What is team alignment and its value to my organization?

1. What is Team Alignment And Its Value To
My Organization?
What is Team Alignment?
Team alignment is defined as the process of arriving at a common understanding by which
various employees across functions and departments communicate and collaborate in order to
deliver specific organizational goals and objectives.
Team alignment includes technology and human process convergence around delivering
better products and services to customers.
With Covid 19 and subsequent lockdowns that have pushed team members to remote working
environments, team alignment has become even more important. Under on-premise working
conditions, issues relating to lack of alignment tend to expose themselves faster as everyone
is physically in the same space of work. However, when team members are working together
but spread across remote locations, issues emerging from lack of alignment may stay hidden
till a major roadblock is discovered.
Therefore, today it is even more important that managers align their teams using technology
and processes to cut losses emerging out of lack of clarity around work delivery, timeframes,
key objectives, targets, and goals.
Team alignment is also often cross-team, where various disciplines come together to deliver a
final project, product, or service.
For example, for technology product managers who work with programmers, engineers,
digital designers, and marketers – it is imperative that each member who belongs to other
functional teams are on the same page.
In addition, even members who belong to the same functional group may need alignment
among themselves. For example, programmers and developers who are also part of a larger
product development team will need alignment among themselves to ensure that the same
tech-stack, programming language, and development methodologies are used.
Why is Team Alignment important?
Team alignment is critical to ensure that every member understands the final goals and the
approaches and strategies being used to achieve them. Furthermore, human talent
management, type of methodology used, type of technology, and tools to acquire – require
team alignment.
To better understand the importance of team alignment, let us look at the objectives that are
met when your team is aligned.

2. Key Objectives of Team Alignment
1.Shared responsibility for the outcome
Output may be personal, outcome however is almost ways a team alignment effort.
For example, while writing an article is a writer’s output, editing it is the editor’s output,
posting it is the site manager’s output – but when they are all aligned – the result is an article
that generates traffic. The more aligned they are, the better and faster is the production quality
content.
Team leaders need to ensure that team members are aligned on their individual goals and how
together they are expected to produce an outcome for the organization.
2.Reduced wastage of resources and increased exchange of knowledge
Unaligned teams equate to redundant processes, technology purchases (similar products used
by different teams), and multiple copies of the same work. In programming, for instance, a
piece of code may have to be written for one project and may need to be written again for
another project. Through cross-team alignment, the team leads can identify redundant work
being done by their members, and exchange of knowledge among their team members.
3.Promotes transparency and accountability
A millennial workforce today demands transparency above all else. A manager of millennials
needs accountability.’
Early alignment is key to both transparencies among team members where each person
knows what another is working on and how each member is accountable for a specific task
for the final outcome.
4.Better ideation process
Ideas are no one’s monopoly, but there must be a time and place to share them, debate and
discuss them and then move forward together on an agreed-upon set of ideas.
Team alignment and meetings allow individuals to share their unique perspectives and ideas,
which often come together to form better working conditions. Without a safe and structured
space for team alignment, where people are allowed to speak freely within the confines of the
scope, a discussion may be suppressed or lost.
5.Acts as a trust-building activity
Team members who understand each other are more tolerable and friendly to one another.
This understanding may simply stem from a technical, work-related discussion, but it leads to
a personal bond that helps develop a healthier working environment.
This is especially true today when our workplaces, remote or on-premise, are filled with
people from various backgrounds who are in different stages of their lives.
Key Best Practices for aligning your team in 2021

3. 1. Company-wide alignment across basics – Product, Process, and Customer
The most preliminary alignment needed across teams, departments, products, and
functions is the need for utmost clarity on what the company’s product suite is, what
problems do they solve and who buys them (target audience).
Whether an employee works in HR, engineering, marketing, accounting, or sales, this
basic clarity and alignment on these core aspects play into every single role. How
effectively they are able to produce quality work aligned to the core objectives of the
company, depends on alignment on what they sell, to whom, and why.
2. Provide individual targets
Company outcomes are collected and shared by every employee. However, the productive
work of each individual employee comes together to create this common success.
It is for this reason that alignment around individual targets is key to ensuring that every
employee knows how they contribute to the overall success of the firm. It is also vital
for their own feeling of having a goal and the encouragement from accomplishing
these individual goals.
3. Showcase how individual targets converse
Following our previous point, it is key to also align your individual team members to
showcase how their work collectively aims and accomplishes revenue goals. This is
not the same as revenue-attribution
for every individual’s target, because in many cases, especially in engineering and
marketing, revenues simply cannot be accurately attributed. However, from a team
and process perspective, it can be easily explained how each role and target
contributes to the final outcome.
4. Invest in alignment technologies
Team alignment, especially in today’s increasingly remote working environment, depends
heavily on technology enablers. For instance, while investing in project or product
management tools, they should be vested for the level of team collaboration and
alignment they can facilitate. Unlike point solutions like Slack, unified product
management suites provide collaboration tools that better sync with the day-to-day
communication activities of managers and employees.
Alternatively, users can also aim for remote collaboration point solutions like corporate
instant messenger tools for live chat.
5. Discourage but don’t stop post-alignment meet queries
Team alignment is also an investment, apart from being an asset when used correctly.
What this means is that there has to be a certain level of adherence to the process of
alignment, by every member of the team, invariant of hierarchy. This includes
ensuring that the time allocated to align team members, even if it is segmented, should
be properly utilized to get queries resolved and arrive at the same page.

4. While a manager should not discourage querying on a subject that was already discussed and
assumably the whole team is aligned to but it may need to be discouraged, especially after
the process is well established, to ensure proper utilization of time.