How to Actively Involve Employees in Strategic Planning

Do You Actively Involve Employees in Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning is often conducted at only the highest levels in an organization. While leaders certainly need to be on the same page and speak with one voice, isolated strategic planning is a mistake.  We know form project postmortem data that companies who do not actively involve employees in strategic planning are asking for strategy execution and change management problems — especially with middle managers and frontline workers.

Why?

Because most misunderstandings and miscommunications that can sabotage strategic clarity, team commitment, and strategy execution happen across all levels of an organization — both internally and externally — not just at the top.  Leaders telling people the “right strategy” without enough buy in from the people who need to implement it is a recipe for frustration, inconsistency, and failure.

The good news is that according to Gartner research, employees are 77% more likely to be high performers when their level of understanding of strategic goals and their strategic buy-in to their day-to-day tasks is high.

Strategy Must Go Through People and Culture to Be Successfully Implemented
Think about it. You count on your employees, from the executive suite to the frontline, to carry the responsibility for actually executing your strategy. But why should they buy into your plan and fully commit to executing it if they had no part in creating it?  For any strategy to succeed, the strategy must be crystal clear so that employees can truly:

• Understand it.
• Believe that it will pave the way for success.
• Feel that it is implementable in your specific corporate culture and marketplace.

What the Strategic Planning Research Says: Strategy Communication Does Not Equal Strategy Commitment
Even with a comprehensive, multi-step, and multi-media communication program, your employees will have difficulty fully grasping the importance and impact of the plan and their role in achieving it. In fact:

• A study by Kaplan and Norton in Harvard Business Review found that only 5% of employees were able to articulate their organization’s strategy.
• Gartner research found that what “leaders say” only has a 1% impact on organizational alignment and performance.
• A Korn Ferry survey found that only 23% of frontline workers feel senior leaders understand their day-to-day realities.

This does not surprise us.  Executives spend spend weeks or months actively designing their strategies.  How can you expect employees who have less business acumen, less access, and less involvement to have the same level of understanding, belief, and commitment from communications alone.

3 Steps to Take
The message is loud and clear. Executives need to come down from their ivory towers after strategy retreats, open up the strategic planning process, and invest more in actively involving employees in strategic planning.  Why? because employees are directly affected by it and are an integral part of successfully executing it.  Here is how to do it and what you will gain:

1. Gain Employee Buy-in by Involving Them During, Not After, the Strategic Planning Process
   If it is not possible to involve everyone, include as many levels and cross-functional participants as possible. Then be sure you craft a clear and compelling message to share and constructively debate the strategy with the rest of the workforce.  For this to work, the strategy should be easy to communicate, understand, and believe in.

   Key stakeholders should understand what will be gained if the strategy is successfully implemented along with the implications of failure.  The purpose is to encourage employees to “own” their role in strategy execution and to provide input to make it a better and more meaningful fit for their teams and for your unique organizational culture.

2. Let Go of Telling Employees How to Execute the Strategy
   Be clear about your vision for success and set clear organizational targets; but let individual employees and teams figure out how to achieve them — as long as it aligns with your desired corporate culture.  Give employees a chance to come up with approaches that they think will work in a way that makes sense.

   Leaders who actively involve employees in strategic planning increase ownership of the strategy as employees try to solve the problem of effective execution within their own area of expertise.

3. Have a Clear Culture to Which Your Strategy is Inextricably Aligned
   Your strategy must go through your culture to be successfully implemented.  Assess your corporate culture to know if current ways of thinking and working will help or hinder strategy execution.  This is a true test of your culture.

   If your ways of working are strategically aligned, your cultural norms and values will guide employee actions and decisions toward successful strategy execution.  If your culture and strategy are misaligned, your strategy will be derailed.

   As you observe employees making choices that support company values and lead toward strategy execution, recognize and reward them to encourage others to follow suit.  When people act outside of desired norms have proportionate and visible consequences.

The Bottom Line
Even well-crafted strategies are difficult to execute. To give your organization a head start toward success, actively involve employees in strategic planning and design from the beginning so that they understand it and can execute it in a way that they believe in.  When it comes to strategy buy-in and execution, go slow to go fast.

To learn more about how to actively involve employees in strategic planning, download 3 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Cascading Your Corporate Strategy