The Incredible Power of Company-Wide Goal Alignment

The need to effectively leverage the skills of employees is even more critical for small and mid-sized firms since most simply cannot compete with large companies when it comes to technology, physical infrastructure, or financial resources. To survive in today's marketplace, small to mid-sized businesses like yours must find ways to be smarter, more productive, and more cohesive than their larger competitors.

How can this be accomplished? Studies show a dramatic increase in both worker and business performance when an organization effectively sets and closely ties individual employee goals to the company's overall strategy. Yet amazingly, a mere 7% of employees today fully understand their company's business strategies and what's expected of them in order to help achieve company goals.

What You'll Learn in This eGuide

This eGuide will reveal how you can put the incredible power of goal alignment to work at your organization. You'll learn:

• The short- and long-term business benefits of company-wide goal alignment
• How to effectively set "SMART" goals
• How automated solutions can help get your employees working on the tasks that will accelerate your business toward even greater success

The Cold, Hard Facts: A Business Case for Goal Alignment

In a recent study¹, researchers found a strong correlation between a company's financial performance and an effective goal setting process. As the following chart illustrates, companies that more closely aligned goals across their organization enjoyed much higher levels of financial success. The study also found that employees in the weakest-performing companies did not clearly understand the connection between their individual efforts and the overall goals of their employers. These same people also reported feeling confused as to their roles at the company, which naturally resulted in unfocused-and therefore less productive-work activity.

The Top Three Business Benefits of Clearly Setting and Aligning Goals Across Your Company:

1. Increased Operating Margins

Employees who clearly understand their individual goals-and how they relate to those of your company-naturally become more engaged with their work. Once employees see how they can make a direct contribution to your company's success, they begin to focus on finding ways to work smarter and more efficiently. This boost in employee productivity will naturally lead to increased operating margins and profitability for your company.

To achieve these results, your company must put a performance management process in place that:

• Increases employee engagement with "SMART" goals
• Provides visibility up, down and across reporting levels
• Creates shared accountability between employees by "cascading" goals from one employee to another when relevant
• Communicates expectations clearly during every phase of goal completion

• Understand more clearly all responsibilities associated with specific goals
• Eliminate redundancies across job titles
• Focus their staffs on your company's most pertinent goals

Setting Effective Goals for Your Employees and Your Company

To be effective, goals must serve both the needs of your company and those of your employees. For your company, goals must contribute directly to your short- and long-term business strategies. For your employees, goals must be clear, objective, and understandable or they will quickly become disengaged.

To achieve "goal alignment" at your organization, you must first clearly communicate strategic business objectives across your entire company. Interdepartmental goal visibility can also help speed the process of alignment. By allowing managers to access and see the goals of other departments, your company can greatly reduce goal redundancies and conflicts throughout your organization. Additionally, many employee objectives are not entirely under the control of one individual. Enabling and even mandating that individuals assign some goals to two or more people increases engagement and shared accountability throughout the organization. Goal sharing also helps departmental heads find ways to better support each other, as well as identify areas where they may be inadvertently working against each other.

Once company-wide goals have been established, managers can then set goals for their individual departments which clearly support your overall business strategies. Major job functions and responsibilities can serve as a general framework when writing employee goals. Managers must remember to communicate to staff members not only what is expected of them, but how each task is to be completed. For example, a customer service rep might be given the goal to boost customer retention (the "what") by improving customer service (the "how"). To be most effective, goals should also pass the S.M.A.R.T. test and be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. This provides clarity up front to employees who will ultimately be evaluated against these goals.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals: Intelligent By Design

S.M.A.R.T. goals have been found to be a very effective method of motivating employees to perform at peak levels. To qualify as S.M.A.R.T., a goal must be:

SPECIFIC. Specific goals let people know exactly what's expected of them with no room for misinterpretation. Specific goals should be able to answer the following:

• Who is responsible?
• When must this be done?
• What is to be accomplished?
• Which requirements/constraints are involved?
• Where is this to be completed?
• Why is this important or beneficial?

Leveraging Technology to Achieve Goal Alignment

As you've already learned, goal alignment is a powerful management tool that not only clarifies job roles for individual employees, but one that also demonstrates to workers their ongoing value to your organization. When you engage employees with their work through goal alignment, they become more committed to your company and achieve higher levels of job performance.

However, fully engaging employees in this manner only becomes possible when individual workers understand-and accept-your corporate vision and goals. To accomplish this sometimes difficult task, company managers need tools that can help them communicate and align goals across your organization with greater clarity and efficiency.

Fortunately, a new breed of web-based, automated performance management system that includes goal alignment is now available to companies of all sizes. And today, small and mid-sized businesses are increasingly using these automated systems to increase productivity-and improve their bottom lines.

The Seven Top Reasons to Automate your Performance Management System

By automating the process of creating, cascading, monitoring, and measuring performance against goals, your company will enjoy a wealth of benefits. Here are the seven top reasons to implement such a system at your company:

1. Establish a more effective and efficient goal-setting process
2. Speed completion of corporate goals exponentially
3. Boost employee cooperation company-wide with shared goals
4. Accelerate performance improvements with clear, continuous feedback
5. Gain powerful insights by using collected data more effectively
6. Improve the quality and relevance of feedback with real-time coaching
7. Improve your company's bottom line

1. Establish a more effective and efficient goal-setting process.

Often the task of setting company-wide goals can be even more difficult than actually accomplishing them. By deploying an automated performance management system, your company can significantly streamline its entire goal-setting process.

For instance, the best performance management solutions include technology to help managers set goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based-or S.M.A.R.T. for short. Many automated systems also offer role-based goal libraries, developed in conjunction with organizational development experts, which include lists of appropriate goals for specific job titles. These goals can then be easily customized for your particular needs. Finally, performance management systems can help keep the goal-setting process on schedule by sending automatic reminders to managers and reporting their progress back to you.

2. Exponentially speed completion of company goals.

By providing everyone at your company with the same vision of success, automated performance management solutions that include goal alignment help your organization achieve its corporate goals quicker. These systems increase goal visibility and boost shared accountability, allowing both your employees and managers to:

• Understand how their individual goals match up with your company's business objectives
• Achieve more-in less time-by providing greater visibility into both individual and company-wide goals

3. Boost employee cooperation company-wide with cascading goals.

No employee is an island when it comes to accomplishing your company-wide goals-most can be achieved only through the combined efforts of many people. By cascading and aligning goals across multiple employees, you can create a corporate atmosphere of shared responsibility that will drive the success of your company. An automated performance management solution can greatly simplify the task of establishing these shared goals and help keep your entire organization working together toward the same objectives.

4. Accelerate performance improvements by tying reviews directly to goal performance.

If you want to improve worker performance, you must provide employees with clear and consistent feedback. Most managers rely heavily on memory to evaluate employees. This leads to a disproportionate consideration of recent actions and performance. An automated goal management solution that pulls performance data on each goal directly into the employee aprraisal allows for more accurate and fair employee evaluations.

Additionally, leading automated performance management systems include writing and goal-setting tools to help managers communicate their thoughts more effectively so they can easily provide meaningful, concise goals and reviews.

5. Gain powerful insight by using collected data more effectively.

With most paper-based systems, employee goal plans and reviews usually get filed away somewhere, never to be seen again. But an automated solution collects feedback and other valuable information and stores it conveniently online where can be utilized by authorized personnel. Who has and has not set their goals? Which teams are behind their milestones and need extra attention? By making this important data available company-wide, managers can always find the information they need to make the best business decisions possible.

• Track your company's overall progress against its goals
• Identify key strengths and weaknesses, organizational skills, total-rewards drivers, and other employee performance trends
• Determine competency gaps and pinpoint any missing organizational skills
• Closely monitor any rise (or fall) in employee ratings
• Assess employee rating distributions across the company, so you can appropriately reward your best performers

6. Improve the quality of employee feedback with real-time coaching.

Many automated solutions include integrated coaching tools that offer professional advice on promoting individual employee achievement. Managers receive specific suggestions for coaching employees on office communications, interpersonal skills, and other competencies. These tools not only make it easier for managers to deliver actionable feedback, but also improve its quality and relevance. The end result? Employees have a clearer understanding of what they need to do to be successful at their jobs.

7. Improve your company's bottom line.

Automating your performance management process can provide huge returns for your company, generating thousands of dollars annually through increased employee productivity, improved retention, and compensation optimization. The following tool will help you estimate the typical bottom-line savings your organization can expect to realize each year.

Automation can bring about dramatic cost savings by impacting the three cost figures in the above formula in the following ways:

Increased Operating Margins via Improved Productivity

• Align employees to corporate goals
• Increase daily engagement
• Improve performance accountability
• More efficient employee review process

• Reward top performers
• Remove "blanket" bonus plans
• Real-time view of budget allocations

• Create meaningful feedback
• Understand development needs
• Provide fair compensation adjustments

Tips for Selecting an Automated Performance Review System

Not all automated performance management solutions are created equal. Some consist of little more than a collection of electronic review forms, while others offer a robust set of best-of-breed goal management tools. Today's best automated solutions provide:

• Goal alignment, tracking and cascading capabilities
• Automated goal management and performance review reminders
• Coaching tools to assist managers when they need it most
• Easy-to-access dashboards to deliver company-wide or individual reports
• Instant form routing and other paperless online processes
• Writing assistants to help managers complete appraisal forms
• Legal scan wizards to ensure legality of review language

Give Your Entire Company the Same Vision of Success with the SuccessFactors Performance Management Solution

Because everyone in your organization wears a lot of hats, knowing who's doing what can sometimes be difficult. Now with SuccessFactors, you can provide your people with the means to easily align goals to the overall mission of your company.

SuccessFactors performance management solution for small and mid-sized businesses unites employees at your company and targets them towards the same objectives. Each employee receives clear direction that links their individual goals with those of your organization. You can cover more ground, faster, with the same resources-achieving the success that moves markets. No matter how fast you're changing, let SuccessFactors help focus your workforce.

Key features of SuccessFactors' performance management solution include:

• Streamlined Goal Planning. Establish S.M.A.R.T. goals, increase goal visibility and align employees across the company
• Online Performance Reviews. Reduce paperwork by 90% and significantly increase employee participation and feedback quality
• Anonymous 360 Reviews. Request and collect anonymous online feedback from anyone in the organization at any time
• Stronger Compensation Planning. Create a true pay-for-performance culture to motivate and reward employees
• Robust Reporting & Analytics. Get a real-time, graphical representation of the performance of your company with a powerful, customizable dashboard

Get More Information

For more information complete the form below and a SuccessFactors representative will be in touch within 2 business days. In addition you will receive immediate access to online webinars, whitepapers, datasheets and videos. We will never share your contact information with a 3rd party.