In a world where talent shortage is causing companies to poach resources from other firms (see what Snapchat did), we here at empxtrack want to help you retain your most valuable employees by making them part of the workforce management process.
In his book titled ‘Corporate Culture and Performance’, John Kotter, states that companies with strong adaptive culture, based on shared values, perform better on average than others. Also, Rainer Strack, from BCG , said that it’s important for people to have good relationships with their peers and their managers in addition to having a definitive purpose in their jobs. A natural question then is: How do you build that culture?
In this post, we look at understanding how you can use goal management, within empxtrack, to build a healthy work culture through instilling shared values in your employees and building a high performance environment.
Start with asking ‘Why?’
The workforce is changing around us. People you hire today are constantly seeking to understand why their job should matter to them. To solve this problem, the process of workforce goal management has to start with your company goals – including the annual business plan that elaborates on the vision, translates to yearly objectives and then goals for departments. To see results it’s imperative to put these primary goals into action.
To simplify the process, at empxtrack, the HR manager can very easily:
1) Add goals from the company’s annual plan,
2) See which category the goal fits into. This will depend in the way you categorize the goals, and may adhere to the Balanced Score Card (BSC), Management by Objectives (MBO) or the timeline for the goal (yearly / monthly / weekly)
3) And, add it against the time period in which the company would like to achieve that goal
Delegate, Delegate, Delegate
Once you define your vision and share it, your people will make it their own vision too, and start aligning with it. Pick a goal that derives from your vision and hold a department or division responsible for it. For instance – revenue goals pass on to the sales, marketing and finance teams; customer service goals pass on to the operations team and the product innovation goals can pass on to the research and development team.
empxtrack’s employee group function allows you to do exactly this. You can divide goals among teams based on the job that they signed up for, location they work out of and the team that they work in.
Get the leadership involved
Now that you have broadly divided the goals, it’s time to call on the big guys in the top leadership team; discuss with them if they would like to work on the same goals or add new ones. Discussing goals at the beginning of the year can help your team focus on achieving them. And of course, the leadership then repeats the process with their line, who then repeat it downwards again aligning everyone to common objectives.
Within empxtrack, you can orchestrate this entire process by:
- Creating goal-sheets for your senior leadership
- Then having the managers and the employees, space these goals out well in time
empxtrack, also makes it possible to select the people by rank, division and location to manage this process well from a single screen.
Make sure everyone is aware
Finally, let’s come down to the place where we started: the ultra-ambitious employee who appears to have the potential to be your top performer. You fulfilled all the tasks mentioned above so that this guy knows why he is with your company and what his role is in its success. By going ahead and sharing his manager’s goals, and the company goals; you inject transparency into your office culture, making it more open and better at engaging the employee in the process.
empxtrack ensures that mention of the manager’s or supervisor’s goals is made clear, next to where your employee jots down his goals. The employee could pick up a particular goal that his manager is working on, add another one of his own, and start working towards this set of relevant objectives. Bingo! Your employee is aware about the goals he is confident of achieving. Now, he is super charged and motivated to achieve these goals; which by the way, are completely in alignment with the vision you framed. Let’s celebrate on that note!
If you have already made the prudent decision to use empxtrack, this post can help you build the foundation you need to create an aligned and engaged team. Feel free to ping our support team, who will show you how this HR solution can be executed at your organization with ease.
