How to Align Remote Teams to the Company Vision
Creating and communicating a clear vision for where the organization is going and how it’s going to get there can go a long way toward creating successful outcomes. It’s no easy task that’s made more challenging in a remote or hybrid organization. Let’s take a look at how SmartSuite can help keep everyone aligned.
Start With a Vision
Vision statements aren’t just theoretical concepts reserved for business schools. They can serve as an important guide when creating long-term goals and help your team know where you want to be in five years, ten years, and beyond.
Don’t Forget Your Mission
Why does your business exist? Right now. Not in the future, but this very moment. A mission statement defines your business, its objectives and how it will reach them.
Consider Your Core Values
You company’s core values are an essential part of crafting your culture - and as the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Core values are the set of guiding principles and fundamental beliefs that help the organization function together as a team and work toward a common business vision.
Why Is Alignment So Hard?
Have you heard the saying in Marketing where just as you get absolutely sick and tired of saying the same thing over and over about your brand, products or services, is just about exactly when people listening start to get it? We’ve found that to be true over the years, and the same goes for a company’s vision and broader strategy. Except your audience is primarily internal (with another large group being external stakeholders such as investors).
Getting teams aligned while sitting in the same room is hard enough. Add remote teams to the mix and sustained alignment becomes even harder. When you work remote, conversations tend to be about the tasks at hand and the element of nuanced, fluid communication about strategy can easily be lost. And without the right tools, it can take longer for ideas to spread. Let’s look at ways to build alignment on your vision directly into your culture.
Build Vision, Mission and Values Training into Your Onboarding
Evangelizing your company’s mission, vision and values helps promote a positive culture. Leadership spends a lot of time in the early days of their business thinking about what they want for the company. All of the decisions they’ve made about how the company should function on a daily basis and perform years into the future gives them a deep level of drive and commitment.
This isn’t necessarily the case for teams, whether remote or in-office, because they don’t have insight into why leadership has made certain decisions or why the vision is even important. Yes, teams are prepared to work hard, but what does the company vision really mean to them? How do you get them just as excited and motivated as the leadership team?
Development teams might think, “I’m just here to write code,” and don’t give the company vision much thought. One simple way to get teams to care about (and commit to) the vision is to document it using a content collaboration workspace.
Create a Company Presentation that Tells Your Story
It’s a simple, yet novel idea. Imagine if everyone in the company - from the CEO to the new customer support rep - could tell the story of the company in exactly the same way? Understanding the history, the mission, vision and core values of the organization with complete fluency can serve as a foundation for building a strong culture. Treat your company story like a brand asset. Version it, make thoughtful updates, and publish it to internal stakeholders.
Get Your Teams Aligned - For Good
In the battles of day-to-day work, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture - especially when remote teams are involved. Leadership must demonstrate how to socialize the company vision and invest in processes and systems to ensure easy access to understand company goals and strategic initiatives.
These investments may be as simple as a monthly town hall livestream, or a periodic Q&A where anyone in the organization can participate. Consider featuring key projects remote teams are working on and draw connections between their work and meeting broader strategic goals. You’ll be amazed by the results.
Consider a strong remote work platform to create a conduit between working teams. SmartSuite offers a great way to visualize goals and track tasks that align to help reach them. A strong company vision has the power to drastically improve how remote teams work - ensure you have the right system to create a living guide that keeps everyone aligned in perpetuity.
Want to learn more about how SmartSuite is built for remote work? Check it out HERE.
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