A common concern for senior executives is whether employees are aligned with the organisational mission and goals. Misalignments are regularly blamed on poor communication, misunderstanding of priorities, lagging performance measures, or simply a resistance to change. While leaders will aim to address each of these issues, what is most difficult is being able to continuously monitor progress and overall alignment.

If we think about common organisational goals like increasing revenue, improving efficiencies, launching a new product or service, improving customer service, etc; success measures are invariably infrequent and lagging indicators. In previous times, leaders could get a sense of progress by “walking around”, leading and listening in on conversations, and course correcting when misalignments arise. But in today’s world of increasingly distributed and remote work, the leadership antennae must inevitably go digital. And this is where SWOOP Analytics comes in.

Digital conversations

So where are employees conversing online? The platforms that immediately come to mind are email, enterprise social and teaming platforms. Of these platforms, email is probably the least interesting, as it has become more transactional and less conversational, as better options emerged. Enterprise social platforms are designed for enterprise-wide conversations; so these platforms are an obvious choice. Teaming platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom are also rich with conversations; though likely secured to specific teams.

So how can leaders leverage these platforms for continuously monitoring employee alignment to the goals and mission?

Leading and listening

Leader adoption of digital platforms has been mixed. The “return to office” (RTO) push in recent years is potentially an indication that leaders would prefer to go back to “managing by walking around”. That said, the pushback has been substantial, even by senior managers themselves. Whichever way the RTO argument falls, it appears inevitable that a substantial proportion of the conversations happening across the organisation will be digital.

The tools are available to analyse online conversations. For leaders wanting to impact employee alignment with “the mission”, it is much more effective to lead the discussion, rather than simply passively observing. Leading digital conversations is more fruitful if it starts with a question. Our research has shown that discussion threads are 2.5 times longer when the discussion starts with a question. Questions can surface misunderstandings and misalignments, giving the leader the opportunity to course correct, with potentially a much larger audience than face-to-face interaction, limited to those physically present.

How might SWOOP Analytics measures be used to monitor alignment?

Here are some standard SWOOP Analytics reports that can be used to monitor alignment:

1.     Topic Analysis: SWOOP Analytics provides topic analysis in its SWOOP Analytics for Viva Engage product. A leader can select a topic related to an enterprise goal e.g. achieve cost savings. SWOOP Analytics will scan online conversations and report on how actively engaged employees are with the topic.

Influential people in the conversation are identified, providing leaders with selected employees they can leverage to “spread the message”. SWOOP Analytics can provide the ability to monitor the breadth and depth of these conversations; identifying areas of the organisation where the message has not effectively reached.

2.     Engagement Metrics: High levels of engagement on posts related to company goals can be a good indicator of alignment. If posts about company goals are receiving a lot of likes, comments, and shares, it suggests employees are aware of, and interested in, these goals.

3.     Sentiment Analysis: This involves analysing the tone of the conversations on your digital platform. Positive sentiment towards posts related to company goals can indicate alignment. Negative sentiment can flag potential misalignments emerging, causing friction amongst staff.

4.     Network Analysis: This involves looking at the connections between employees and teams. The influential people network provides the leader with the ability to touch the far reaches of the organisation through personal network effects.

For larger organisations though, individual networks can only go so far. The most intense levels of digital interactions happen within teams. Team leaders can be formally enrolled in the enterprise-wide goals and mission through traditional “top down” communications. However, differing team contexts can result in uneven alignment. For example, a mission to improve customer service might be ignored by team leaders of teams that are not customer facing. Yet all teams have “customers”, even if they are internal customers. If the executives are looking to create a “customer focussed” culture across the whole organisation, communication needs to be both top down and horizontal across teams.

SWOOP Analytics has adopted the “Team of Teams” construct championed by General Stanley McChrystal to create more agile armed forces in the face of an ineffective top-down organisation.

The objective is to have teams connected in a more organic way, rather than hierarchical. The customer service objective is an example of one that needs to be interpreted across different contexts. A highly connected team of teams structure can help avoid isolated pockets of misaligned teams.

Achieving an effective alignment with the intent of the senior executive, across the full complexity of large globally distributed organisations, is a non-trivial task. Current methods for identifying misalignments rely on infrequently measured lagging indicators. By the time misalignments are discovered, much of the damage may already have been done.

The movement of organisational discussions from always face-to-face, to now often conducted on digital platforms, provides both a challenge and an opportunity. The reduction of face-to-face contact creates a challenge to effectively communicate “the mission” across an increasingly diverse workforce. The opportunity, however, is the ability to reduce the “distance” between senior executives and the frontline, that is simply not possible using traditional top-down communication methods. Modern analytics tools like those from SWOOP Analytics can provide a powerful new lens through which leaders can monitor employee alignment, in close to real time.