22 Jul
Goal setting and goal management are two critical steps in any performance management process. To ensure that your goal setting and management works well, pay due attention to these five tips.
- Align organizational goals to individual goals to ensure employee commitment.
- Create a culture of continuous learning (relevant to goals & job) in the organisation to ensure that employees keep developing their skills and capabilities further.
- Establish a 360-degree feedback process which ensures that it is received well and progress is assured.
- Establish an environment of rewarding and recognising performance, to motivate and encourage employees to consistently better performance.
- Technology is an ideal substitute to human effort and adopting an effective Performance Management System, you could achieve all these, in a consistent and repeatable manner.
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Performance management is an important aspect of any enterprise, we can even say it’s a sine qua non for its growth and success. To establish a performance management process, it is important to provide adequate attention to goal setting. This article deals with some of the important aspects of goal setting which make goal management effective, thereby ensuring that you deliver on your performance .
Goal management is about establishing the right tools, processes and activities which enable employees to set and achieve their goals. It is important for a manager to discuss the goals being allocated to an employee, before actually freezing them. This will help to quickly identify any gaps in the employees’ skills, knowledge or access to tools which could all affect their performance. This will also help to bridge gaps, if any, before the employees can achieve any of the goals set for them. Training, development, positive/negative feedback or support go a long way to improve an employee’s performance.
The Right Approach to Goal Setting
Goal management requires preparation and planning. Unless a goal and its purpose are clearly laid out, goal setting will just confuse employees. It will also leave them unclear about what is expected of them. Which is why organizations invest in the concept of SMART goal setting where SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Employees need to know why a goal is important and who will be working to achieve it and what resources need to be dedicated to it. These goals then need to be tracked and measured to check if they are being achieved as expected. When people are set goals which are patently unachievable, they get demotivated and lose their confidence. By setting challenging, but achievable goals, we can motivate people to stretch their efforts to attain tough goals. To be relevant, the goals need to be realistic and bring along the resources required to achieve them. SMART goals also need to have a specific amount of time allotted to them, within which they need to be completed.
We share the top 5 tips to facilitate your goal setting and management, as it is good to invest the time and effort needed to do it right.
1. Align Organizational Goals to Individual Goals
It is necessary for people to know how their individual contribution is helping their organization to succeed. We can do this only when we tie employee performance goals or team goals to organizational goals. It helps to keep employees more engaged while achieving the strategic objectives of the business itself. Companies achieve exceptionally well when they learn how to balance business goals with employee goals. Employers also find that employees focus harder, show more commitment and achieve more when they get to set their own goals.
2. Create a culture of continuous learning
To ensure the required standards of performance, organisations need employees who possess the necessary skills and capabilities to execute a task. But business today operates in a dynamic environment. This requires employees to be open to learning. It has progressively been getting more difficult for employees to avoid the adoption of technology and other software applications to deliver on their jobs. Learning has to be ongoing. It cannot end at a specific point.
We need people who are constantly learning and evolving to not just get better at what they are doing, but also move to other tasks.
3. Create a Reliable 360-degree Feedback system
As you may be aware, 360-degree feedback is about having every employee reviewed by every single stakeholder starting with their subordinates, colleagues, supervisors and adding a self-evaluation. Some even include customers depending on the role’s requirements. With the right kind of questionnaire, an employee’s competencies can be assessed. With the right kind of assessment and rating, a 360-degree feedback sets clear expectations and enables behavioural change and measurable progress.
4. Recognize and Reward Performance
Find the necessary time for performance reviews. Employees keep up their high performance when they are recognised for their efforts and rewarded right. Even the employees whose efforts were not recognised will keep striving to perform better than before so as to gain the fruits of their hard work in the form of rewards and recognition. When recognition is linked to value offered and is timely and regular, organisations reap the benefits of their rewards and recognition programs in various tangible and intangible ways. Such a culture of recognition helps to boost overall performance too.
5. Employ an Effective Performance Management System
Technology helps to improve many facets of our lives. Find a Performance Management System (PMS) which simplifies your goal setting process, its management and 360-degree feedback cycle. Establish an effective performance management program using a PMS to ensure goal setting, 360-degree feedback, employee development, goal attainment as well as better communication and collaboration across the organisation. This would ensure goal management and boost achievement, by ensuring goal attainment by ironing out any differences within the team and ensuring the attainment of the final goal.
These 5 tips could set you on the road to business success, if adopted diligently and implemented effectively.
Download our buyer’s guide for performance management system for a comprehensive checklist while evaluating a PMS. You can also read the following blog post to learn tips on how to justify investment in HR technology.
