What Does an Aligned Team Look Like?
Oftentimes, businesses don’t know how to create team alignment or even realize they have issues or recognize the symptoms of having disparate teams.
A well-aligned organization is healthier, runs more efficiently, and gets more out of its people than one that has barriers separating different departments, teams, and people. That’s because a business that’s well-aligned organization-wide is more transparent with their goals and gives their teams the tools they need to work collaboratively.
76% of employees believe that well-defined strategies and goals leads to a more positive work culture
What Makes for a Well-Aligned Organization?
Organizational alignment is based on some core principles, including:
- Transparency from the Top-Down: Everyone should know the company’s current focus projects and goals so that teams from the top-down understand what they’re working toward, how projects and work are helping achieve that goal, and their unique role within it all. In many businesses, especially larger ones, a barrier tends to form between the top and the bottom. Creating team alignment in a company is about taking down that barrier.
- Encouraged Collaboration: Teamwork across departments should always be encouraged. Everyone in an organization should be available to help with projects in other departments. Expertise from different disciplines can be invaluable in others. For example, sales should absolutely be lending their knowledge to marketing to help in developing effective content and other materials.
- Effective Project Planning: To bring it all together, every team needs connected and effective project planning to ensure everything that needs to get done is finished and that different teams understand the progress and goals of other teams.
Benefits of Connecting Disparate Teams and Creating a Well-Aligned Company
Here’s a look at some of the main benefits of business alignment and the positive impact it can have on everyone in an organization.
- Reduce Wasted Production and Work on More Effective Projects: Don’t waste time, resources, or production by accidentally having your teams work on similar or ineffective projects. Aligned organizations are better at managing projects to ensure that their employees are always working efficiently on projects that are backed by a data-driven purpose.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Empower your teams to make faster, more data-driven decisions during their workday by being able to access and utilize structured data when they need it.
- Familiarity and Culture Development: Part of work is building positive bonds with co-workers that not only improve moods but also enhance collaborative ability and production.
- Decreased Turnover: Happier employees leads to many benefits for businesses (increased production, higher profits, etc.) but it also means top talent will decide to stay for longer, decreasing turnover and removing all the costs associated with having to constantly be replacing important people.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Tools like SharePoint and SmartSheet can be used to streamline workflows and projects by giving everyone involved in a project the ability to access or share important related documents, data, and work. All in one place.
- Improved Employee Experience: Technology can be used to create a happier workforce by improving the way people work at your company. Let people work smarter, not harder by giving them the tools to automate, collaborate, and communicate freely and easily. More aligned teams also means more defined roles within departments and clearer goals which helps employees understand their value in an organization.
- More Visibility: More connected teams results in more visibility between them on projects and goals and a better understanding of what the company is currently doing and their roles within that.
How to Create Team Alignment with Technology
If you’ve noticed a lack of the above at your business, the cause is probably misalignment between your teams causing miscommunications, mismanaged projects, low quality work, and more symptoms that can harm a business. Sometimes, instilling the principles of alignment isn’t enough because your teams lack the tools they need to actually put those principles into practice. That’s where innovative business technology comes in.
Aligned companies have 19% faster revenue growth and a 15% increase in profits compared to unaligned companies
To get the most out of all the departments and teams within your organization, use some of these tips to create team alignment for everyone using innovative business technologies.
Have the Right Collaboration Tools in Place
Collaboration is a key part of aligning disparate teams in an organization. But, to accomplish this, people need the appropriate tools made available to them.
In technology, it comes by the way of collaboration tools like cloud-based data storage that’s accessible to everyone who needs it, live documents like Microsoft Office 365 (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) where multiple team members can work together in real-time, and easy calendar management applications like Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar that allow for fast meeting creation and scheduling.
All these tools (and more) come together to connect people who may work in different offices, different rooms, or different countries and let them work together instantly.
Additionally, cloud-based storage solutions make all documents, data, and files available all the time to whoever needs them, removing snags that slow down projects due to waiting on being sent the necessary materials.
More information than ever before is readily available to everyone within an organization with tools like these.
Know How to Communicate Between Teams
In modern business, there are a seemingly limitless number of ways for businesses to communicate. Between video meetings, IM applications, emails, text messages, and even comments on live documents, the number of channels available can actually become a problem if not managed carefully.
Oftentimes, departments and teams may find themselves using different communication channels, creating a technology barrier that keeps them from collaborating and communicating to other departments in the company.
For example, the marketing team may use Microsoft Teams chat but IT might communicate mainly through Slack. Though this may get the job done for each team individually, it does not encourage cross-departmental communication which hurts collaboration and leads to misaligned teams.
Instead, establish a uniform way of communicating by having all teams and departments on the same service. With Microsoft 365, email, IMs, chat channels, and meeting invitations can all come from the same application, making it easy for everyone to find who they need to talk to get jobs done quickly and effectively.
Additionally, it’s generally a good idea to have a company ‘hub’ or ‘intranet’ to store helpful documents, videos, trainings, and resources so they’re readily available to everyone. This is also a good way to communicate important internal information to the entire organization.
Produce More Accurate and Accessible Reports
Another benefit of having collaboration tools and cloud-based storage solutions is making reporting easier. With more access to company data from different departments, teams can make more data-driven decisions quicker than before, speeding up project timelines and creating more impactful work.
With shared databases, everyone is working off of the same information and can receive valuable insights that can help their own projects become more successful.
In Conclusion
Aligning your business delivers multiple benefits from higher profits to happier employees, but it all starts with implementing the right technology. With productivity suites, collaboration tools, custom apps, communication software, and other helping business technology, your business can reap the rewards of uniting disparate teams and creating team alignment in your organization.
If you want to learn more about how your business can become data-driven, check out Impact's Modern Business Requirements Webinar, "How to Become a Data Driven Company"