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Performance management takes organizational visions into actionable plans that motivate workers to reach goals and take a business to the next level. Combining these tactics with clearly structured goals sets the stage for employees to achieve objectives and move it towards new achievability for the business.
Because all employees have job metrics – contact center agents have customer service standards, sales people track billable hours – including those metrics as part of your evaluation ensures the same thing gets applied consistently and fairly.
SMART Goals
SMART goals provide a framework to set and achieve effective targets. They’re specific, measurable, attainable and relevant goals that have an established timeframe for completion.
Goal enablement helps to make objectives explicit and measurable which in turn results in business expansion. They also help your workers be more productive by making their goals aligned with the company mission and objectives – indeed, when goals were aligned with business objectives, our State of Employee Goal Enablement report from 2024 found that they were 35% more productive.
By using the SMART approach to goal setting, you’ll be able to circumvent goal-setting traps like focusing too much on numbers or short-term rather than long-term objectives. Yet not all SMART goals are created equal, here are some tips to design good SMART goals to align with strategic business initiatives.
Time-Based Goals
Leaders can assign time-bound objectives for performance management and gauging the success of employees over time. This creates visibility while also promoting flexibility – bosses and staff can share achievements or overcome challenges during appraisals.
Process and micro goals must be coordinated with outcome goals to create a meaningful framework for goal setting and evaluation collaboratively. Outcome goals represent what you hope the process and micro goals lead to, such as being promoted within one year or winning an award; however, as these may be less controllable and rely more heavily on hard work than luck, they should be assessed regularly for effectiveness.
These goals should align with your strategic goals, making it clear how employees’ work contributes to meeting your overall business objectives. To assist managers, offer training workshops or resources on best practices for setting goals and evaluating performance; you could even offer role-playing exercises so managers can practice having difficult feedback discussions with their colleagues.
Stretch Goals
The stretch goals should be high in number, but achievable, to push teams to be more and do better than originally expected. Warning, however: if you place them too close, they could be seen as intimidating and down.
Product Managers can empower themselves to launch 3 products by Q3 (90 % on-time) with an increased product lineup and presence in the market and a strengthened project management capability. The HR team may also wish to get 10% off turnover within the next year through better engagement efforts; hence it would lead to higher company profit (by reducing cost of labour and improving output).
It should be an alignment of employee performance expectations with company strategies in order to make everyone feel that they are making a difference and that their work directly contributes to the company success. Workers who are working towards these objectives were 35% more productive and efficient.
Measurable Goals
Performance management should include quantifying objectives to drive employee accountability. Specific goals, weekly goal meetings and frequent feedback keeps your team on track. Moreover, other objectives and processes should be aligned with your organization’s strategy.
Your organization may have the objective of improving customer satisfaction ratings by 10% next quarter as a achievable goal for your Customer Service Representative. Such an aim defines better, measures its impact, and sets an timescale for it.
Another popular goal setting tool is MBO (Management by Objectives), where a set of annual goals are used to monitor an employee’s performance. This is especially helpful for top performers such as sales or professional services. Yet another method, Objectives and Key Results (OKR), emphasizes big or stretch goals with clearly defined roads to achieve them; a bit more malleable than MBO and suitable for businesses with a lot of metrics.
