Team Alignment is the foundation on which the rest of your business is built. The one thing that can bring down even the biggest, baddest company is poor team alignment, because it becomes a sequence of events that leads to mistakes being made.
Team Alignment in Ecommerce is about more than just maximizing your value proposition. It’s about getting all the moving parts to work together and for the same goal: increasing revenue and profit, and customer satisfaction.
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Poor Team Alignment costs you time and money:
– Employees become overloaded with tasks that don’t contribute to company goals; they’re either not aware of their role or can’t see how it fits into the bigger picture. So they get overwhelmed (and stressed/upset) and start dropping balls.
The result?
Poor productivity, which comes out in mistakes like missed deadlines, poor quality execution, etc… This is true for employees who work remotely as well as those on site at your team’s location.
– You hire consultants and other outside services to achieve certain company goals, but the team fails to implement them in a timely manner. Or they’re not aware of their existence at all because no one bothered to fill your team in…
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– Team members get pulled off task, waiting for information that never comes or is delayed exponentially. For instance, you wait on marketing materials so your PR firm can craft a social media campaign around them, but they don’t arrive until the day before launch. Now your whole team has to rush through it instead of having ample time to carefully review and make sure everything is accurate/on brand.
– You’re stuck waiting on multiple people and under-staffed to get things done. You could be that person who has an overflowing plate because your boss forgot to assign you tasks or your coworker is swamped and doesn’t tell you what’s up.
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– It takes forever for feedback to arrive, so work gets stalled until the final green light comes through. Or there’s no feedback at all because it never got presented in the first place…
– The work itself isn’t conducive to the overarching strategy of getting things done quickly and effectively. Maybe it’s not prioritized correctly, which would explain why other items are always put before it, or maybe it has major issues that need quick attention but sit untouched for weeks…
– The feedback loop doesn’t exist because it’s not known what other people are doing or if their work even matters to the project. This happens when tasks are undocumented or left for dead in a random notebook or sticky note, never to be seen again.
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– You can’t get your work done well (or at all) because there’s no guidance on how you should do things. How fast, how slow? What tools should you use? What about repeated actions like deployments, testing and bug fixes? Your co-workers may have different styles that create chaos in the workflow.
– There’s no sense of camaraderie because nobody knows who they’re supposed to collaborate with beyond their own team, which can be anywhere in the company. This problem is easy to solve with a concept called ” Conway’s Law .”
– Different teams, especially those in different office locations, may have completely separate workflows and project management systems. Without some coordination, your company will spend countless hours and money creating and maintaining systems that compete for resources and attention.
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Devise a way to organize the teams, their size, and their efforts. Each team should have clearly defined goals, roles, methods of communication, and responsibilities so that there are no repetitions or unnecessary steps being created by separate departments. This will keep clients happy through increased productivity , while also saving money through collaboration instead of redundant work .
Better communication leads to better designs . Meetings may seem like they just waste time, but the right kind of meetings radically improve communication skills within your team. Without effective communication tools , you’ll have broken lines between design and development , resulting in buggy code which impacts both sales and reputation .
Fundamental Importance of Team Alignment in E-Commerce are:
1. Team Alignment is the most efficient way to get the best out of your employees.
2. You can motivate and retain top talent through Team Alignment, and increase overall productivity.
3. It’s cheaper than building another new team or hiring that person full time after they’ve left for a competitor.
4. It allows for specialized workers without making them feel like second class citizens within the company, as is often the case with siloed teams (e.g., an ecommerce store might not want its web design/dev team feeling like they don’t belong because their department isn’t “in house”)
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5. It makes it faster and easier to answer questions and provide feedback.
6. It can improve employee satisfaction, which is directly correlated with retention rates, allowing you to retain the top talent that has proven their worth.
7. If your company’s vision is ever changing or expanding, it’s easier to adjust when everyone isn’t siloed into a single team.
8. Groups are able to focus on specific projects without feeling like they have an entire company riding on their shoulders alone, thus relieving unnecessary stress and allowing them to work more efficiently.”
