Importance of Understanding Your Employees Goals
Goals keep employees motivated and productivity moving forward. Goal setting should be the combined effort of management and the worker to align individual tasks with corporate strategies. Goal setting is also a necessary process to engage the worker in their own success. If you don’t understand your employee goals, you’ll be less likely to retain them for the long term. Here’s how to get managers on the same page around goal setting.
Goal Setting Strengthens the Employer/Employee Relationship
Your employees want manager feedback. This is especially true of the millennial generation. They want to know where they stand in the organization and in their department. Goal setting and alignment is a part of the process of aligning the employee goals with strategic business needs.
When workers are meeting goals, they should receive positive feedback to reinforce their excellent work. This will help keep them engaged in the success of the organization. They’ll be more interested in their work. Goal setting can give employees a path to grow and advance, but if the employer doesn’t participate in the process of setting these metrics, there is no way for the worker to hit them.
If your company doesn’t take the time on a regular basis to sit down with workers to set and measure goals, productivity simply won’t be as high. Your employees may feel discouraged by their job, and managers won’t be able to measure progress toward goals, which is what will drive productivity for your organization. How can managers help employees in this process?
Best Practices for Employee Goal Setting
Setting measurable and attainable goals should be a collaborative process between management and staff. This helps managers align employee goals with business objectives and gives staff something to work towards. This process should include:
- Inviting employees to set job-specific goals. Managers should not set these goals for the worker; engage your staff in this process by creating their own in conjunction with you. Dictating goals to employees will demotivate them. You need to create buy-in by allowing staff the autonomy to develop their own key performance goals.
- Make the goals measurable but also attainable. You want goals to be set that the employee can achieve. Otherwise, they may grow frustrated by the process. Set attainable, specific goals, and then create the environment where the employee can reach them. The whole point of goals is that they motivate the employee and, as a result, increase productivity. Failing to achieve goals is a demotivator and will have the opposite effect you intended.
Goal setting is tricky. The goals must be collaborative between you and the employee, they must tie into business goals, and they must be attainable. But the plans must also be individualized in a way that does not set one worker against the other but instead builds the team. If managers don’t understand their employee goals, their department, and ultimately the business will be less effective.
The Custom Group of Companies is here to help your organization meet its hiring goals. Talk to our team today about how we can help your business.
