Employee Alignment: Unlocking the Engagement Puzzle In this episode of Engaging Internal Comms, The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith talks to Lindsay Uittenbogaard. Lindsay is Director at Mirror Mirror, which is an employee engagement consultancy based in the Netherlands.
Mirror Mirror has built around 120 practitioners in 17 different countries. It is a tool that identifies and measures alignment gaps, by capturing the way that people perceive their context at work and comparing them in other team levels, to identify common ground and differences. It helps organisations and employees create clarity and engagement, enabling teams and organisations to develop more effectively.
Prior to Mirror Mirror, Lindsay held senior internal communication roles at Shell, T-Systems, VEON, and FEMS (Federation of European Microbiological Societies). Lindsay also has experience in micro-businesses.
Employee alignment is different to employee engagement Employee alignment is often viewed as a consequence of employee engagement. In reality, alignment is a precursor to engagement. Alignment is crucial to employee engagement.
Lindsay explains this in three levels of alignment in an organisation:
1. The alignment of the enterprise to the strategic intent This provides a strategic frame in which employees can operate, ensuring an organisation’s systems and processes are all pointing in the same direction.
2. The alignment of people to the organisation’s strategy How the context can be shared with employees to enable them to align with the strategy.
3. Aligning employees with each other With the strategy and communication in place, this level ensures employees can collaborate and interact to fill the gaps.
Lindsay explains that without alignment and a clear view of the strategy on how to collaborate and implement it, employees will not be engaged. However, she also puts forward that employees may be aligned yet not engaged.
When employees understand the vision, the strategy, their team’s purpose, and how they can implement it, engagement is achieved to advance the organisation’s mission through their role.
Creating employee alignment in a diversified world Thankfully, world culture and organisational culture now encourage diversity and the embracing of differences. However, it may appear contradictory to combine this with alignment, with all employees expected to sit on the same page.
Lindsay is quick to clarify that alignment must not be confused with the idea of everybody thinking the same thing. “We don’t want you to just kind of memorise a message, because that’s not really going to have them internalise it,” she explains. “People have to make sense of things in their own ways.”
Alignment is not a uniformed and rigid message. It’s about cognitive and behavioural compatibility.
Organisations must both deliver a strategy and allow employees to express their interpretations and views within it.
Employees and teams must take time to discuss their interpretations, healthily challenging each other without confrontation or conflict, with respect for differences in opinions. Doing so will pave the way for alignment as employees adapt to each other’s views and decisions and come to agreement on how to move forward together.
Therefore, communication must focus on engaging people in conversation to surface misalignments and resolve them as a team.
Miscommunicating communication Communication through conversation is widely accepted as the best method to engage people in organisations. But how one person hears a message can be very different to how others hear it. The result could be engaged teams that are misaligned.
Organisations must take car
