Workforce Alignment:

Turn your Organizations Defining Resource into a Competitive Advantage

Workforce Alignment:
Turn your Organizations Defining Resource into a Competitive Advantage

The executive team just announced it would be acquiring a small competitor in the market. In the last six months, there were several new changes in partnerships. Just prior to that, the company built a new service center in Mexico City, which is now fully up and running.

How will workers know what is expected of them and how they will be rewarded for the work they do? How will managers ensure they have the right talent doing the right work? How can we ensure a smooth integration of

As these changes affect the companys growth and play a key role in the evolution of its corporate strategy, it is necessary to have an agile business to ensure uncertainty of the future does not negatively affect production and results during current transitions.

workers through an acquisition while making sure workers stay on track and remain focused? How can we maintain visibility into the companys key goals and initiatives as the business environment constantly shifts? The VP of HR knows her organization needs a solution that can empower managers to redeploy and develop talent as necessary to support evolving business strategies and achieve true workforce alignment.

As company strategies evolve rapidly, the business should be assessing the following questions:

How can managers and their workers have the confidence to remain aligned, engaged, and productive?

Unfortunately, the VP of HR finds herself at a loss. How will workers know the priorities of the organization and ensure the work they are doing is in line with the companys priorities?

elasticity, and enduranceall of which can only be

Visibility, Alignment, Optimization

This is the second in a three-part series that will outline Workdays view of the three key steps to effectively managing your workforce and translating talent data into bottom line impact:

achieved by having the right people and a deep focus on continuous workforce alignment and optimization.

Is your organization successful at aligning the goals of your workforce with the overall goals of the organization? For most organizations, this can be quite nebulous. However, we know that poor alignment of skills and talent to key business goals lowers efficiency and productivity of the organization, puts the success of these goals at risk, and reduces engagement of the workforce.

Visibility. Increase authority and credibility by having real-time, accurate visibility into the composition, capabilities, cost, and quality of your workforce. Alignment. Provide managers with tools that help maximize the output of their teams through alignment of workers and the work they are doing. Optimization. Contribute to the sustainability and growth of your organization by architecting talent strategies for optimization.

Alignment begins with basic performance reviews and cascading goalsclearly articulating the goals of the organization to ensure all employees can draw the line between their work and what matters to the organization. But it also includes true talent management and employee engagement to ensure continuity and consistency of business ideals. This involves understanding and motivating individuals uniquely and commitment from the organization to follow through on promises when

The Importance of Alignment

What exactly is alignment and why is it so important to the success of your company? Workforce alignment should not be narrowly defined as periodic performance reviews and goal setting. Rather, real alignment is about continually optimizing the investment in people and maximizing the productivity of the workforce against organizational objectives. This goes hand in hand with effectively communicating what is important to the organization and rewarding workers accordingly. Both HR and managers need to take a shared role in accomplishing alignmentHR as a guide and mentor with a birds-eye view of the organization, supporting managers who know and oversee their people day-to-day.

objectives are achieved.

Traditional performance management systems pose a risk of moving out of sync with evolving business strategies and make it easy to become misaligned. Employees may engage in periodic goal setting and performance reviews within the current systems, but the task often sits outside of their everyday work. The link between actual work and goals may become weaker as the focus on work shifts and goals are not updated. As corporate initiatives change and their impact on everyday work is unclear, there could be a loss of engagement and potentially the loss of key performers. Moreover, this misalignment can actually become a business risk.

Shifting business models, increased regulation, mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, expansion, and contraction are all the part of the new normal. And, todays business climate generously rewards operational scalability,

Engaged Employees

Disengaged Employees

productivity of the organization but also reduces workforce engagement and puts the success of the organizations goals at risk.

(9.57:1)

: :

-$35 ,

Employee dissatisfaction and disengagement cost American

World-Class Organization

businesses over $350 billion every year (The Cost of Disengaged Employees Gallup Management Journal, 2009)

Replacing disengaged workers becomes very costly. It is important to find the right people who will contribute the most and also get the most out of the work assigned to them. Workers can achieve the right balance of maximizing business success and continuing their growth for the future.

(1.83:1)
Average Organization

Alignment leads to employee engagementat world-class organizations the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged workers is 9.57:1. In average organizations the ratio is 1.83:1. (Employee Engagement: Whats your Engagement Ratio? Gallup, 2010)

To achieve true alignment, organizations need to If HR can equip the organization to effectively achieve continuous real-time alignment, and equally incentivize managers to optimally engage their employees without additional goal setting, HR will have successfully managed to reduce business risk, improve results and create a more satisfied, high-performing organization. Many HR organizations today are considering or actively developing workforce/talent dashboards for their business users. While helpful, these efforts dont go far enough because the data presented is often disconnected and out of context of the workflow. To deliver highimpact performance support, HR should also provide business users and managers with workforce intelligence through the natural course of business. overcome the inability to understand the needs of each team and how best to fill skill or talent gaps, as well as inconsistency of management and performance based compensation across teams.

Aligning employees to the corporate strategyhelping them understand their new call to actionis a critical driver of success in todays market.
Corporate Executive Board, Align Employees with the Corporate Strategy, March 2010

By providing managers with tools to gather information,

How Poor Alignment Affects Your Organization

One of the main challenges facing HR organizations today is the poor alignment of skills and talent to work supporting key business goals. The organizations top talent may be working on non-critical objectives and underperformers may be subject to unrealistic expectations. This not only lowers the efficiency and

ask the right questions, and in turn, draw the proper conclusions, HR can become a valued influencer. HR can offer managers guidance and training on the best practices for fostering a positive culture, generating results, and rewarding performance within their teams. In turn, managers can increase the productivity of the workforce, ensure the satisfaction of their workers, and give the organization the best chance to meet its overall goals.

Traditionally, HR focused on transactions: changing current data or reporting on a retrospective basis. Now HR needs to anticipate business needs by providing proactive, prospective analysis and recommending actions based on the organizations and the individualstalent management, development, and succession planning data and needs.
Towers Watson, Viewpoints Q&A: Reshaping HR Service Delivery for a New World Order, August 2010

All of these factors contribute to poor continuous alignment, lead to lowered organizational efficiency, and hamper workforce productivity and engagement. In the end, if HR cannot enable worker success, organizations can actually become misaligned over time.

The majority of executives in all industries indicate that their companies lack coherence: They struggle with setting a clear and differentiating strategy, ensuring that day-today decisions are in line with their strategy and allocating resources in a way that supports the strategy.
Booz & Company, Executives Say Theyre Pulled In Too Many Directions and That Their Companys Capabilities Dont Support Their Strategy, January 2011

Why Current Alignment Plans Dont Work

Many factors compromise workforce alignment:

Lack of transparency into the link between personal goals and actual work to team and business goals set by the leadership team Lack of visibility by the workforce into how their work contributes to the organizations success Little or no visibility into the mismatch between the actual capabilities, capacity, cost, and quality (CCCQ) of a team and the CCCQ needed to achieve team goals Limited tools to help close these gaps, maximize workforce mobility, and find and allocate workers Performance reviews based on individual goals set and revisited infrequently within a constantly changing business environment

Alignment for a New HR

True continuous alignment is more than goal setting. It is also about connecting goals to every day work done by the workforce in real-time. Linking actual work and contribution by the workforce to organizational and personal goals gives individual workers insight into how their effort factors into their own and the companys success. The more clearly the workforce understands how its behaviors affect company and personal benefit, the more engaged they will become. Additionally, clarifying the link between a workers performance to the initiatives and goals set by an organization makes performance appraisals and goal management a more meaningful exercise.

involvement and understanding of the organizations and individuals goals, can more effectively equip managers with the right tools to effectively engage, assess, reward, and develop their workforce.

HR will be able to help managers answer the questions:

Does the work their people are doing align to the goals the company is trying to accomplish?
Annual goal alignment and performance reviews without continuous feedback and recalibration leaves gaps in the calendar and risks misalignment. Ensure continuous alignment through the capture of daily activities in line with business initiatives.

Are the right people with the right skills assigned to the right work? What do teams need and are there talent gaps

As corporate strategy changes, it is necessary to ensure the message trickles down into everyday workwhich may not happen if goals are only set once a year. With the ability to empower managers with the right tools and consistent, up-to-date information about the skills and work of their workers, HR can successfully create a highperforming organization and also provide guidelines on how best to leverage the skills and strategies to optimize their teams.

that can either be filled internally or developed from within? Is there consistent and equivalent management across teams?

Understanding How Workday Unified HCM Can Help

Workday unified HCM is the optimum tool set to empower HR and managers with cohesive information to assess, analyze, and implement strategies to maximize their teams productiveness and opportunities for success. It combines workforce, initiatives, talent, and spend information with embedded intelligence and analytics through a self-service interface that any business user and manager can use.

HR needs to have programs and tools in place to help effectively match individual capabilities with the changing needs of the organization. An organizations needs are continually shifting, but HR, with a strong

OPTIMIZATION

INDIVIDUAL CAPABILITY

ORGANIZATIONAL NEEDS

INDIVIDUAL CAPABILITY

ORGANIZATIONAL NEEDS

OPTIMIZATION

The simplistic definition of talent management is matching individual capabilities with organizational needs. These needs are ever-changing as businesses operate in evolving environments. Business leaders need to have ways to communicate the real, up-to-date, strategic, and operational needs to the rest of the workforce. In turn, HR needs to ensure the talent management strategy continues to evolve along with that strategy. Only then, can organizations become agile and achieve optimal business results.

With this information, HR professionals can become impactful influencers on the organizations ability to achieve its strategic goals. HR can now provide guidance and support and equip managers with the best tools available to achieve the creation of high-performing organizations, make better decisions, and more effectively execute on the companys business plans and overall visions.

workers for real business contributions. By continuously linking actual work and performance with organizational initiatives and strategic corporate goals in real time, Workday allows HR to foster increased consistency of management and performance based compensation across the different teams of an organization.

With Workday, managers can use scorecards to measure their divisions goals against the organizational goals they support. They can visually represent goals and initiatives all the way down to the work supporting each. Managers can gain visibility into skill and talent gaps, easily find and compare workers internally, who may already have the skill set, or flag the need for resources on their most critical initiatives. HR can flag managers hiring the best talent and ensure best practices filter through the entire organization. They have empowered their managers and employees with tools that improve insight, decision-making, and collaboration across the global workforce. They have increased productivity within their teams and are able to be a more agile organization that responds faster than ever to changing markets and needs. Aviva is able to provide better service to their customers and gain a better understanding of the people working for them.

Aviva Achieves Alignment Through a SelfService Delivery Model

Aviva, one of the worlds largest insurance companies, with 46,000 employees in 28 countries, has achieved its mission to operate as a single global organization that rapidly responds to their customers needs.

A truly unified system can help your organization align organizational objectives, divisional initiatives and every day work in real-time.

HR can help managers support real-time continuous goal management outside of yearly reviews and everyday monitoring of work. They can help managers prevent time spent on work unrelated or contrary to company goals and focus their workers on the most important initiatives. Consequentially, managers can align the workforce to goals and actual work, more efficiently achieve the organizations objectives, and effectively pay their best

The only way forward was to choose a single global systemof-record that provided self service capabilities and allowed operational effectiveness across regions.
Andy Moffat, European Director of Human Resources

Alignment for Competitive Advantage

With increased transparency, HR and managers can work together to fill talent gaps, identify top performers for additional merit, and start development plans for underperformers in need of development and guidance, directly based on current work and goal completion. HR can foster a high performance culture and become a trusted partner to managers to better engage and leverage their workforce. HR can work with managers to maximize the potential for business success for both the company and individual workers and successfully support the acheivement of the organizations strategic corporate goals.

reputation of being a transactional, administrative, and regulation-run department with no strategic insight and use Workday unified HCM to identify and recommend areas of workforce and process improvement. With Workday, HR can become the workforce authority within the executive team, arm business leaders to be authorities on their segments of the workforce, and turn the overall workforce into a competitive advantage for their organization.

65%+ Employee Engagement

Average Total Shareholder Return

+19% -44%

<40% Employee Engagement

How do we ensure the progression of the individual employee and, at the same time, the development of the workforce as a whole? The goal is aligning individual and workforce perspectives. If HR puts in place the right mechanisms, processes and communication to support this alignment, the results will be promising for individuals and the broader enterprise.
Towers Watson, Viewpoints Q&A: Reshaping HR Service Delivery for a New World Order, August 2010

Alignment, leading to employee engagement, is proven to be better for overall profitability. At companies with over 65% employee engagement, the average total shareholder return was 19% versus -44% at companies with less than 40% employee engagement. (Hewitt Associates, July 2010)

Visibility, Alignment, Optimization

Thanks to solutions delivered in the cloud like Workday, HR can become a workforce authority to the business through visibility, alignment, and optimization.

For HR departments that want to maximize the engagement and effectiveness of their workforce, Workday provides a unified global SaaS solution allowing for unprecedented insight into workforce capacity, capability, cost and quality. HR departments can shed the

Organizations that commit to workforce visibility, alignment, and optimization are well positioned to dominate in the new economy. They are responsive and adaptable to market realities, create a culture that is skilled at optimizing talent, and are ready to outperform their competition.

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