.png)
New employees can bring a slew of new ideas to the table. Integrating the best of these ideas into the company’s processes can only happen after the new employee fully understands the culture and values within the organization. Everything from onboarding new employees to 360 performance reviews should have an underlying theme of team alignment and tie in company values. It’s a cyclical, give-and-take relationship. Employees must understand their place in the organization in order to help the organization move toward its goals; and the organization must understand the motivations and strengths of the employee in order to help them assimilate to the team or department.
Employee loyalty thrives when workers understand their place in organizational goals and how they play a part in company values. So what tools does your organization need to maintain values and team alignment from the onboarding process to the time they cycle out of the company?
Onboarding
Your employer branding affects the productivity of your employees. When managed properly, those going through the onboarding program will see the prominence of company values. The best employee onboarding programs retain 91% of new hires. Allow the company beliefs and values to seep through to the very basic levels of training, and you will see an increase in employee retention.
“Onboarding is the process by which new hires get adjusted to the social and performance aspects of their jobs quickly and smoothly, and learn the attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to function effectively within an organization.” - SHRM Onboarding Report
The very definition of onboarding, according to SHRM, includes teaching new hires the professional and social atmosphere of an organization. Even with onboarding software, you can infuse the program with company values using tools like gamification. These training initiatives can be monitored by onboarding software, which helps clarify and organize company initiatives, projects, goals and mandates per individual, team, department and region.
Performance Management
Companies that strategically align their performance management plans with their organizational values are likely to see that connection in their employees’ work. The effectiveness of your performance management system can measure more than just employee performance; it can assess the success of imprinting company values into the team’s work.
Performance management can help employees align their work with company values. Unfortunately, however, only one quarter of organizations link employee performance to cultural value. This is rather startling information considering 93% of business leaders believe a key driver of performance is the influence of an organization’s cultural values.
Not only does a performance management system centered on company values drive employee performance, it helps teams to reach goals with a map built on company culture. This culture holds employees accountable for their performance while maintaining organizational values.
360-Degree Feedback
Organizational leadership has become increasingly more aware of the benefits of employee performance feedback. 360-degree feedback allows employees to have a voice in their performance. Creating well-rounded feedback provides an opportunity for the meeting to grow from the traditional performance review, into a meeting that further instills the employee’s work into company values. It allows managers and their employees to analyze how their performance has benefited the organization, and how their personal and professional goals match the values of the organization.
360-degree feedback allows employees to analyze their own work against the opinion of their manager, which increases their propensity to intrinsically value their additions to the company. Some organizations even see these feedbacks as opportunities to coach their team members, deepening the employees’ understanding of company values. Dale S. Rose, PhD (@Dale_S_Rose), President and Co-Founder of 3D Group, said:
“One of the most encouraging findings [in our study] was that while some companies see coaching about the feedback results as an option that can be skipped, more than 70% of companies make executive coaching available as an important aspect of their 360 degree feedback process.”
In order to retain employees and develop loyal ones, organizations have to begin expressing company values from as early as the recruiting process. Aligning these goals should begin during the onboarding process, and can result in higher performance and retention rates. After all, team alignment doesn’t just happen. It takes strategy and the right tools to situate your employees on the same page in order to improve employee performance. The effectiveness of the employer branding and integration of organizational values throughout the entire performance management system, from employee onboarding to walking out the door, are the ultimate purveyors of strategic team alignment.
