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Research shows that 95% of a company’s employees are unaware of the company’s strategy. What do we
mean by “strategy awareness” in this case? Why is it important? How to measure and improve it?
Key topics:
Strategy awareness level is a percent of employees who are “aware of the strategy”.
Strategy awareness level = (Employees aware of the strategy / Number of FTE) * 100%
(a) Define what we mean by “an employee who is aware of the strategy.”
(b) Find the cost-effective way to count the number of those employees.
There are many reasons, for example, strategy awareness is one of the leading factors of high employee
engagement; it also helps to address the strategy execution gap.
We want our employees to understand strategy to the degree needed to help them make
the right decisions without direct control of managers.
In the formula for “Strategy awareness level,” we have “Employees aware of the strategy.” What do we mean
by this?
Here we have several ideas to consider:
Let’s test these options against the purpose of measurement formulated above. The first two options don’t
help us much with daily choices, so option (3) is the only applicable.
Conclusion 1:
otherwise:
Conclusion 2:
When we measure strategy awareness in general, we will simply push employers towards
memorizing right words.
Before moving ahead with measuring strategy awareness level, I’d like to introduce another important
principle:
It is impossible to measure awareness level for the strategy when the strategy itself is not
well-formulated.
The reason is that we simply won’t be able to validate accurately the activities of the employees.
Before trying to measure strategy awareness, we have to make sure that the strategy itself exists and is
well-described.
Here are the signs of a well-formulated strategy, most of them are covered by K&N Balanced Scorecard:
If your strategy passed this checklist, then go to the strategy awareness measurement step.
We are interested in the practical application of strategy awareness. Our goal is to find out if employees
know strategy to the degree that helps them with their daily decision making.
The best way to measure the awareness about something is actually measuring the changes
in actions that it implies.
Think about safety awareness training. It might have 100% attendance rate, trainees might even pass all
exam tests, but what ultimately matters is that the training has an effect on their daily routines in the sense
of increased safety.
Strategy awareness for the known challenges can be quantified by the expected changes in
the behaviour
See the example of customer support specialist below.
What about the cases when we cannot measure an impact of strategy awareness on specific behaviour? I
this case, we need to find some proxy for strategy awareness.
The best proxy for the strategy awareness is strategy alignment, e.g, when the goals of
the individuals are aligned with overall strategic goals
Think about a software engineer. Due to the nature of his/her job, we cannot quantify specific signals of
behaviour change due to strategy awareness, but we can use frameworks such as OKR to make sure that
the goals of the engineer are aligned with the company’s strategy.
We agreed to measure the strategy awareness level in the context of a specific business domain.
Stakeholders
I’m not suggesting to build information silos, but it is a good idea to explain and adapt strategy according
to the needs of stakeholders who will follow it.
Let’s see how the strategy awareness level can be measured in a case of customer support specialists.
Strategy
Measurement
If we want to understand a strategy awareness level, in this case, we can look at:
and
How many improvement ideas were noted down by a specialist as a result of the conversations
with customers?
For example, we can say that an employee is aware about strategy when
and
The benchmarks here should be on a minimal level as we are not trying to validate the employees´ skills
(even if that was the case, more doesn’t necessarily mean better in the case of near-miss reporting).
What about those cases when an employee is aware about, for example, near-miss reporting but doesn´t
report accordingly?
Let’s formulate the main takeaways of this article in the form of strategy awareness measurement
algorithm:
k a d h s
About Aleksey Savkin
BSC Designer
Liked 764 likes
Scorecard Expert | Speaker | Author
BSC Designer
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Posted in Articles
Last updated on May 22, 2019 by Aleksey Savkin
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