One of the components of strategic alignment is ensuring employees are supporting implementation of the organisation’s strategic plan.
In an ideal world, all employees would be across the strategic plan: the vision, the goals and the planned strategies. They would all be “singing off the same song sheet”.
This definitely sound useful.
I’ve heard executives talk about ways they’ve tried to do this: take a bottom-up approach to planning, consult employees on the draft plan, post hard copies of the plan all over the office, hold a town-hall presentation of the key components.
Yet there still seems to be confusion or a lack of awareness, particularly below the middle management level, about the organisation’s strategic direction.
My suggestion: Pick your battles.
Avoid information overload, which will disengage people. Focus on a smaller number of things to communicate and make sure people are across those.
Start with the organisation’s purpose and vision statements.
They often seem like redundant items in a plan, crafted by some anonymous senior executive. But they actually matter...provided you have crafted a purpose-driven plan.
The purpose statement should help employees answer the following question: Why does the organisation exist?
The vision statement should demonstrate what the organisation is ultimately trying to achieve.
Both should be short, simple and unique to your organisation.
Everything below these two statements is how we go about this for the 3- to 5-year period ahead. The mechanics.
No use communicating those if people aren’t across the basics.
Thanks for reading the post. I hope it was helpful.