The hard truth is that it’s not enough for your employees to be able to fulfil their function. In order to contribute to your organisation’s success, your employees should also understand how to provide value in the context of your business strategy.
Whether they are upper management or in the lower rungs of the organisational chart, understanding an organisation’s strategy and executing it is critical to driving success. But, this doesn’t occur in most organisations. In fact, up to 86% of employees can’t articulate their employer’s strategy.
This results in employees experiencing undesirable situations like these:
- Spending time working on initiatives that don’t proceed because they don’t fit the strategy
- Being uncertain of which market opportunities are worth pursuing
- Being confused about the customers most deserving of their time and efforts
Why help employees understand your business strategy
There are five specific reasons to encourage your employees to learn the broader business strategy. For when employees understand an organisation’s strategy they:
- Understand business priorities
- Streamline their decision-making processes
- Can align not just “big picture” but daily activities with the business strategy
- Foster productive workplace connections
- Have clear, consistent direction
How to approach this
To help employees understand an organisation’s strategy you should:
- Ask a selection of your leadership team to articulate the strategy.
- Ask employees to review the responses of leaders and develop their own understanding. They should articulate ways they can individually provide value in the context of this strategy.
- Ask them to confer with their line manager about their conclusions so they may be followed through.
When it’s laid out like this, you can see just how significant it is that an employee understands an organisation’s strategy, for the day-to-day operations, team morale and of course, overall success.
That’s why I highly recommend employers follow a process like this during the employee onboarding period for all new hires.
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Greg Weiss is Australia’s Leading Career Coach. He is the author of “So You Got The Job! WTF Is Next?”. The book prescribes a proven, practical 7-step framework for new employees so they succeed, rather than fail their probation periods and beyond. Find out more about the book at https://www.wtfisnext.wtf/
He is the Founder and Director of Onboff an online training and coaching platform that helps HR specialists, coaches and recruiters to deliver exceptional onboarding and offboarding experiences for employees.
He also hosts The Keep: The Employee Experience podcast and runs CareerSupport365.
