April 2017
A Steady Aim: The Importance of Goal Setting for Your Team
It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business that’s starting to grow, or a well-established household name: goal setting is an important ingredient in your business’ future success. Although there may be some misgivings that there’s no time to set goals for your employees and their teams, you’ll soon begin to reap the rewards – making it an activity worth your time.
Why Should I Set Goals?
As a business grows, it’s commonplace for the owner to begin to take a step away from the business – perhaps to concentrate on business development or dreaming up new products. This distance can lead to employees carrying on working how they always have done, unaware that the goals of the business (now that it’s reached a certain size) are no longer being worked towards in the most productive way. This scenario affects businesses from the point they start growing, all the way up until they’re multinational giants, whilst smaller businesses may need to look to goals to help them to reach that stage of growth in the first place.
How Do I Go About It?
Thankfully, setting and monitoring goals isn’t as time-consuming as you may expect. You need to ensure that the overall goals of the business are known to all employees, and that they have their own goals to work towards – but creating the goals is only step one!
Make Goals Clear
Make sure that whatever goals you’ve chosen to assign to different employees or teams are easily understood by everybody. There’s no shame in not being sure, and employees who have their questions answered and who know what they’re doing are more likely to be successful. Likewise, make sure the company’s objectives are simple and comprehensible.
Create ‘Line of Sight’
As a business grows, some employees can become disengaged when it’s no longer clear how their day-to-day role contributes towards the business’ objectives. Instil in your teams a clear line of sight between what they do and where the business is headed.
Check in on Performance
Setting goals is one thing, but ensuring they’re being met is a whole other ball game! For this, you can either set up quarterly or monthly one-to-ones (if your team size allows for this), or have different departments confer among themselves and report back. Either way, employees need to know that their hard work is being acknowledged and that support is available should they be struggling with their goals.
Use the Right Tools to Help
Feel like there’s a lot to do? You’ll be glad to know you don’t have to tackle all of this by yourself! There are many solutions on offer today which track your team’s progress and offer transparency by getting individuals to regularly report back on their progress.
In addition, you can make use of a bespoke CRM tool to support employees in achieving their goals by better managing their time, making processes simpler, and automating smaller tasks. With the right tools at your disposal, setting and monitoring goals should be a straightforward road to success!
Want to create a winning team? Simply get in touch to arrange a free trial of our bespoke CRM solution, complete with third party integration, and arm your team for success.