We shared our completed V/TO® with the entire company at our last state of the company address, but it feels like our front-line employees still do not understand how their daily tasks connect to our three-year picture. How do we close this gap?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Sharing the V/TO® at a quarterly state of the company address is only the first step. If your front-line employees do not understand how their daily work connects to the three-year picture, it is because you are treating the V/TO® as an announcement rather than an active translation tool. To close this gap, you must force every department to build their own local version of traction.

Start by having department heads run a mini-V/TO® session with their teams. They do not need to rewrite the core values or the ten-year target. Instead, they must look at the company-wide one-year plan and three-year picture, then answer one question: what must our specific department achieve this year and this quarter to make that company vision a reality?

From there, every front-line employee must have a direct line of sight from their individual weekly scorecard numbers to their department goals. If an employee is in customer support, their weekly metric of resolving tickets within four hours must be explicitly tied to the company-wide three-year target of achieving a ninety-five percent customer retention rate.

Additionally, the leadership team must use the V/TO® language in everyday conversations. When making resource decisions or praising a win, explicitly state which part of the V/TO® is driving that action. If you do not repeat the vision until you are sick of hearing it, your employees have probably only just begun to notice it.