Strategic Alignment
Cheung-Judge, Mee-Yan, and Holbeche (2011) state, “The most critical step to build evaluation into the organization’s culture is to align the OD agenda to the organization’s strategic plan”; Jones (2018) also points out the importance of connecting unit level business goals and performance metrics based on overall organizational objectives. The Boeing Company is a large complex Fortune 50 company whose purpose and mission statement is Connect, Protect, Explore and Inspire the World through Aerospace Innovation. In the Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) division that I am using for my case study, the company website states that BCA is committed to being the leader in commercial aviation by offering airplanes and services that deliver superior design, efficiency and value to customers around the world. Further breaking out the enterprise strategy and expected behaviors are as follows:
Enterprise Strategy:
Operate as One Boeing
Build Strength on Strength
Sharpen and Accelerate to Win
Boeing Behaviors
Lead with courage and passion
Make customer priorities our own
Invest in our team and empower each other
Win with speed, agility and scale
Collaborate with candor and honesty
Reach higher, embrace change and learn from failure
Deliver results with excellence – Live the Enduring Values
The BCA website further states, The Boeing Vision is an expression of our company’s purpose and values, designed to inspire and focus all employees on a shared future and to reaffirm that, together, we can meet the challenges that lie ahead. The change effort I suggested is tied to both the enterprise level and business unit’s organizational goals. Hence evaluation must encompass the organization business unit goals as a way to help determine what they should be measuring. The expected outcome of my change effort is organization alignment on our mission and our values
Because the company is large and complex, the evaluation will only focus upon one commercial program’s executive leadership team’s communication and flow down within production. The expected Outcome: communication and aligned engagement of the OD intervention and proposed evaluation are reflective of the organization’s overall strategy, on the whole, and specific to one of its parts (Jones 2018) e.g., collaborate with candor and honesty, deliver results with excellence, invest in our team and empower each other supporting our vision that is designed to inspire and focus all employees on a shared future and together we can meet the challenges ahead and ultimately meet our production and performance KPI’s and goals.
As we learned in Lesson 3 (Myers, Lesson 3) the organization’s objective is to help people improve performance, and align with and contribute to the strategic goals of the organization which is embraced in BCA’s strategy and the OD intervention.
Through the lens of Employee Involvement, where I currently work; seek to understand how the flow down of the program’s executive leadership team communications flow down to production and how perceptions of these communication efforts affect the opportunity for factory production employees and multiple levels of leadership to be engaged and involved in a common vision of continuous improvement to support “One Boeing” specifically the Boeing Behaviors.
Even with aligned executive leadership, a potential obstacle of strategic alignment is ensuring senior leaders are aligned to the OD intervention because what senior leaders, “seldom do is to pay attention to the ‘throughput’ – the alignment of the organizational internal variables in order to support the strategic priorities because strategic direction can easily be set, achieving the strategic priorities is much harder – because those who have the role to implement the plan have to be brought into the plan itself (Cheung-Judge et al, 2011).
I will want to ensure that once the project’s value has been established that we gain agreement with executive leadership with who from the senior leadership team should get involved in refining the metrics and criteria for evaluation, when the appropriate time is for evaluation to take place, and what methods should be used (Cheung-Judge et al, 2011).
The encompassing “practice of aligning a company’s strategy, operation, culture, and people behaviors with the central theme of the company” (Jones and Rothwell, 2018) is multi-faceted and complex. Utilizing KPI’s to help tell the evaluation story can be both an art and science in that there are both harder metrics that are more visible, more tangible, and easier to measure, and softer metrics that are less visible, less tangible and more difficult to measure such as some individual and group metrics such as how the reaction to increased and more transparent communication flow down affects morale and potentially performance which can’t simply be measured by increased communication efforts. As well as cause and effect of communication efforts to attrition and attendance without measuring other dependencies. This type of data can have more significant impact on the organization than the harder data, and yet they are tough to translate into monetary value. (Cheung-Judge et al, 2011).
The inclusion of evaluation during multiple stages of the OD intervention will assist the program in staying on track and aligned throughout the communication and engagement project, as well as help determine if the effort achieved its key objectives of improving communication flow and perceived impact supports employees being more aligned and engaged.
By also assessing the overall results at the end of the designated time frame as well as potentially develop an ongoing continuous improvement to sustain the efforts moving forward.
We will ask the following questions:
- How effective was the intervention?
- Did it meet the objectives / KPIs?
- Is the change effort sustainable?
- What are the unexpected impacts both short term and long term?
- Evaluation methods may include: 1:1 interviews, focus groups, surveys, communication artifacts
(Jones and Rothwell, 2017).
The first outcome of the pre-intervention evaluation is to better understand our current state and the baseline of production employee satisfaction and engagement which is connected to the current flow and perception of executive leadership communication flow down.
The second outcome, is related to pre, intra and post evaluation. The specific executive leadership communication flow down and impact, will be measured in two ways. The first way will be through an anonymous manager and employee survey. A baseline survey must be taken to identify the starting point. Questions related to culture, leadership, communication and trust must be asked. It is recommended to do one prior to the change effort to gather baseline results, and one post-evaluation period, which is to be determined based upon the change effort.
The third outcome will be to repeat these evaluation measures after communication change has taken place and will be related to potentially different KPI’s that can be identified due to root cause and learning.
Hopefully the KPIs will provide us the foundation for ongoing evaluation and continuous improvement results as well as provide feedback that could lead to improving better aligned results, engagement and culture through better communication flow.
Attracting and retaining talent is a strategy that is key to competitiveness in the market place, and the measures used for this strategy indicate alignment between the organization strategy and evaluation.
References:
Cheung-Judge, Mee-Yan, and Linda Holbeche. Organization Development: A Practitioner’s Guide for OD and HR, The evaluation phase, Pages 106-134. Retrieved from ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=691548.
Jones, M. C., & Rothwell, W. J. (2017). Evaluating organization development: How to ensure and sustain the successful transformation. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Jones, M.C., Pennsylvania State University (n.d.) WFED 585, Lesson 3: The Business Case for Conducting OD Evaluation and Appraisal, Retrieved From https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/canvas/sp19/21911—7892/content/03_lesson/04_page.html