004: Using Align Enables Your Team to Run Efficiently

Executive overview

Distributed teams tend to drift between quarterly planning sessions, working hard but not necessarily on the right things. Align (AlignToday.com) was built to solve this: a software tool that makes company and individual priorities visible, owned, and tracked in real time.

The tool enforces discipline that paper and spreadsheets cannot — every priority requires an owner, a KPI, and a due date before it can be saved.

The origin of Align

• Andy Bailey was flying back from India after implementing Rockefeller Habits with a global software company.
• The CEO asked: "How do I know if my 250 people's priorities align with the company's?"
• The only honest answer was: pull 250 sheets of paper, or build a spreadsheet — neither gave a real dashboard view.
• That 14-hour flight became the design session for what became Align.

The core problem it solves

• Companies create quarterly priorities at offsites, then ignore them until the next offsite.
• Without a daily visibility layer, employees make decisions disconnected from company goals.
• Front-line workers need to see how their daily actions connect to what the organisation is trying to achieve.
• Leadership needs the same visibility downward — not just upward reporting.

How coaches implement Align with clients

• Load existing strategy and current quarterly priorities into the one-page plan tools before the first session.
• Start with the senior leadership team as the first wave of users.
• Train on the tool in the first session, filling any missing strategic blanks.
• Shift focus from the daily huddle to the weekly meeting as the primary adoption anchor.
• Before each weekly: team members update their priorities; meeting then reviews accountability, highlights blockers, and plans the week ahead.

What makes priorities stick inside the tool

• Every priority must have an owner — the tool won't save without one.
• Every priority requires a KPI with a definition and a target value.
• Tasks can be tied directly to a priority; as tasks are checked off, the KPI updates automatically — no manual status update needed.
• Defaulting to 100% completion as the measure keeps accountability concrete.

Align vs. other tools

• Basecamp and Asana handle project and operational work — work in the business.
• Align handles strategic priorities — work on the business.
• These are complementary, not competing; most clients run both.
• The clearest adoption hurdle: teams that already manage priorities on paper or in Excel resist the switch, but those starting from scratch adopt it naturally.

Task management: the underused feature

• Most organisations use email as their task management tool — a poor substitute.
• Align's task manager lets you create a task with a due date, assign it to one or multiple people, and track completion through dashboards and notifications.
• When a priority is set to "task-driven," the KPI automatically reflects task completion progress.
• This eliminates a separate status-update step entirely.

Employee feedback: eNPS and suggestion box

• Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): a single question survey ("How likely would you refer someone to work here?") sent automatically on a set schedule (monthly or quarterly).
• Respondents add a comment explaining their score; results display on the dashboard, tracked over time.
• Designated managers receive and respond to feedback directly inside the tool — anonymously from the sender's perspective.
• Virtual suggestion box: real-time submissions routed to assigned owners, with two-way responses handled entirely inside Align.
• Multiple owners can be assigned so that unread suggestions don't stall — any owner can respond.
• Key risk: don't open a suggestion channel without committing to respond; ignored suggestions signal that feedback isn't valued.

Results with the founding client

• The original global software company has grown significantly since implementation and expanded from six or seven locations to include Ireland and Australia in addition to multi-site North America.
• Before Align, quarterly planning sessions were spent catching up on the last 90 days.
• After Align, teams arrive already informed; sessions address real strategic questions instead of status updates.
• The company describes itself as closer and more tightly coordinated despite increasing geographic spread.

What's coming

• A full code rewrite is underway to enable faster iteration and a redesigned UI/UX.
• Multi-language support is the headline new capability — moving Align beyond English-only for the first time.