How Individuals Contribute to Value Creation
Each person in a company plays a role in creating value, but can you quantify how their work contributes toward achieving organizational goals? Do you know what they are doing each day to help you achieve your business goals?
Business goals establish a company’s purpose and help grow and attain its financial objectives. Setting specific goals enables a company to measure its progress and identify operational aspects needing improvement. Therefore, it is essential to communicate these goals to employees.
Performance tracking and clear communication help employees understand the impact of their actions on those goals and let them know what they need to help them meet those business goals.
How a Value Creation Mindset Helps to Achieve Business Goals
For a business to consistently achieve its financial goals, it must build products and services that its customers find helpful. A company cannot deliver exceptional products and services without the help of its employees. Therefore, it’s essential to create value for employees to motivate them to perform at their best and help achieve the overall business goals. Employees feel valued when adequately compensated, receive opportunities for training and development, and believe they do meaningful work.
Goals provide the metrics against which an employee’s performance is measured. An employee’s individual goals measured against the employee’s performance inform them of the quality of performance. This helps owners, managers, and supervisors align staff to work toward the business’ value creation goals.
Value Creation Mindset
An employee who aligns their work to achieve organizational goals helps create value for the company. When your employees clearly understand your business vision and are aware of your strategic value creation goals, they are more likely to understand the relevance of their work and its importance in helping you achieve the company’s goals. Conversely, a company’s failure to align their employees’ contribution to value creation and achievement of business goals slows the business’ overall growth.
Owners must take specific initiatives to ensure that employees believe in their business goals and work toward them. Misalignment of an organization’s value creation goals and its employee’s contribution toward these goals may cause a business to fail.
Employees’ value creation mindset helps them understand how their contribution to day-to-day business activities is essential for long-term business growth. This motivates them to perform better.
How to Develop a Value Creation Mindset
The Right Mindset Is Everything
The right mindset of your employees will take your business to the top. Employee mindset aligned with business goals leads to a personal association with the workplace and builds commitment to achieving a common goal. To cultivate a winning team culture, business owners must understand how employees relate to their goals and strive to maintain four levels of employee alignment to build a successful company.
- Align employees with their roles: Choose the right candidate for the job function. This helps drive synergy and get the employee’s buy-in for the job at hand.
- Align employees with goals: To ensure all employees work toward a common organizational goal, make goal-setting a collaborative process, and set specific, measurable goals for the employees.
- Align employees with their teams: Ensure all employees know and understand their managers’ expectations and how their work contributes to the team’s success.
- Align employees with the company’s goals: All employees must have a clear understanding of the company’s growth strategy, culture, vision and mission, and short- and long-term goals. This alignment helps inform employees’ commitment and accountability to business success.
A misaligned mindset leads to disassociation from corporate goals and has an adverse effect on business success. Other impacts include:
- Poor or no motivation toward their work
- Misunderstanding the business goals, objectives, vision, and mission
- Low productivity in the workplace
- Poor team performance due to inadequate work contribution
- Misinformation due to lack of role clarity
- Poor inter-and intra-team communication
- Lack of collaboration leads to organizational silos
- Duplication of tasks and work
- Hurdles to attract top talent
- Confusion among employees.
Cultivate the Right Employee Mindset
If an employee does not believe their work helps create value for the company or does not provide value toward its goal(s), how can the business owner cultivate the right mindset?
All business owners know the importance of setting goals, but long-term business success requires aligning individual employee goals to team goals and aligning team goals to organizational goals.
When all employees work together to achieve the company’s overall growth strategy, aligning goals gets everyone moving in the same direction. Moreover, aligned goals create a healthy, positive atmosphere where all employees work together and clarify their roles and responsibilities.
To cultivate the right employee mindset, follow these tips:
- Establish clear business goals and communicate them to the employees in a timely, effective manner.
- Get buy-in from your management team. Once they are on board, ensure they communicate organizational goals with the rest of the employees. Solicit their feedback and focus on resolving their queries. This will help to redefine your message.
- Ensure all employees are on the same page, irrespective of their locations and designations. Goals help employees to work consistently. Conduct regular team meetings for guidance and deploy an employee performance tracker to gain insight into their performance. Regular communication and timely guidance reinforce, remind, and align employees with the organization’s goals.
How to Track Value Creation
Business owners invest a lot of time and energy to accomplish their companies’ goals and enhance their value. At the same time, companies focus on training and educating employees in their roles and on how their work is essential to the organization’s goals and value creation. It is equally essential for employees to know how well they contribute to value creation.
What’s Next?
Aligned goals help set the tone of your business strategy. Business goals set benchmarks for employees to plan and execute their work accordingly. Benchmark goals help strategize by breaking down tasks into smaller actionable chunks that measure success against larger goals.
Employees get a sense of belonging when they work toward a common goal. When employees don’t know where they fit in the organization, they may feel lost and disengaged. Seeing the impact of their action and success gives a sense of pride and accountability.
Establish priorities. Everyone has a to-do list from which they must determine what to choose, what to prioritize, and what helps the business as a whole. When employees understand the impact of each task on company goals, it becomes easier to prioritize what needs to be completed first.
Aligned goals connect employees with teams. They connect employees and other business units. Common goals act as a crucial bond and help to create value.
