Creating goals can be fun and accomplishing them can be invigorating. The hard part is the work that separates these two points. Here are some quick tips to help you and your team meet goals this year!
1) Aim high but start small
It’s important to have big bold goals, but it is just as important to break up those goals into series of steps to lay out the pathway to get there. This is sometimes called reverse planning and it has been shown to increase motivation and productivity. By creating sub-goals, employees will have a clear path of what success looks like.
“Those that perform backward planning have ~10% increase in performance.” – Association for Psychological Science
2) Celebrate small wins
According to research, we give more attention to small mistakes than the accomplishment of small goals. This can negatively affect motivation and make it much harder to achieve long-term goals. Hence, it is critical to celebrate small wins. Research shows that appreciating small wins can boost an employee’s sense of confidence and enhance worker motivation. Celebrate small success and recognize your employees when they have done a good job. Check our blog post about the benefits of recognizing employee’s efforts.
3) Document progress
There are many benefits to documenting small wins and progress. Not only will this decrease the chance of biases in performance assessments/reviews, but it will also allow for a single place to store all data to understand goals and progress made, for both the employees and their managers. There are many tools that can be used to document progress of objectives (pen-and-paper approach, shared documents like Google Sheets, etc.; we recommend Pavestep, of course!). Make it a priority to document your employee goals and progress.
4) Align individual goals to company objectives
It’s hard for employees to work on a goal when they don’t understand how it contributes to the overall company objectives. The perception that an employee has on how their work matters to overall company strategy influences employee’s productivity and motivation. Luckily, you can easily increase employee productivity and motivation by involving the employee during the goal-setting process and aligning individual goals to company objectives. Not only will this make the employee more engaged, but it will help the employee understand why this goal is important and how it contributes to other team and company strategy. Mission/purpose alignment is one of the strongest driver of engagement and motivation.
What are your thoughts? Let us know!
