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According to Harvard Business Review nearly half of organizations surveyed failed to achieve their near-term strategic objectives and majority of these respondents cited lack of employee buy-in as a major contributory factor.
Why is employee buy-in important?
When employees commit to business goals and objectives, they’re more motivated and engaged. According to a Gallup survey, organizations with strong employee engagement experience 10 percent greater customer loyalty and 23 percent higher profitability.
Beyond a sense of ownership and loyalty, buy-in can drive creative tension, a mindset in which employees are attuned to competitive pressures and motivated to experiment and innovate.
When employees feel that they have a stake in your company's success, they’re more likely to stay long-term – which can save your organization from losing up to two times their salary from turnover.
At the moment, however, employee buy-in is on the downswing.
To bolster your strategic initiatives, here are four things you can do to get employee buy-in.
1. Create Employee Accountability
Creating accountability in the workplace is essential to gaining support for your business strategy. One tool that can help is a ranking performance system.
Ranking systems provide clear measures for employees to determine expectations and ownership of their parts in the strategy.
Examples of performance ranking measures include:
- Level of professionalism
- Number of technical industry skills
- Leadership capabilities
Establishing such measures can help eliminate unknowns that create stress for employees.
By implementing a ranking system, achievement-driven employees can be more likely to invest in your business strategy. However, ranking systems don't always bolster buy-in.
The risks associated with ranking systems is that they may have some demotivating factors associated with them as well.
Examples include:
- No incentives for high-performers
- Unfair treatment of low-performers
- Lack of development and growth opportunities for lower performers
To avoid this, ensure that your ranking system strikes a balance between encouraging employees to achieve stretch goals and being accountable. To bolster accountability an ORCI strategy that clearly defines those who own, are responsible, should be consulted, and those who need to be informed (during change initiatives) helps employees understand their roles in relation to others and the goals that have been set.
2. Improve Communication
Communicating direction is one of strategy execution’s most important aspects. While it’s essential to share your organization’s strategy with stakeholders, investors, and your team, you must also think beyond traditional lines of communication. For example, the use of artificial intelligence to show employee consideration is growing both in use and in acceptance by employees (36% according to research by TalentLMS).
Despite efforts to communicate goals and objectives, organizational silos can also create resistance to change. To overcome this, you can use several mechanisms to facilitate cross-team communication. Sun-Maid (the world famous Californian raisin brand) breached those silos by creating cross-functional teams to resolve problems across quality and service levels and by realigning leaders with the company’s core values. They changed their culture from a farm cooperative to an innovative, consumer, and market-driven organization and brought their stakeholders with them on that journey through achieving early buy-in.
Such exercises allow employees from different units and functions who don't normally interact to communicate, brainstorm, and share ideas.
Another option is creating “solid” and “dotted” lines in reporting relationships.
An individual has two bosses. The solid-line boss has direct authority for resource allocation, goal setting, and evaluation. The dotted-line boss provides guidance and input to evaluations.
For example, if you’re a finance employee, this would entail reporting to your manager (solid-line boss) and the company’s chief financial officer (dotted-line boss). While your manager would want to know how your daily work contributes to business goals, the chief financial officer would be more concerned with big-picture projects. With more than one line of managerial communication, you're more likely to buy into the strategy by perceiving it as a shared effort involving multiple parts of the organization.
3. Encourage Creative Risk-Taking
There’s always an element of risk when implementing business strategy.
It’s important to implement strategic goals that continually push your team to take risks, even if your company’s culture isn’t highly competitive.
One of the ways to reduce risk in this process is to make managers accountable. An element of that is having stretch goals and pushing people to not accept today's level of success as a final destination, but as a starting point for what might be possible in the future.
However, employees aren’t always willing to take risks. While communicating your risk management process can help ease concerns, a wedge may linger between those who support your business strategy and those worried about failure.
Providing a safe environment to fail is essential to fostering creative risk-taking. You can achieve this by increasing employees’ span of influence – the extent to which they engage with and influence others. With greater influence, they can pursue opportunities to take creative risks and work outside their comfort zones.
Examples include:
- Approving new products or services before they go to market
- Implementing new technologies
- Weighing in on hiring new talent
To take such risks, employees must know that they’re encouraged to learn and improve. Allowing room for mistakes is at the cornerstone of success in implementing business strategies.
With a stronger sense of collective responsibility and support, employees can become more comfortable with calculated risk-taking and view it as an opportunity to grow, innovate, and contribute to strategic initiatives.
4. Communicate Belief Systems and Core Values
Another way to get employee buy-in and execute your business strategy is by communicating your organization’s belief systems and core values. Many employees fail to see a connection between the company’s mission and their own roles.
Once the decision to invest is made, the goal is to exit at a pace that matches the PE firm’s value-creation and monetization point rather than moving the investment to languish in a continuation fund. The Total Value Optimization (TVO)™ approach, which finds and implements value creation initiatives throughout the supply chain, can bring profitable growth in operations, market expansion, and competitive advantage.
Belief systems are sets of organizational definitions that you communicate and reinforce to provide direction. They commonly take the form of credos, mission statements, and statements of core values that define your organization’s purpose and impart what employees should do and how they should act.
Effective core values possess two attributes:
- Inspiration: They make every employee proud of where they work.
- Guidance: They ensure employees know whose interests should be put first when making difficult decisions.
Johnson & Johnson, for example, is particularly adept at communicating its core values. Their credo – which is a statement of their core values – was first written in 1943. The first paragraph says:
“We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors, and nurses to mothers and fathers, and all others who use our products and services.”
There is no doubt at Johnson & Johnson: Customers come first.
Explicitly stating your organization’s core values and beliefs can enable you to not only gain support for strategic initiatives but provide employees with purpose to improve their performance.
