S.M.A.R.T Goal Alignment: Benefits of Company and Employee Goal Alignment

Recent studies in goal alignment have shown that there is a strong correlation between an effective goal setting processes and a company's financial performance. In the study, the weakest performing companies reported that employees did not understand the connection between the overall objectives of the company and their individual efforts. These employees did not clearly understand their roles at the company. This resulted in unfocused work activity which translated to lower productivity.
"How Smart HCM Drives Financial Performance", Workforce Intelligence Institute, 2006.

"7% of employees today fully understand their company's business strategies and what's expected of them in order to help achieve company goals"
Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, "The Strategy-Focused Organization", Harvard Business School Press, 2001

Two Benefits of Aligned Goals

By aligning company goals and employee efforts, companies can expect to recieve:

Strategy Execution: Goal alignment allows managers to have a clear understanding on the role responsibilities. Goal alignment helps shape the focus of managers to improve performance with faster strategic execution.
Dramatically Increased Margins: Employees become more engaged when they clearly understand how their individual goals relate to the company's objectives. This automatically increases profitability.

To align individual and company goals, the S.M.A.R.T methodology should be utilized. S.M.A.R.T goal setting is a very effective method of producing peak level performance by motivating and increasing employee engagement. S.M.A.R.T goals are described as:
Specific: The spefic goals should answer the 5 W's (Who, What, Where, Why and When).
Measurable: Technologies play a tremendous role in helping define the progress of goal execution.
Attainable: Realistic goals motivate employees and increase employee engagement. Ambituous goals on the other hand, do the opposite.
Relevant: Goals must be relevant to the employee. They must have clarity of definition to be accepted and understood by the employees.
Time-Based: Goals must have a clear objective timeframe. Employees move toward achieving goals that have clear end definitions.

How Technology can Assist With S.M.A.R.T Goal Setting

Technology is the 'Measuring' tool that quantifies the objectives that are defined in S.M.A.R.T goal setting methodology. Employee Engagement Monitors are able to provide the definition of how time is utilized on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, by the employees. The right technology allows a manager to provide the daily guidance necessary to keep the team on track with the S.M.A.R.T goals. Take a look at the discussion on how employee engagement monitoring tools should be utilized.

Five Reasons to Automate the Measurement

Increase the company's margins.
Create an effective S.M.A.R.T methodology.
Increase employee cooperation with the strategic company goals.
Accelerate performance with delivery of feedback data.
Identify the necessary training required to increase productivity.

“Companies that increase employee engagement see improvement in operating margins.”
Towers Perrin, New Realities in Today’s Workforce

Give Your Company The Tool To Measure

Scoop Advanced is an Employee Engagement Monitoring solution that is designed to provide details on the time utilization within a company. Three levels of access (Executive, Manager and Employee) ensure that information is utilized in the most appropriate method at each level in the company.

Executives have full access to all data within a monitoring site. The Dashboard provides graphs and grading systems that show how the company is performing in real time providing executives the information necessary to make strategic decisions.

Managers have group level information to help guide the day-to-day performance requirements.

Employees have full access to their own individual records to view how their goals are in comparison to the company objectives. Based on the guidance from the managers' reports, employees adjust their work habits because they have a better understanding of the company goals, and the part they play in execution of the goals. This makes the employees more engaged.

Goal alignment, therefore, first requires effective goal setting. The IT Werks Employee Engagement Monitoring solution along with the S.M.A.R.T goal alignment methodology allows a company to steer into clearly defined and attainable goals. Read more about the IT Werks Employee Engagement Monitoring tool.

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