How Goal Setting Can Help You Get More From Your Staff

Helping your employees set goals for themselves can motivate and encourage productivity. Follow these tips to make your team more productive.

 

As a small-business owner, you'd probably do just about anything to help your businesses grow—work nights and weekends, give up your favorite, time-consuming hobby, even mortgage your house. But what about your  employees?

To be an effective leader, it's important to know why your employees work for your company—why they show up every day and what they hope to get out of their employment with your company. Put another way, what's the one bullet point they'll put on their resume that shows their biggest achievement while working for you?

Knowing your “employees' bullet point” shouldn't just be a slogan but an ongoing management tool. The key is to make sure that your employees' personal goals match with your overall company objectives. When they're complementary, employees work hard and stick around. When they diverge, however, an employee’s performance can sink, and they may eventually leave the company.

Goal-Setting Tips

How can you discover each of your employees’ bullet-point goals and support their achievement of them? Start with this checklist:

1. Ask them for specifics. Get each employee to tell you their primary and secondary work goals. These should be two distinct objectives, which can be pursued simultaneously as long as they're complementary to each other. A secondary goal can also become a primary one over time.

2. Put a measurement on it. Progress toward achieving the bullet-point goal needs to be quantified by the employee and the company. If it's not measurable, the employee won't know when it's accomplished.

3. Be realistic. Ensure that the bullet-point objectives are realistically achievable inside the company in a time frame of less than two years. Each goal must have a set deadline.

4. Align their goals with company goals. Ensure that the employee’s bullet-point goal overlaps with your company strategy. Identify areas and time frames where they might diverge.

Bullet-point objectives are typically long-term goals—daily emergencies will distract employees from achieving these overall objectives. Weekly or monthly tracking of an employee's progress will ensure that your employees don’t stray too far from their goals. Many times after such a review, an employee will be forced to refocus on the bullet or the company, and they'll need to dedicate more resources toward its achievement. For reinforcement and support, bullet-point goals can be shared by employees in front of the entire company .

Tech Support

Goal-tracking software can help employees outline the steps and target deadlines they need to complete to achieve their bullet-point objectives. The software can also help inform the employee's manager what type of progress is being made and determine how each employee's goals fit into other employees’ objectives and overall business goals.

Here are a few software programs you might find useful:

• Lifetick. This app allows users to build steps for each goal and review progress over time. It includes graphs and reports that quantify bullets. It's free for tracking up to four goals.
• Mindbloom Life Game. This free tool helps users collaborate on goals and share results with friends on their smartphones. This gaming environment offers incentives for working toward established goals.
• Joe's Goals. Add bullets and the things that need to be accomplished to a calendar, then check them off each day. This free app works well with positive goals to be achieved as well as negative goals to be avoided.

Goal setting isn't just for employees. It's good practice for business owners, too, to help you stay on track.