Tips for Successfully Setting Employee Goals

by Stacey Mc Grath, Digital Marketing Executive with Intelligo Software who provide Corporate HR Software and Payroll Software

Setting employee goals can be a difficult task and tends to be easier said than done as the road to success can be tricky to map out. However, establishing employee goals is an essential aspect of all businesses, their employees and their bottom lines. Such goals can define what the company intends to achieve in growth and profitability, as well as internal aspects of the business such as expanding staff or boosting employee recognition/morale.

If you already set employee goals, but are wondering why employees aren’t reaching their goals, there could be several reasons why. The difficulties might come from a lack of clarity, a discrepancy in alignment with the company’s purposes, and much more. It can be done successfully by assuring that goals are relevant, useful and attainable, crucial for effective performance management. Rather than looking at what you are doing wrong, it’s easier to zone in on what you can do going forward to set employee goals successfully. However, above all, the success of goals begins with communication between management and employees. With this in mind, the rest falls naturally into place.

Make Goals Achievable, yet Challenging.
Successfully planning employee goals is all about ensuring they are realistic, attainable yet challenging. While having difficult goals isn’t necessarily a bad thing, a simple goal can leave an employee jaded and passive on their development in your business. Preferably, managers should evaluate each employee’s individuality and craft goals based this. After all, it would be remiss of any manager to expect every employee to achieve the same goals. Individuality is essential, as they are not of the same character and should be treated as such.

So how you can do this? You need to be intelligent about it, and make sure the goals are SMART too. SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Setting goals that match these rules make it easy to track development while ensuring the value of the target remains for the company. Once a business sets a goal for their employees, they must believe that employees will complete it. However, management should be available to help their employees as needed. Ensuring a successful plan for goal achievements!

Align Employee and Company Goals
While countless managers do care for their employees in a personal sense, their primary job is to improve employees with the company’s interest in mind and for its continued success. Therefore, it benefits all parties involved if the employee’s goals align with the all over goals of the business itself, not just the employee’s personal goals. Alliance of both goals sets can be complicated if the company doesn’t understand the strengths, weaknesses and motivations of all their employees. One definite way to do this is to establish open and honest communication from the highest level down. But how can you do this?

A simple strategy as a starting point would be to try and increase communication, so it is regularly expected, such as once a week. Taking this regular time to communicate with employees, allows them to see the big picture for the business with a personal view. After all, employees don’t always get to see the finer points that go into an all over performance as they are only involved with their part in that process. This is particularly important for large-scale business initiatives or projects and allows managers to record every employee’s progress to identify if goals have been reached for both parties. Such a process also allows you highlight strengths and weaknesses what may need addressing in future.

Recognise and Reward Achievements
Recognising an employees goal achievement is a factor in continued goal success for your business. Employees will be engaged and motivated when they associate their accomplishments with your recognition. This is achieved by rewarding them when they’ve met their goals – simple as that. After all, feedback is one of the significant building blocks of a successful goal strategy.

However, rewards don’t have to cost an arm and a leg for your company. It could be in the guise of an extra day annual leave, a company lunch, or even a small award. The opportunities are endless! At the very least, their direct management should take time to recognise their accomplishments, whether it’s in a one-on-one meeting or before the whole company or department. Failing to reward employees can cause employees to feel downcast and affect their likeliness to comply with future goals for the business.

Don’t Ignore Missed Goals
On that same note, your business should work to evaluate why employee goals aren’t being reached. Though rather than reacting to missed goals with negativity, use it as an opportunity to help the employee see where they need improvement. It is essential to help employees correct their mistakes or recognise areas where management is failing them. After all, every mistake is a possible teaching moment for both of you.

Work with the employee on initiating their next goals and assess whether there is a gap that needs to be addressed, such as skills or a lack of communication. Afterall, if employees miss their goal mark, it may not be just their faults, and the business needs to take some ownership or to evaluate why this happened.

Simply put, setting employee goals is at the heart of planning and accomplishing your own businesses goals. Though this can be an area of HR that may be left idle, with these tips for successfully planning your strategy, you can begin to work with employees in setting goals and sequentially, achieve your own business goals in the same instance. To mention, if your business struggles to keep records of employees goals and their achievements, a robust HR Software, can be invaluable to your goal strategy and its success.