Motivating employees is a key to business growth and success. It starts with helping employees in setting goals and supporting them in accomplishing those determined objectives. It also assists in providing a basis to evaluate and measure their performance. But, before fixing the desired expectations and objectives, it is essential to understand its different types. Only after that management can identify and set performance goals with their employees.
What are performance goals?
Employees irrespective of departments are expected to accomplish short-term goals, termed as performance goals within a set period. These goals are defined based on the specific job positions and are determined after considering all the duties and tasks an individual has to perform in that position. These goals are a subset of and added to the overall goals of the company. They help employees in knowing what is expected from them at their position. Therefore organizations need to set clear and easily measurable performance goals by using the most ideal performance management tool for them.
How to set performance goals with employees?
Pay attention to both adaptive and tactical performance
The first step of setting performance goals is to identify whether the performance goals are adaptive or tactical. The adaptive performance focuses on the ability of individuals to adapt, solve problems, create good results without lots of oversights. It also focuses on innovation and improvement of standard processes. Whereas, tactical performance is the ability to finish a task with high efficiency and quality.
The success of a business depends on employees who are both adaptively and tactically proficient. While setting performance goals, managers should make sure that employees are focused on both types of performance.
Understand and handle biases
Evaluating the performance of employees is really challenging because there is a lot of subjectivity that constitutes better performance, employees are wary of biases, and this causes distrust.
So leaders should carefully identify and manage these things to create confidence in their performance goal-setting process.
Know the right measuring gauge
Managers need to understand what measuring gauge will be perfect to evaluate success. It can be measured against standards of performance, list competencies, against employees themselves, against established competencies, etc.
There can be two best options for identifying the right measuring gauge. The first is that both managers and employees mutually understand what gauge will be used to figure out whether goals are being met and improvement is there or not. The second is that the standard of performance should be based on objective measures like previously determined competencies, job descriptions, procedures, objective and key results, etc.
What is goal alignment?
Goal alignment is essential for every organization because it is the process of aligning individual and team goals to the larger goal of the organization. This is essential to ensure that all the employees and teams are working in alignment with the overall objective of the organization. Sounds simple, but it’s one of the hardest areas of organization building.
Once the wider goals of the organization are determined, management must take steps to ensure that employees are informed about it, what they have to do and why. An appropriate strategic alignment ensures that the work of all employees is utilized effectively and efficiently in line with the overall objective.
Importance of goal alignment
Properly aligned organizational goals communicate things that are important so that employees can plan and execute their work based on it.
It takes the organization’s overall strategy and divides it into manageable chunks, mentioning checkpoints throughout the way to reach the strategic mark.
Employees can easily feel disengaged and lost when they do not understand their exact position in the organizational hierarchy. But, with goal alignment, they can easily notice the impact of their efforts.
Goal alignment gives every employee a role to play and promotes accountability along with providing points for recognition, appreciation and celebration of good performance.
Through goal alignment, employees understand how every task affects the team and organizational objectives, it becomes easier for them to select the job that requires their attention first.
Interested in Learning More?
entomo is a modern performance management software built for the ‘future of work.’ Powering 30mn+ users, entomo enables ‘enterprises of tomorrow’ to drive performance by aligning goals and nudging actionable insights to manage distributed & remote teams and build a tomorrow-ready workforce.
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