The Align tool is designed to help you and your team understand what your current strengths and opportunities look like at a given point in time. This innovative tool offers a comprehensive snapshot of your team's performance, enabling you to pinpoint areas of success and identify opportunities for growth.

By leveraging the insights provided by the Align tool, teams can make informed decisions to enhance their productivity and achieve their goals more efficiently.

The Process of an Align

The Align process is structured around three key steps to ensure a thorough understanding and application of the tool's insights within your team

Diagnose: Launch your exercise and collect responses
Digest: Digest your team's results (optional: Team leaders and HR Partners can book 1:1 time with the Valence Coaching team here)
Discuss: Have a Discussion as a team (typically 60-90 minutes long)

Timeline for an Align

Typically, a team would run an Align every 3-6 months to keep track of their effectiveness and encourage healthy, productive conversation amongst the team

To efficiently run an Align exercise, follow this streamlined timeline:

Launch Exercise (Day 1): Kick off the Align exercise, setting clear expectations.
Team Engagement (Week 1): Team members complete the exercise within this week.
Optional Coaching Call (End of Week 1): Schedule if needed to prep for the team discussion.
Team Discussion (Week 2): Convene to discuss findings and plan improvement strategies.
Habit Formation & Progress Tracking: Post-discussion, establish habits for areas of focus, and ensure accountability through regular progress checks.

This compact timeline ensures a focused yet flexible approach, allowing for comprehensive participation and impactful outcomes.

Set up the exercise

Log in to Valence
On the left side navigation panel, select "Align" under the Feedback section

In the "select a team" dropdown at the top of the page, select the appropriate team

If this is your first time running an Align, you will see the button "Start Align". Click this. button.

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 and click the blue "Launch Align" button.

Invite your teammates to participate

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 it, and allow you to review who has not yet completed the assessment.

Alternatively, you can copy the exercise's URL and paste it into 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 blocking emails from third parties.

Complete your assessment

Once the invites are sent, you will be redirected to the Align page. You can either submit your assessment here or you will also receive an email to submit your response.

Manage the Align Exercise

Manage participants

For an Align exercise that has been started and not yet closed, you can manage the participants.

Log in to Valence
On the left-hand side, select "Align"
On the top of the page select the appropriate team

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

Click "Options" on the top right corner of the appropriate Align exercise card
Click "Manage Participants"

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

Deleting an Align: You can delete an Align by clicking on the 'Options' button, followed by 'Delete Align Exercise'

Close the Align exercise

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 follow-up discussion; this lets everyone review their own personal version of the report and they can come to the follow-up discussion with some insights.

Discuss your results as a team

You're ready to arrange a team discussion! Valence's Discussion Space is a point-and-click tool that 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!