Business Cohesion: Time for a new business function?

It should go without saying that the best businesses know exactly what they want to do and exactly how they want to do it. This is usually explicitly laid out in their Mission and Values.

That is to say a company's Mission is what they want to do and their Values is how they want to achieve it.

The perfect business will have all of their staff working towards the same rough mission (although their job role will be different) and working towards it in a similar way (although the tasks they will be doing will be different). Is this always the case? I highly doubt it. I'm pretty sure that we've all worked in places where different people have a different idea of what the organisation is and what the organisation should be.

And this is a problem. As soon as employees stop working towards the same ideals, the effectiveness of the business will start to falter.

Perhaps I should demonstrate what I mean. Take any big chain of your choosing. Go into any of their stores and you know exactly what to expect.

Go into a McDonald's and you'll know you're going to eat a tasty but regrettable burger that will be the same everywhere. Go into a Maplin and look confused for about 20 seconds and you'll have an employee who is like a meerkat on speed asking you if you're okay. Go into Subway and you'll know the exact moment when you have the option to put salad on your sandwich, adding fodder to the delusion that you're eating healthily.

Despite a hugely diverse work force, you can expect the same thing in every outlet.

But not all companies have outlets where they can dictate exactly what the customer experience should be from before they step in the door to after they leave. Some companies, in particular public and third sector companies, need to think carefully about whether or not their staff are actually working towards the same goals.

I therefore propose the function of 'Business Cohesion' - at the very least a yearly audit, but even potentially a whole department as a core function.

The whole point is to understand whether or not employees and managers are working together effectively, to work out whether all the employees actually understand the organisation they work for, to work out where there needs to be more internal branding, to understand if and where internal communication is breaking down, among many other things.

In essence, are employees working with one another, or against one another? And how are you going to fix it?