In episode one, Jenni talks about employee alignment, having spent some time researching and discussing whether employee engagement has been a distraction for organisations and leaders – and whether we should, in fact, be focusing on employee alignment instead. Jenni shares the differences between employee engagement, internal communication and employee alignment. She also looks at why a lack of clarity over these terms can create chaos and what you need to do to make sure you aren’t focusing on the wrong things for you and your team.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Blog: Is employee engagement the great distraction for internal communication teams?
Podcast: Chaos to calm: Employee engagement, employee experience and internal communication S1 E8
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Now, this is the first episode of season three, and today I’m going to be talking about employee alignment. Now, this is partly because I’ve spent a few months researching and discussing whether employee engagement has been a big distraction for organisations and leaders. And I really want to get to the root cause of what can help organisations thrive. And I think employee alignment has a big role to play. So, in this episode, I’m going to share the differences between employee engagement, internal communication and employee alignment. And I’m going to talk about why a lack of clarity can create chaos and what you need to do to make sure that you aren’t focusing on the wrong things for you and your team.
Now, as I continue to learn more about the world of work, my thinking is really starting to shift into exploring this importance of alignment. And I think it’s important because it’s one of the fundamental things we need to think about when it comes to organisational success. If we’re looking at organisational change, we need to make sure people are aligned. So, when I’m talking about this word alignment, I’m talking about how aligned people are to the organisational strategy. And I think if we can focus on that as leaders and communicators, it should be instead of employee engagement.
Now, I like to test my thinking for a topic. So, I asked my LinkedIn community for their thoughts. And in a poll, around 68% said that we should focus on Employee Alignment rather than Employee Engagement. Now, this is in no way a landslide win for the alignment case. But it shows that there is more room for curiosity and also maybe a bit more room for challenging against this employee engagement metric that’s been used for decades in organisations.
Now, I’ve popped a link in the show notes to the blog post that I wrote sharing some of the comments that were shared in the LinkedIn poll. So, if you want to have a read, you can go and grab that. But I think it’s opening the doors to having a conversation.
Is employee engagement the right thing for us to focus on? Or should it be more about employee alignment?
So what are the differences between alignment, engagement and internal communication?
Now, I’ve discussed this specifically on an episode in season one. It was episode eight, where I talk about the difference between internal communication and employee engagement.
But I’m going to share the definitions again here. So, the definition for Employee Engagement is a workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values. They’re motivated to contribute to organisational success and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of wellbeing. And that definition is from McLeod and Clark.
Now, I’m going to share my definition for internal communication, which is everything that gets said and shared inside of an organisation. As a function, its role is to curate, enable and advise on best practice for organisations. To communicate effectively, and in an engaging way.
And the definition for employee alignment is from where. And this definition is that employee alignment is defined as the degree to which employees value and believe in the goals, mission and vision of their organisation. Now, alignment between people is convergence. Misalignment is divergence.
So, importantly, we have to recognise that alignment doesn’t necessarily mean people need to agree with each other or think the same. It’s about agreeing a way forward. So, I often talk about swimming in the same direction. We’re all agreed on the direction. And as a result, decisions and actions can happen.
Why does this distinction matter? Why do we need to explore alignment when engagement has been working for decades?
Well, I’d argue that it hasn’t. And therein lies the issue. Employee engagement metrics, surveys, scores, scores haven’t been working. And if they were, we would start to see significant shifts in organisations about engagement.
But engagement is individual. How engaged I am in the organisation I work for depends on a lot of factors, loads. My life outside of work plays a role in it. And when it comes to measuring it, I don’t think we look enough at the business outcomes. And instead, we get stuck measuring engagement levels, which are ultimately meaningless. It’s the business outcomes that we want to see, not a percentage point in a survey change.
Why does a lack of focus on employee alignment lead to chaos?
Now, all of this links to clarity. So, if your employees aren’t aligned, the symptoms you’re going to see will include things like wasted time on projects and initiatives that don’t support the business strategy, low engagement scores, if you’re measuring it. You know, I don’t believe you can be engaged if you’re not aligned first. So, your low engagement scores would suggest a lack of alignment. A lack of understanding about the strategy and the purpose of the organisation. And that also then links into not really knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing. So, you’re not really connected to that broader purpose.
How do we take all of this and go from chaos to calm?
Well, let’s go back to the explanation of alignment. If alignment between people is convergence and misalignment is divergence, then we have to make sure that we understand that it’s not about people agreeing with each other. It’s about making sure we’re going in the same direction.
Now, for some people, the word alignment can feel really cold. And someone on the LinkedIn poll said it sounded like coercion. Now, I can understand this, but I wonder if that’s because it can feel uncomfortable talking about people doing what you need them to do for the organisation to succeed.
That sounds really cold.
It’s uncomfortable to make it sound that cold when we spend so much time talking about how to make it purposeful and have meaning. Now, I do believe that you need to be aligned before you can even begin to explore being engaged. So, these are the things to think about to ensure you’re working on alignment inside your organisation. And I’ve got five things to share with you for you to consider.
1. You need clarity at the top
Whenever I’m taking an organisation through the Field Model, I will always interview a leadership team because it’s really important for us to understand how they feel, how connected they are, how clear they are on the direction of travel for the organisation. If there isn’t clarity there at that level, it’s going to be impossible to get any sort of alignment through the organisation.
2. Giving people time to ask questions
We’re often really quick to launch a strategy inside an organisation, but we don’t often take the time to listen and give people that time to question things. We have to make that time for people to ask questions to enable alignment. We’re naturally curious people as human beings. If I don’t have that opportunity to have a discussion and ask questions, I can’t really believe in the direction we’re going in because you haven’t given me time for a conversation.
3. The need to keep talking about what and why
It’s easy to think you’ve said something once, and that’s enough. I’ve said it once. Why aren’t you all doing it? But it needs to be said about seven times. Now, we can often get bored of our own content as leaders or as communicators.
It’s easy to think, “I’ve already said it. We’ve said this so many times, it’s now getting boring.” But we have to keep bringing that link into why we’re doing something, get the stories going, helping people understand how it all fits together. If we don’t do that, it’s easy for things to get lost in the day job and in all the other noise that’s going on for people.
4. Get to the root of the friction
Now, this is the crux of the issue lot of organisations. We tend to ignore any kind of friction. And I’ve talked about team friction on the podcast before, and we tend to just hope it will go away because we don’t want to have that difficult conversation. But if you can see it, you can see it starting to cause chaos, then you’re going to have to address it with some sort of coaching conversation.
You cannot have alignment if people aren’t able to work together in a frictionless way. It just leads to chaos, and it’s just going to make it more difficult for you to succeed.
5. Creating a rhythm for alignment
For people to thrive, there has to be a rhythm in the organisation that is consistent, that they feel part of. And that rhythm is important when it comes to alignment because it links to having an intentional culture. How things get done inside the organisation should ensure there is alignment throughout the organisation, up and down and across, whichever way round you want to do it.
So, if you want to start making that shift to think about employee alignment rather than employee engagement, think about these five. Think about the things that will make a huge difference to the organisation. And if you’re going to start anywhere, start with that first one about having clarity at the top.
Now, I’ve added some links to the show notes for any blog posts or episodes I’ve mentioned, and I’ve also linked to the blog post about the Field Model, so you can find out a bit more about that and how that can help you go from chaos to calm. I’d also just like to thank everyone that commented on my LinkedIn post about this topic. There was so much discussion about it. And even though it felt really uncomfortable for people, I think it was an important debate to have to help leaders and organisations drive change.
Thank you for listening!
Now, in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about why you need to be a learning organisation. We’ll explore what that means and why it can be important in turning chaos to calm. And what is the mindset that you need in order to do that?
Thank you for listening. And as always, I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. And you can also join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. Please connect, ask questions and share your thinking with me. All details are in the show notes.
