The more aligned you are, the faster and easier it is to generate revenue. It’s that simple.
Every business function should see its connection to revenue. After all, revenue is the value for what customers are willing to pay for your products and services. Everyone can impact customer’s satisfaction and success whether customer-facing or not.
By asking cross-functional leaders to evaluate and clarify your desired go-to-market strategy, you will gain insight to better align client success and eliminate the causes of organisational drag impacting revenue production.
When was the last time your cross-functional leadership team had these types of conversations? For most, it’s been too long. When was the last time you stopped to take a good, hard look at your employees’ roles and responsibilities?
Role alignment
Role alignment is the process of ensuring employees are correctly matched to the responsibilities that suit their skills and strengths. It involves comparing the job description each person was hired to do with their actual day-to-day work.
If it’s been more than a few months, you need to make this a quarterly planning priority moving forward. Why? Because role alignment is one of the best ways to improve employee productivity. Role alignment tells you if people are overworked or underused, and helps clarify when someone’s ready for the next phase of career development.
An effective role alignment strategy ensures every individual within your organisation understands their responsibilities, can meet their goals and recognises how their roles contribute to overall success of the business. Your employees may be effective at work now, but if their roles are not strongly aligned to work preferences and motivations, it’s only a matter of time before productivity will start to decline.
The sooner you prioritise role alignment, the better positioned your business will be to realise the many benefits of this strategic process, including:
A positive correlation between role alignment and employee productivity no doubt improves real value. When employees clearly understand their roles and how their work contributes to the overall success of your organisation, they are more likely to produce quality work.
Role alignment also enhances operational efficiency. By matching personal motivations to overall business goals, you can ensure tasks are allocated to the most suitable individuals. But the benefits don’t stop there.
Signs that roles are misaligned
Ongoing role alignment also involves providing the training and support employees need to become more proficient over time. This results in higher retention, fewer redundancies and minimal errors — which in turn leads to cost savings and greater efficiency. Sometimes, misalignment is obvious. If someone regularly takes on assignments that fall outside their standard scope of work, this is a strong indicator of misalignment. But other clues may be less apparent. For example, your employees might not be correctly aligned to their roles if some team members are overworked while others have time to spare, there’s a good chance roles need to be realigned.
If someone regularly spends a large portion of the workweek watching tutorials to complete essential tasks, they may not yet be ready for their current responsibilities. If someone completes projects in record time, they may be ready for more challenging work.
If an employee struggles to understand assignments and meet deadlines, it’s probably time to reassess their responsibilities.
Signs of misalignment can be imperceptible and gradual, such as the overworked high performer whose burnout symptoms fly under the radar. Or they may hit suddenly when someone unexpectedly turns in a two-week notice instead of requesting more training. The reality is, most organisations have a lot of work to do in this area. By regularly evaluating role alignment, you can uncover potential issues long before they have a chance to become bigger problems.
If steps one and two reveal discrepancies, the next step is to look for opportunities to reallocate and delegate tasks. Again, involve your employees in this process — they are the best sources of information when it comes to keeping teams aligned. By aligning individual goals with the strategic goals of your organisation, employees can see how their contributions directly impact business success.
It’s important to set expectations with clear performance metrics during this step, so employees understand exactly what’s expected of them in their roles moving forward. Revenues will then become more reliable faster.
