Your Employee Activities: Are They Focused on Your Business Strategy?
Execution is the sum of all the activities and tasks performed by your employees. This is where the rubber hits the road and these activities and tasks must be directly relevant to your strategy.
While on paper your processes may appear finely tuned and the roles people fill conducive to execution, but in the field, a serious gap can be occurring between the tasks employees perform and what management thinks is happening.
Sometimes that gap happens for good reason: employees may be using a workaround to accommodate a unique supplier or an old system’s limitations. But more often, employees are required to perform tasks that don’t contribute to your business goals, or worse- they are doing work that is at complete odds with your strategy.
Other reasons for the gap include a poorly chosen metric or a process designed without considerations for upstream or downstream constraints. And sometimes, a manager who is misinformed about the company’s strategy may have directed employee activities that contradict the organization’s go-to-market approach.
In a famous (and real) example, a new manager asked drivers of a furniture delivery company to buy a rose to give to each client and to conduct a detailed satisfaction interview. It would have been suitable for a high-end store, but this one was built on low prices and high efficiency, and these new tasks understandably slowed down delivery schedules, dramatically hurt already thin margins, and muddied the store brand.
Are your activities and structure consistent with your strategy and positioning?
Consider the questions below. If you answer “no” at least once, you would be well-served to scrutinize the major activities being performed by your employees and weigh them against your strategy.
If employees were asked, would they say that they spend their daily efforts only on tasks that are critical?
Does your strategy provide a clear guide to help employees prioritize their daily activities and priorities?
Do all employees clearly see the connection between their work and customer value?
Is individual decision-making systematically encouraged?
Our clients use Line-of-Sight to get an unvarnished assessment of how relevant the activities performed by their employees are to accomplishing their strategy.
If you want to improve employee productivity AND progress toward results, you’ll need to rigorously eliminate superfluous tasks that do not directly contribute to your strategy.
There are big implications to this approach. First, you must communicate your strategy in clear and simple terms to all employees (hence the importance of Strategic Understanding as an execution driver). This is the only way for employees to assess whether the activities they perform add value.
Second, you must empower employees to make decisions, so that they have the leeway to focus only on those activities that are aligned with your goals. Of course, that also requires information to flow openly, because employees must also prioritize their tasks by considering how they fit in the broader operations.
Finally, your structure must aggregate and organize activities in a way that makes sense for your strategy. Elon Musk famously remarked that poor service delivery or product design often reflects breakpoints between functions or teams in the organization.
Michael Porter summarized it best, “The essence of the strategy lies in choosing what NOT to do.” Your role as a leader is to ruthlessly fight “task inflation” which is the natural tendency for humans to do more rather than less and to lose track of what is most important. When you do less, your employees will be equipped to better focus on activities that matter and they will know how their work contributes to business results.
In our next blog, we will consider attracting and retaining Human Capital.
How well is your business executing? To find out, please reach and we will initiate an assessment of your execution capabilities.