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How To Ensure Organisational Alignment in a Company

Updated: April 1, 2022

Any successful organisation has alignment among its departments. If you work in a siloed company, you inevitably have unknown gaps that affect the customer experience. Siloes also prevent departments from holding each other accountable for the objectives they have set.

Since most companies operate in a digital environment today, streamlining customer experiences is more important. Your company will only be successful with this if individual teams align and collaborate.

 

What happens when there is no alignment?

In a company that does not foster alignment, departments have their own goals, technology applications, and even data sets. The teams are within one corporation, but they might as well be in different companies. What’s more, siloed companies have contrasting efforts or action plans that cancel each other out because teams do not talk about their approach to issues that affect the entire company.

 

How do you break down silos?

Organisational alignment is an ongoing process. It starts with a vision from top decision-makers, which middle managers will interpret as a group before bringing to their teams. Here are four tips for companies that want to start with alignment.

 

Have a vision that you will follow

Leaders must lead the charge in creating a culture of collaboration and transparency. When they do this, it helps their subordinates trust the process. However, working together cannot be about merely sharing data and checking up on each other.

For alignment to work, each team must be clear on the vision and the purpose of their department. They must also know how their goals mesh with the broader goals of the organisation. When managers can articulate this, they can bring it to leadership team meetings.

 

Align your tools and applications

Once you have the reason why you must align, you must also know how you will achieve this. If your company writes down your goals and KPIs and then uses different workflows and software, the exercise is meaningless. Alignment also means investing in technology.

For instance, the customer relationship management or CRM platform of a goods and services provider should be the foundation of all teams’ technology stack. Each team member should have access to the data points relevant to his work; CRM should not just be for the marketers.

Put your teams on integrated platforms, or ones that allow integrations among apps that each department uses. When you do this, it will make collaboration seamless, allowing for freer exchanges of ideas.

 

Always speak with your counterparts

Working on your own is excellent for tasks that require focus. However, getting more people to think about a problem will result in more creative solutions. Know when you should keep to yourself, and when you should seek out other people’s insights.

Establish mixed teams to help people from different departments learn how to work towards a common goal. For instance, you can get people from sales, customer service, and marketing to work on an initiative geared towards client retention.

 

Conclusion

Improve employee engagement and provide opportunities for them to learn about each other. When people know who they work with, it helps them do their work better and see the company as a whole. Breaking down silos, more than contributing to the bottom line is about building a healthier and more responsive community at work.

 

Build high-impact, collaborative teams when you work with SKILLFIRE.

We specialise in organisational alignment, helping companies in Melbourne and Sydney get to the core of who they are and what they want to become. Get in touch with us today to learn more.