Employee Alignment: Our Journey into Customer Discovery
We interviewed 51 people (and counting) at 35 companies about setting and achieving goals. Here’s what we found out.
If you look at why any company was started, it was to solve a pain. Slack solved the pain of complicated communication. Tuft & Needle solved the pain of buying a mattress.
The pains we at Dart Metrics are trying to solve? Slow company growth, high employee turnover and low productivity.
It took some digging (lots of conversations and research) to find the culprit behind these pains: Gaps between company culture and employee alignment.
The Dart Metrics team — as managers and contributor-level employees ourselves — has felt the pains that stem from this alignment problem:
- Frustration from poor communication
- Not knowing what projects take priority
- Rarely finding purpose in our work
We’ve felt the pains, but do people throughout all levels of an organization feel them as well? We needed to find out.
The mission: Validate the lack of employee alignment
To find out if companies lacked employee alignment as much as we thought, we developed a set of questions for interviewing three levels of employees: executives, middle managers and contributor-level employees.
Our questions focused on:
- Setting and measuring company goals
- Documenting and tracking project-level metrics
- Employee engagement and job fulfillment
- Employee alignment to company purpose
The process: Interview executives, middle managers and contributors
Over several months, our cofounder, Steven, asked more than 50 employees — of which 33% were executives (VPs, C-level execs and directors), 24% were middle managers and 43% were contributors — about their company’s process for setting and achieving goals.
We started with people in our network who were willing to talk with us. From there, we asked those people who we should be talking to and interviewed them, and so on — covering 35 companies across Arizona and beyond.
The results that didn’t surprise us confirmed what we hoped: most companies struggle to effectively set goals and get employees on board with achieving them.
The results: Setting goals is a pain
The plan: Keep it going
Now that we’ve confirmed employee alignment is indeed a problem, the next step is to find where those gaps in culture and alignment live.
We’re diving deep into interested companies, interviewing all three levels of employees (contributor, middle manager and executive) within the same organization. We’re gathering these insights to further understand how organizations operate, which will help us solve the employee alignment problem — and keep solving it as our product grows.
Intrigued by what we’re doing?
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