Setting and establishing goals can be a powerful tool, one that can be used to help motivate your workers to achieve greater things. Establishing, achieving and then celebrating accomplishments throughout the year can benefit both workplace morale as well as overall efficiency. Working with your team to set quarterly goals can go a long way towards unlocking the full potential of your staff.
Be Specific
Establishing goals that are too vague can end up defeating the purpose. Details, deadlines and even the basic concepts behind a goal that change too frequently can often lead to a loss of interest and engagement. Being as specific as possible and adhering tightly to the parameters of a goal once it has been set helps to ensure superior results.
Encourage Participation and Solicit Feedback
Goals that are shared between a team, department or across an entire business can benefit tremendously from increased worker participation. Discussing past goals with your staff, comparing ideas for how to tackle a new challenge and ensuring that feedback and suggestions are utilized whenever possible can make quite a difference. Getting your team interested, engaged and involved in the process of setting new quarterly goals is often one of the most important steps in the process.
Establish Deadlines and Track Progress
A firm deadline serves as a focal point, one that helps to keep the whole team on the same page. Goals that may require workers to take on additional responsibilities or to put for extra effort in order to be met may end up being deprioritized and forgotten in the event that there is no pressure to finish by a certain date. Deadlines make a difference and you would do well to determine the ideal amount of time needed for the team to reach a goal.
Recognize and Celebrate Accomplishments
Expecting your workers to push themselves a little harder without providing them with extra incentives would be a mistake. Recognizing individual accomplishments, arranging a celebration or even using a corporate restaurant delivery service to buy your team lunch is a small way that helps to ensure that they feel valued and appreciated. Pushing the team too hard without giving anything back in return can lead to decreased morale and less impressive performance. The number one reason people leave their jobs is because they don’t feel valued.
Setting the Right Goals
Tasking the team to achieve the wrong goal could end up being a bigger mistake than you might realize. Playing to the strengths of the team and providing them with goals that strike the right balance between being too difficult and too easy to achieve is of paramount importance. With the right quarterly goal to motivate them, you may be surprised as what your team is able to achieve.
Kara Masterson is a freelance writer from West Jordan, Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah and enjoys writing and spending time with her dog, Max.