How to Link Compensation and Business Strategy

Question One 

Organizational alignment of devised strategic goals with designed mission and vision is a fundamental functionality that engenders business competitiveness in the contemporary business context. Companies can advance the aforementioned framework through top-executives' cascading objectives to middle and lower management, and bottom-line employees. The process of expeditious goal achievement for firms incorporates four critical internal techniques that overhaul employee productivity as the substructure of goal attainment. First, the business's top-level management convenes a meeting to create the chief goals that will stimulate its success. Second, the top management team explains the set goals to middle and lower-level management and mandates the latter to create short and long-term departmental strategies that align with the overall organizational plans ( Larkin, 2019). The departmental plans must be subsets of company goals, as well as have unique structures that bottom level workers can conceptualize easily and relate with their personal goals. Third, the middle and lower-level executives meet bottom-level workers, expound the departmental and corporate goals, and then help the employees create personal goals that define how they will align their job engagement and involvement to help the company attain its goals. Middle and low-level leaders must then create metrics that will help employees evaluate their output, such as timeliness, quality, productiveness, or quantity. 

Question Two 

The case study proffers Mindful Toys' shifting of corporate strategies from increasing product volume and sales to innovating and inventing existing toys for expeditious attainment of its overall goal, mission, and visions. The company needs to adopt a new compensation strategy that deviates from the classical norm of employee longevity, departmental production volume, and sales income for set timelines. I propose that Mindful Toys assimilates the mixed-factor compensation strategies that link employee income with new attainment of designed organizational goals, vision, and mission ( Kalén, 2017).  Thus, Mindful Toys should periodically evaluate employee output quantity and quality as premises for determining monthly employee compensation. Further, Mindful Toys could align employee relations with clients and innovations achieved during a determined period as staff compensation metrics. Through these aforesaid quantitative and qualitative factors that will act as foundations for employee compensation, the company will attain its goals at an enthusiastic rate. 

Question Three 

I think Mindful Toys should adopt a mixed-method employee performance evaluation mechanism that checks for achievements of personal and corporate goals during prescribed periods. First, the company should check for employee innovation and invention rates, customer service level, and capturing the new market for the business as metrics that determine overall performance. The evaluation strategy can encompass qualitative and quantitative aspects as predetermined by Mindful Toys to help workers assess their productivity and improvement areas. 

Question Four 

I selected the mixed-method performance evaluation strategy for its efficacy in stimulating employee job productivity to align with overall organizational mission, vision, and objectives. The current performance assessment framework is obsolete because it does not mirror the new plans designed by Mindful Toy's management, and the company would hurt employees by desisting to change its productivity review plan ( Kalén, 2017).  . Using longevity as metrics of excellent performances may demotivate hardworking employees because it propels the rewarding of underperformers for their sales and production volume while ignoring workers with excellent customer service skills and innovation capabilities, which are the current corporate goals. Using the mixed-method approach would ensure that employees are appraised for the right reasons and that their compensation would not be affected by wrong evaluation strategies. 

References 

Kalén, L. (2017).  Linking Pay to Performance – Critical Issues to Consider  (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences . https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/130824/Kalen_Laura.pdf?sequence=1 

Larkin, I. (2019). Strategic compensation: A critique and research agenda.  Handbook of research on strategic human capital resources , 1-33. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330673979_STRATEGIC_COMPENSATION_A_CRITIQUE_AND_RESEARCH_AGENDA