Goal-Tracking: Give Your Team a Secret Weapon

It’s astonishing how underused goal-tracking is in small business. Yet, every business has objectives that must be met on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. Especially, if that business wants to achieve their overarching goals. If attaining your business objectives is important to you, then helping your team set goals and track their progress towards those goals should be important to you, too.

Goal-Setting is Crucial to Employee & Company Performance

Most of us start learning how to set goals in grade school to achieve the things we want to accomplish. We learned how to set goals with the acronym SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based.

As you may already know, goal-setting is the process of identifying what you want to accomplish and then establishing specific parameters around the desired result: who, what, when, where, and why.

But let me be clear, goal-setting isn’t just for our personal goals and dreams. Goals play a crucial role in the workplace, too. When you work with your team members to set goals for their performance, you establish clear expectations, provide direction and purpose, and motivate your team to engage in achievement.

• Engaged teams return 3x higher than companies that fail to engage their employees in achievement.
• 82% of highly engaged employees has a leader that clearly communicates goals and objectives.
• 88% of highly engaged employees understand how their job contributes to the organization achieving its business goals.
• You waste 30% of your performance potential when you don’t set goals to align employee behavior with organizational objectives.

Source: Willis Towers Watson, Gartner Inc., Clear Company

First, You Set the Goal (Goal-Setting)

When it comes to setting goals with your team members, it’s important to include them in the process. You need their help to set a SMART goal (the “A” and “R” are impossible without them) that aligns their actions with the overarching business objectives.

Historical data is extremely helpful when it comes to setting a realistic goal. You can look at the last 90 days to establish the appropriate benchmark slightly above current operating performance.

However, the point of individual team member goals is to ultimately attain the organizational objectives. Knowing where your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators of your business) need to be in order to achieve the overarching objectives is essential to then working backwards to establish where individual goals need to be in order to achieve the KPIs desired performance.

Second, You Track Progress (Goal-Tracking)

The best way to attain a goal is to measure progress toward the goal. This process is called goal-tracking. With the help of a measurement tool, your team members can identify their current performance compared to the desired performance. It enables them to know in real-time where they stand in relation to their goal, giving them more control over reaching the mark.

Goal-tracking is a capability we here at BlueIQ feel very passionate about. In the coming weeks, we’re releasing our new dashboard cards, which include a new, robust goal-tracking feature 😀

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