Team aligned but still off track? Fix the gaps holding you back

Organizational and team alignment have a direct impact on business success and continuity. When teams are truly team aligned—sharing the same priorities, goals, and direction—it becomes much easier to move forward efficiently and achieve meaningful results. Alignment reduces confusion, speeds up decision-making, and helps employees understand how their work contributes to the bigger picture.

However, many organizations, especially large ones with distributed workforces, struggle to keep everyone on the same page. Different teams may work toward competing priorities, communication can break down, and employees may lose sight of company goals. When teams are not fully team aligned, productivity drops and engagement often follows.

In this blog, we are bringing to you 8 practical ways to improve alignment in your organization and keep your teams focused, connected, and moving in the same direction.

1. Set Up Shared Goals and KPIs

The way you set up your company’s OKRs and KPIs can significantly impact the level of alignment at both the company and team levels. When goals are unclear or disconnected, teams may move in different directions, making it harder to stay team aligned and deliver consistent results.

It is critical to define OKRs on a company level so that employees are aligned on the goals they are supposed to reach. This gives everyone a shared direction and helps teams understand how their work contributes to broader business outcomes.

Team and cross-functional KPIs should also be defined properly. This is particularly important for cross-functional teams with a lot of dependencies, where misalignment can quickly lead to delays, duplicated work, or conflicting priorities. Clear KPIs help teams coordinate better and stay focused on shared success.

Furthermore, the OKRs and KPIs must be evaluated and communicated frequently. Regular check-ins, updates, and adjustments ensure that teams remain team aligned even as priorities shift. Without ongoing communication, goals can quickly become outdated or lose relevance.

Many organizations still struggle with this. Instead of relying on outdated statistics, it’s clear from experience that companies that revisit and communicate goals consistently are far more likely to stay aligned and perform effectively.

On the other hand, a Betterworks survey found that 92% of American workers would work harder if their colleagues could see their goals. This highlights how visibility plays a key role in keeping teams team aligned—when goals are transparent, employees better understand expectations and how their work connects to others.

Furthermore, according to research, the most successful companies have a 28% higher communication intensity, measured by the number of communication channels used, and run OKR check-ins more frequently. This shows that regular communication and visibility are not optional—they are essential to keeping teams team aligned and focused on shared priorities.

2. Embed Alignment Into Your Company Culture

Making team alignment one of your core company values can help you promote and nurture alignment internally and embed the right behaviors across your organization. When alignment becomes part of “how things are done,” it is much easier to keep teams team aligned without constant intervention.

Internal communications departments play a critical role in reinforcing company culture and values. Through consistent messaging and storytelling, they can help employees understand what alignment looks like in practice. By using creative, personalized, and engaging content, they can motivate people to adopt new initiatives that support collaboration and shared goals.

For example, you could implement workplace initiatives that encourage team collaboration over competition and celebrate teamwork over individual work. This helps reinforce the idea that success is a shared effort. You can also introduce a social recognition channel where employees highlight examples of collaboration, making it easier for others to see how being team aligned leads to better outcomes.

Or you can create an employee newsletter or an internal company podcast featuring employee-generated content. Sharing real examples, tips, and success stories makes alignment more tangible and encourages others to follow the same approach.

3. Eliminate Communication Barriers

Poor workplace communications are one of the main reasons for the lack of alignment between teams. When communication is unclear or inconsistent, it becomes difficult to keep teams team aligned and working toward the same goals. Barriers such as app and information overload, grapevine communications, lack of active listening, and the use of the wrong communication channels are often the major culprits for poor alignment and team collaboration.

If you work for a large organization, the chances are high that you rely on multiple workplace communication tools. While this can be useful, it often leads to scattered information and missed updates. Employees may struggle to find what they need or receive conflicting messages, which quickly breaks alignment across teams.

Ideally, organizations should have a clear understanding of employees’ preferred channels and use them strategically. This makes it easier to distribute content, documents, and updates through the right platforms and employee apps, ensuring that the right people receive the right information at the right time.

When information and app overload are reduced as a communication barrier, it becomes much easier to keep everyone informed and on the same page. As a result, teams are more likely to stay team aligned, avoid misunderstandings, and collaborate more effectively.

📹 Check out our Masterclass about how to eliminate communication barriers in the workplace!

4. Enable Both Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication

Most companies use instant messaging platforms to communicate and collaborate with their peers on a daily basis. While it is important to enable synchronous workplace communications, organizations must understand that the lifespan of these messages is short. It can be quite difficult to find important messages and information in the sea of daily conversations, especially when teams rely heavily on chat-based tools.

When critical updates get buried or lost, it becomes harder to keep everyone team aligned. Employees may miss key information, leading to confusion, duplicated work, or misaligned priorities.

On the other hand, asynchronous communications ensure that employees stay up to date with the most important, critical company information. They allow people to access information at their own pace, revisit it when needed, and stay informed regardless of time zones or schedules.

Most organizations use intranet solutions to improve asynchronous communications in the workplace. However, not many solutions make it easy to deliver timely, relevant, and targeted information to every employee—something that is essential for keeping teams team aligned.

In fact, content irrelevancy is one of the main reasons why employees ignore or overlook company-wide communications. When messages don’t feel useful or personalized, employees disengage. As a result, they miss important updates such as surveys, open enrollments, or critical announcements, which directly impacts alignment and overall effectiveness.

5. Improve Manager Communications

Managers and proper manager communications play a critical role in ensuring better alignment within teams and across departments. They act as the link between company strategy and daily execution. When managers communicate clearly and consistently, it becomes much easier to keep teams team aligned and focused on shared priorities.

As nicely put by Inc.,

“Good communication is everything in the workplace. Clear direction and expectations can’t happen without it. Teamwork and morale take a hit in its absence. And productivity ultimately suffers without it.”

Managers are responsible for translating high-level goals into clear, actionable steps for their teams. This includes setting expectations, providing regular updates, and making sure everyone understands what success looks like. Without this clarity, employees may feel uncertain about priorities, which quickly affects alignment and performance.

Even though communication is one of the most critical leadership skills, many organizations still struggle to get it right. Instead of relying on outdated or inconsistent statistics, it’s clear that when managers don’t communicate often or clearly enough, teams fall out of sync. Improving manager communication—through regular check-ins, feedback, and open dialogue—is essential to keeping teams team aligned and working effectively together.

Drilling down further, many organizations face a deeper issue: a lack of emotional intelligence (EQ) in how leaders and managers communicate. When communication feels unclear, impersonal, or one-sided, it often leads to misunderstandings, disengagement, and misalignment. Strong communication is not just about sharing information—it’s about listening, showing empathy, and making sure messages resonate. This is essential to keep teams team aligned, especially during times of change or uncertainty.

Research also shows that employees are more motivated when they receive regular updates and feel informed about what’s happening in the organization. When managers communicate consistently and clearly, employees better understand company goals, challenges, and their own role in achieving them. This clarity builds confidence, improves performance, and helps teams stay team aligned over time.

6. Encourage and Support Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge sharing is the process of exchanging information, ideas, and experiences among individuals or groups. It enables teams to learn from each other, avoid repeating mistakes, and build on existing expertise. When done well, it helps build a collective knowledge base that supports better decision-making, faster problem-solving, and stronger collaboration. All of this contributes to keeping teams team aligned and working toward shared goals.

To truly embed this mindset, knowledge sharing should be treated as a core company value—not just an optional activity. When organizations actively encourage it, employees are more likely to contribute, collaborate, and support one another.

However, not everyone is naturally inclined to share knowledge. In highly competitive environments, employees may hesitate to share insights or expertise. Without the right culture and incentives, knowledge can remain siloed, making it harder to keep teams team aligned and informed.

Managers and internal communications must actively promote knowledge sharing across the organization. This includes clearly communicating its benefits, recognizing contributions, and making it easy for employees to share what they know. Using the right, intuitive workplace technology can remove friction and help teams access and exchange knowledge quickly—keeping everyone better informed, connected, and aligned.

7. Give (and ask for) Frequent Feedback

Besides just setting up shared KPIs and communicating important company updates, managers need to be strong listeners and encourage frequent feedback from their people. Feedback creates clarity, surfaces issues early, and helps teams stay team aligned as priorities evolve.

To continuously improve team alignment, employers and managers need to understand the current state of alignment and measure it regularly. Without this insight, it’s difficult to identify gaps or take action before misalignment affects performance.

But how can managers measure team alignment?

One of the most effective ways is by regularly distributing pulse surveys to their teams. These short, frequent check-ins provide real-time insights into how employees feel, what they understand, and where alignment may be breaking down.

When it comes to alignment, there are six key areas you should measure to ensure teams stay team aligned:

1. Purpose: the reason the team exists and why their work matters.
2. Values: the standards or guiding principles that shape behavior and decisions.
3. Vision: a clear picture of what the team aims to achieve in the future.
4. Goals: the short-term outcomes needed to move toward that vision.
5. Priorities: the most important areas of focus to achieve those goals.
6. Roles: what each team member is responsible for in achieving success.

By regularly reviewing these areas, managers can quickly identify where teams may be drifting out of alignment and take action to correct it.

Based on that, here are a few team alignment-related questions you can include in your surveys.

To what extent do you agree with the following statements (strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (6)):

• Our team knows what is expected of us.
• People in our team demonstrate a clear understanding of values through their behavior.
• Our team is moving together in the same direction.
• Our team has a coherent plan for achieving our vision.
• I like the direction this team is going in.
• The strategies we have in place will ensure we achieve our vision.
• Our team clearly understands what we need to achieve.
• Team members have the information they need to set priorities.
• Our team clearly understands what our priorities are.
• When priorities change, team members are made aware of the change and the reason for the change.
• ​​The team is clear about the roles and responsibilities of each team member.
• Team members understand what is expected of them in their respective roles.

8. Recognize Those Who Show Alignment

Social employee recognition is one of the most effective ways to show employees which actions and behaviors are valued in the workplace. It helps reinforce expectations and makes it easier for others to follow. When recognition is tied to collaboration and shared goals, it becomes a powerful way to keep teams team aligned over time.

By recognizing those who demonstrate alignment, support teamwork, and actively share knowledge, you show the rest of the company that this is something you value. This creates positive reinforcement and encourages others to adopt similar behaviors, strengthening alignment across teams and departments.

Employee recognition programs are most effective when they are clearly connected to company values and business goals. This ensures that recognition is meaningful and aligned with what the organization is trying to achieve. Over time, this helps build a culture where being team aligned is not just expected, but consistently practiced.

You don’t need a large budget to get started. Simple, non-monetary recognition can have a strong impact when done consistently. For example, you can create a #thanks or #kudos channel where employees and managers can recognize and appreciate those who demonstrate alignment. These small moments of recognition help build momentum and keep alignment visible in everyday work.

FAQs about keeping your team aligned

What does it mean to have a team aligned?
A team aligned means everyone understands the same goals, priorities, and direction — and works toward them together. It’s not just about knowing the strategy, but also how each person contributes to it. When teams are aligned, decisions are faster, collaboration improves, and there’s less confusion or duplicated work.

Why do teams struggle to stay aligned?
Common reasons include poor communication, unclear goals, and too many tools or channels. When information is scattered or inconsistent, teams can easily lose focus. Without regular updates and feedback, even well-performing teams can drift out of alignment over time.

How can managers keep their team aligned day to day?
Start with clear goals and priorities, then reinforce them often. Regular check-ins, simple updates, and open feedback loops make a big difference. Managers should also ensure everyone has access to the same information. Small, consistent actions are what keep a team aligned — not one-off initiatives.

What tools help teams stay aligned?
Tools that centralize communication and make information easy to find are key. This includes intranets, employee apps, and collaboration platforms. The goal is to reduce noise and make sure important updates don’t get lost. The right tools help teams stay aligned by keeping everyone informed, connected, and on the same page.