EAD-Employee Alignment Disfunction, happens to the best of companies, and is quickly becoming the killer of Employee Engagement in many organizations today. With 70% of the workforce being disengaged, the best way to bring the focus back to engagement is to put a focus on employee alignment.

70% of employees say that alignment is the greatest hurdle to achieving company strategy. But where does the issue lie? With management? Or the individual? No matter who is at fault, employee alignment is essential to fostering engaged employees who will help bring great profit to your company. Employee alignment is the act of getting all of your employees on the same page. Learning to embrace the idea of employee alignment is not only critical to the overall success of your company, but it is essential to keeping your employees engaged.

Here are five ways that you can make sure that your employees are aligned:

Keep the channels of communication open

• Remember the telephone game as a kid? One person would start the chain and by the end of the line what was said is nowhere near what the original sentence was. The same concept applies when you have faulty lines of communication within your organization. “The more people a message travels through, the more chance that message has of being drastically altered,” Andre Lavoie, CEO of the talent alignment platform ClearCompany, states. To avoid the $37 Billion in loss that can happen as a result of miscommunication be direct and with your employees and make sure that everyone understands your vision. 

Set Goals

• All projects that are assigned  to a team should directly impact the overall goals of the organization. Doing so will enable managers and leaders within your company to be able to visualize how everyone within the company works together, and how this will impact the overall goals of the company. Not only does your company need to set goals, they need to stay committed to those goals. The more your employees interact and engage with one another the easier it will be for them to stay committed to the goals of your company.

Download: How Employee Engagement Efforts are Failing

Keep Your Expectations Clear

• The expectations of your employees are solely contingent on the expectations that you, as their employer, set for them.

Tracy Maylett, CEO of management consulting firm DecisionWise, states that “as we conduct employee exit interviews with some of our client organizations, we find that often employees who are ‘exited’ (the politically correct term for ‘fired because you weren’t doing a very good job’) simply didn’t know the employer had certain performance expectations, and thought they were fulfilling the job requirements.” If you do not set clear expectations for your employees, you are setting them up for failure, and therefore your team will not be aligned and your company will fail.

Be Consistent

• Consistency is key when it comes to making sure that your employees are aligned and on the same page. When rules and policies are enforced differently according to circumstances, it results in EAD. The only thing that employees can count on in an inconsistent work environment is indecision. When employees see their employers exhibiting signs of indecision they lose confidence in their employers abilities, and therefore are no longer a united front.

Recognize Your Employees Good Work

• Reward your employees for a job well done. A Gallup study found strengths-based employee feedback resulted in a 12.5 percent increase in productivity. Understanding what your employees strengths are and utilizing them to align your other employees with the company’s goals will promote a successful and united company. A great way to reward your employees and let them know that their work is aligned with the company’s overall goals is to implement an employee engagement platform, like Rewardian, into your companies structure. Using the Rewardian platform, you can create programs to reward your employees according to your company’s goals, reassuring your employees that their work is aligned with the goals of your company.

By keeping communication open, setting goals for your employees, keeping your expectations clear and consistent, as well as rewarding your employees for a job well done your employees will be engaged and and motivated to play a role in your company’s alignment.

Only slight adjustments are required to shift the focus and align your employees so that they are committed to your company and its overall success.