Employee alignment is core to employee engagement - but how do you actually measure it and what can you do to improve it? The team at Power2Motivate knows!
Employee alignment is a new way of thinking about engagement whereby companies look at how synced up their employees are to the organisation's wider goals. It's becoming popular in modern business because, all too often, employees don't understand what their place is. They don't know how the tasks they complete on a daily basis tie into their employer's objectives. As such they lack motivation, feeling that their job serves no real purpose.
It's one thing saying employee alignment is important, but how do you measure it?
Test employee understanding through surveys
One of the best ways to see whether your employees feel aligned to your organisation is through surveys. Add a question in your normal employee engagement survey that asks whether team members understand the wider goals of the business and how their job fits into these.
Another method is to send out a questionnaire that tests your employees' knowledge of the business and its values. To encourage responses, you may want to offer an incentive for them to fill out the quiz, such as a prize or extra points as part of their rewards program.
If you find your employees lack a basic understanding of your organisation and its goals, it's important to address this straight away. Offer training and presentations on the company's wider vision, and make sure communications enable team members to understand how their day-to-day activities contribute to that vision.
Measure critical behaviours
All businesses have a set of values they want to espouse. Acting ethically, continuous self-improvement, reliability, fun culture... whichever you support, every single action your employees take should help to support these values.
Consider what your employees' critical actions are - these will be those behaviours that best support your organisation's values. Once you've decided which critical behaviours complement your values, start measuring how frequently your employees are undertaking them.
For example, if you believe in continuous self-improvement, you'd expect employees to constantly be learning, whether that's through training, mentoring programs or self-reflection. If there are very few participants in your learning programs, it suggests they don't feel united with your self-improvement value, and you may need to step in to remedy this.
Assess social media support
We live in an age of LinkedIn, where it's normal for employees to be advocates for the businesses they work for. There are plenty of employees who regularly post on social media about new initiatives their company is undertaking, or recent things they've learned from work. This is a good indication that these employees feel they are a core part of the business, because they know that these initiatives directly affect them.
Start looking at how many of your social media mentions are from employees, and how many of those are positive. You can do this by using tracking methods available within each social media platform you operate on. For example LinkedIn Analytics enables you to understand more about your followers' demographics and sources. This will enable you to see what sort of discussions your employees are having about your company and whether they are positive.
Employee Rewards and Recognition with Power2Motivate
One of the best ways to improve employee alignment is to set up an Employee Rewards and Recognition Program with Power2Motivate. By offering employees incentives for their work, you're showing that you really value what they do - enough to pay for different rewards for them.
If you'd like to learn more about improving employee alignment in your organisation through a rewards and recognition program, speak to the incentives experts at Power2Motivate today or request a demo.