A business strategy can inform how you make decisions, allocate resources, and direct actions to achieve organizational goals. According to Bridges Building Consultancy, nearly half of organizations fail to achieve 50 percent of their strategic objectives, making strategy implementation vital to long-term business success.
Yet, successfully executing strategic initiatives requires employee buy-in. Here’s why it’s important and how to get it.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhy Is Employee Buy-In Important?
Employee buy-in refers to employees' commitment to your company’s strategic goals. It’s critical to strategy execution and can profoundly impact organizational performance.
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.
“Our goal is to bring competitive pressure—the pressure entrepreneurs feel every day—inside the organization,” Harvard Business School Professor Robert Simons says in the online course Strategy Execution. “Businesses do this by pushing employees out of their comfort zones, asking them to think and act like winning competitors.”
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.
To bolster your strategic initiatives, here are four things you can do to get employee buy-in.
4 Ways 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—which are quite common in practice—have really good features that managers can use to stimulate performance,” HBS Professor Susanna Gallani says in Strategy Execution.
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
According to Gallani, establishing such measures can help eliminate unknowns that create stress for employees.
“Everybody's compared at the same level, which highlights the individual contribution of different workers—pointing out who did better and who did worse,” Gallani says.
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,” Gallani says.
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.
Related: How to Foster Employee Engagement When Your Team Is Remote
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.
“Organizations are good at moving information vertically, up and down the formal hierarchy,” Simons says in Strategy Execution. “But they're not so good at moving information horizontally.”
Despite efforts to communicate goals and objectives, organizational silos can create resistance to change. To overcome this, you can use several mechanisms to facilitate cross-team communication.
“One is the cross-unit team or task force,” Simons says. “You give a group a challenge, such as improving speed to market, integrating a new acquisition, or rolling out a new quality initiative.”
Such exercises allow employees from different units and functions who don't normally interact to communicate, brainstorm, and share ideas.
Another option is creating what Simons calls “solid” and “dotted” lines in reporting relationships.
“An individual has two bosses,” Simons says in Strategy Execution. “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.
Related: 4 Business Strategy Skills Every Business Leader Needs
3. Encourage Creative Risk-Taking
There’s always an element of risk when implementing business strategy.
“Risks may not be pleasant to think about, but they’re inevitable if you want to push your business to innovate and remain competitive,” Simons says in Strategy Execution.
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. In Strategy Execution, Marriott’s Global Chief Human Resources Officer David Rodriguez explains how doing so can help avoid unwanted surprises in a shifting market.
“One of the ways that we prevent that is to make managers, in particular, accountable,” Rodriguez says. “An element of that is having stretch goals out there, 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.”
Yet, 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. According to Strategy Execution, 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. In Strategy Execution, Rodriguez says that allowing room for mistakes is at the cornerstone of Marriott’s success in implementing business strategies.
“We ask that people learn from their mistakes,” Rodriguez says. “It's really important to us that people feel it’s safe to try new things. And all we ask is people extract their learnings and apply it to the next situation.”
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.
According to Strategy Execution, 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.
In Strategy Execution, Simons describes how pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson is particularly adept at communicating its core values.
“Johnson & Johnson is a company that does this very well,” Simons says. “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 here 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.
Get Support for Your Next Business Strategy
Garnering support for your business strategy is critical. However, it can be difficult without the right tools.
To ensure you’re equipped to manage risk and achieve your organization’s goals, consider taking an online strategy course, such as Strategy Execution. Through real-world case studies and interactive learning exercises, you can gain the frameworks and skills to execute your business strategy successfully.
Do you need help getting employee buy-in for your strategic initiatives? Explore Strategy Execution—one of our online strategy courses—and download our free e-book to gain insights into implementing strategy effectively.
