Grabbing the Advantage of Joining Company and Employee Goals
I’ve often thought there is a broad tendency in general to separate the employee’s success from the success of the organization. This is formalized by labor laws for example that require a set amount of pay per hour rather than requiring a set amount of pay per completed task. The effect is to stimulate a mindset that hours are the important things rather than the tasks accomplished during those hours.
When a company is loosing money because it just isn’t competitive enough and employees are still at the jobsite a specified number of hours but only completing half the amount of work that should be completed in that amount of time, you have to wonder what the thinking is. It’s almost as if it’s employees against company and whoever can get the most with the least expended is the winner. This points to a major disconnect in the understanding of just what the employees’ roles are relative to the company’s goals.
I read in a report by Success Factors that nearly 95 percent of employees don’t know the top objectives of their companies. Interestingly they go on to explain it is like that because few companies articulate the goals effectively and then track employee performance relative to the goals.
In construction there are so many jobs that are specifically focused on one particular aspect of something that it is assumed the people doing those jobs understand how their piece ties into overall company goals. That assumption is exactly why many managers are surprised when decisions get made that directly run counter to company objectives. Once you rule out sabotage then you have admit that perhaps the employee who made the decision doesn’t really know the company objectives.
Getting an employee to just see and understand company objectives is not enough. They have to come to understand how doing their job every day moves the company toward those objectives. But even more importantly they should understand how the things they do, and don’t do, that negatively affect the company’s ability to meet it’s objectives in turn negatively affect their ability to meet their own objectives.
On a bad day when you spot someone goofing off haven’t you wanted to go up to them and say something like: “If you don’t complete your assigned task by two o’clock the company will loose $100, and so will you.” Wouldn’t that magically, and quickly make the point of this whole article?
Addressing this issue though is much better done in a different way. In order to create the environment where people really do understand how their actions affect the bottom line Success Factors recommends putting together a formal process that you use to not only create relevant goals for each employee but one that also measures the employee’s performance in working toward company goals. If you may want some help in this area I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Success Factors specializes in doing these kinds of things for businesses.
For companies that are really trying, and are not doing insensitive things like over-paying management while underpaying everyone else, bringing the company goals to the forefront could very well mean the difference between staying competitive or closing up shop.
