If this is your first time running an Align, you will see the button "start Align". Click this. button.
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If you have run an Align before, you will see a screen with that previous Align. To start a new exercise, click the "Start a New Align exercise" button.

You'll be presented with templates according to the organization you're using Valence with. Review these templates to see which one is best for you and you can even click "Explore live demo" to understand it further.

Once you know which version you'd like to use, select it on the right hand side and click the blue "Next" button.

You will be prompted to complete your own assessment. Click on "Assess the team now" to begin. As well as giving your assessment, this allows you to understand what your team will experience when you invite them.

You can read about completing the diagnostic assessment by clicking here.

If it's not applicable for you to take the assessment (i.e. you are not part of the team) you can skip the assessment by clicking "invite members now".

After completing your own assessment, you can invite your team members by clicking "Invite members now".

Note: you can always add more participants later if needed.

The best way to invite your team is by adding each member's name and email address. This will add them to your team, send them an email invitation to complete this exercise, send them reminders if they don't complete, and allows you to review who has not yet completed the assessment.

Alternatively you can copy the exercise's URL and paste it in an email to your team manually. This way, people won't be added to the team until they have completed the exercise. It also means that they don't get reminder emails prompting them to complete the exercise if they haven't done it, and it's more difficult for you to keep track of who has not responded.

However, this can be a good approach if you find that your organization's email is block emails from third parties.

All of your team's Align exercise will be listed there with the most recent at the top.

Here, you can see see who has completed the exercise. If you sent the email invitations via Valence, you can also easily see who hasn't completed the exercise and trigger a reminder email to them.

When all of your desired participants have completed the exercise, you should close the exercise.

You need a minimum of three participants to close the exercise. If you have three or more participants, you'll see a "Close and Generate Report" button on the Align card.

When you close the exercise, you'll be able to view the Align report, and email a personal version of the results to each teammate who participated.

Our recommendation is to send the results to your team 24-48 hours in advance of the followup discussion; this lets everyone review their own personal version of the report and they can come to the followup discussion with some insights.

You're ready to arrange a team discussion! Valence's Discussion Space is a point-and-click tool which will help you with exactly what to say and do during the conversation.

You can access the tool via the 'Team Conversation' tab in the report...

...and then by clicking on the "Begin Exploring" button:

You can always set up a prep call with us about how to best host one of these discussions; we'd be happy to walk through your results with you, and share valuable resources we have!