Employee goal setting and goal management

Why do we set goals for employees and why goals should be hard?

There is over 35 years of research on employee goal setting that beyond telling us what we know, which is goal setting is an essential part of achievement, the research tells us why goal setting works and the conditions that make some goals way more effective that others.

Goals increase our focus on the relevant activities – Goals serve as a directive function. They direct attention towards goal relevant activities, and away from irrelevant ones.

Hard goals prolong effort – When employees can control their time, e.g. they work remotely, hard goals prolong their effort, with sustained effort helping to achieve more.

Hard goals increase effort – Hard goals are energising and lead to greater effort. Easy to achieve goals have low levels of impact and value so should be avoided.

Hard goals accelerate learning & improved collaboration – Hard goals cause the arousal, discovery and use of task relevant knowledge and strategies. Easy goals don’t.

How do you set goals for employees?

How you set goals for teams and employees will very much depend on the approach you take. Tools and frameworks like KPIs, SMART, and OKRs are complementary ways to approach goal setting, and are supported in ZOKRI and taught by our OKR consultants.

Good guiding principles are to ensure your goals contain:

Create alignment – Goals set in silos that are not going to support strategy, and are not vertically or horizontally aligned run the risk of being poorly aligned, with energy being directed to lower impact or irrelevant activities.

Use quality metrics – Quality metrics / KPIs make good goals and focusing on the ones that require the most change makes a good goal. Making sure you track the metrics that matter is a key part of know what needs to become a goal and how you measure achievement.

Make goals a stretch – As you can see from the research, easy goals are low value goals, so hard goals need to be normalised and failure needs to be made safe and a learning experience. If you’re not able to set hard goals, you will achieve less.

Avoid BAU – Goals that are set that involve following business-as-usual processes and doing everyday jobs-to-be-done make poor goals. They dilute your focus from the goals that matter most and are the focus of the change required.

The building blocks of better goal setting & goal management

Strategy

Inputs like Strategic Pillars can provide specific areas of focus and a structure that enable success criteria to be defined for the successful implementation of the strategy, as well as allowing departments and teams to align goals with your strategy.

Strategy Maps Provide Longer-term Direction