure that employees have the skills and tools in place to actually reach their established goals. The best way to do this is through development plans. Unfortunately, this is an area where most goal systems and processes fall short—but HR can combat this problem by monitoring overall usage...