It is essential that company managements understand the ways to increase staff motivation, task engagement and productivity levels among employees. The truth is, setting employees’ performance goals is a vital practice in the modern workplace in order to boost staff performance, help them prioritize and stay focused, and ultimately engender a sense of achievement in them.
Here are ways you can set attainable goals for your staff.
Start and Flow Down Goals from the Top
How do you ensure employees goals are aligned to the organisation’s goals? By starting from the top and getting everyone lined up behind the cause with each person’s contribution or quota clearly defined. If, for example, the management sets a specific target of increasing company profit by 5% in the business year, every member of staff should be able to identify their roles in actualizing their collective goal. An employee could be focused on reducing cost or increasing sales to achieve their goal.
By starting and flowing down goals and key themes from the top, management will be helping to tie together the efforts and performance of each staff member to the central objective of the organisation as a unit. It doesn’t matter if you have a small or large staff, what is important is that everyone’s actions are ultimately focussed on and channelled towards achieving a set of clearly defined common goals that underline the mission of the company. It does help to create a simple goal flow down matrix for key members of the staff or team to help drive the different key areas of focus or themes of the organisation’s main goal.
Collaborate with Employees to Set Goals
Employees need to be aware and clear on their primary and/or delegated goals as individual workers or members of a team. Where this is lacking or ambiguous, employees may become stagnant, neither helping to develop the company or themselves. One way management can prevent a situation like that is to involve employees in the process of goalsetting. It is also vital that you motivate them for this by showing them the organisation genuinely cares for their health and general welfare as members of a family.
Collaborate with staff to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each person, as well as their career goals, so together with management, company and individual goals and milestones can be set. That way, employees can think about the big picture for the company and also on a personal level, and thus feel more connected with and committed to the organisation.
Include the 3 Types of Employee Performance Goals
When setting employee performance goals, be sure to make it holistic and include the 3 areas of key performance index for final result assessment.
- Accomplishment Goals (What the employee achieves or the result of the employee’s work)
- Efficiency Goals (How the employee does his or her job)
- Development Goals (Extent of professional learning and growth)
Make the Goals SMART
It is critical to apply SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Based goals) principles to employees’ performance goals. This will make the goals specific, clear and provide a clear finish line for management and staff to properly evaluate and score. Making the goals SMART will make it easy for management to conclude whether a goal was achieved, unachieved or exceeded. For example, rather than set or write a goal like ‘improve sales’, it should be ‘improve subscription rates by 5%.’