One of our top goals as HR professionals is to see our employees thrive. By helping them grow, build their skills, and find greater satisfaction in their work, we contribute to a more productive, engaged, and loyal workforce.
Goal setting is an excellent tool for enhancing employee performance. It has the potential to inspire growth in employees while also concentrating their efforts on your company’s overall performance goals. However, to realize its potential, goal setting must strike a proper balance between inspiration and realism.
Typically, goal setting involves an expectation that an employee will push beyond their usual performance to accomplish something greater. It can look like making more sales, retaining more clients, getting better customer reviews, and more. Goal setting raises the bar and usually looks to establish a new standard of performance.
Business leaders can motivate employees to rise to new heights in the workplace by ensuring goals are inspirational. For example, explaining goals to highlight their benefit to customers and not just the company can drive efforts. When employees understand that serving more clients also means changing more lives for the better, they may be more motivated to contribute to the effort to achieve that goal.
At the same time, business leaders can demotivate their employees if they push for unrealistic goals. Those familiar with SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goal setting know that effective goal setting involves focusing on achievable goals. If employees don’t see a goal as something that can realistically be accomplished, they won’t be motivated to pursue it.
Achieving a 100% customer satisfaction rating is an example of a goal that can easily be viewed as unrealistic. Instead, it’s more realistic to encourage your employees to pursue that goal for a certain length of time—the next 90 days, for example. However, asking employees to pursue it indefinitely does not acknowledge the type of balance needed to get them on board with goal setting.
The following are some tips that can help your business as you strive to foster inspirational yet realistic goal setting for employees.
Tip #1: Seek to Align Goals and Outcomes
A win-win is always the best scenario. When the goals an employee is excited about pursuing align with the outcomes the business is trying to achieve, a powerful synergy is achieved. Business leaders may need to help employees connect the dots when this doesn’t happen naturally.
The first step in this process may involve reframing business-wide goals in a way employees can appreciate. This can be as simple as translating corporate jargon into a language employees can understand and get excited about. When “growing our client base” becomes “getting game-changing products into the hands of people who need our solutions,” employees will be more inspired to get on board.
Once overarching goals are effectively communicated, leaders may need to offer some
guidance on identifying goals that are meaningful to the employee and also support desired corporate outcomes. It is valuable to give employees some leeway in setting goals, provided they fall within certain parameters.
Tip #2: Foster Intrinsic Motivation
Leveraging intrinsic motivation in the goal-setting process is a surefire way to increase the level of inspiration. Intrinsic motivation fuels activity by drawing upon the internal satisfaction someone feels from pursuing a goal. You might say it is the journey — and not the destination— that motivates an employee who is driven by intrinsic motivation.
To bring intrinsic motivation into the equation, leaders should seek to help employees
comprehend how their pursuit of goals will strengthen their skills and contribute to a greaterpurpose. Purpose and mastery are considered two key drivers of intrinsic motivation.
Understanding and tapping into an employee’s personal passions can also contribute to intrinsic motivation. For example, if an employee is an environmentalist, goals that improve a company’s sustainability can be very inspiring.
It’s also valuable to understand that intrinsic motivation can increase an employee’s optimism about achieving a goal. If an employee is passionate about fitness, for example, they may be more willing to commit to an ambitious goal focused on increasing employee participation in health and wellness initiatives.
Tip #3: Embrace Professional Development
Goals that expect employees to achieve higher levels of performance become more realistic when those employees are offered opportunities for professional development. Those opportunities can include attending industry-focused conferences and seminars, obtaining relevant certifications, and even acquiring advanced degrees such as an MBA.
Embracing professional development as a component of goal setting also makes goals more inspiring for employees. Obtaining a new skill has a value that goes far beyond the benefits it delivers to the company. For the employee, it becomes an accomplishment that follows them wherever their career may take them. When goal setting strikes a balance between being inspirational and realistic, it can be very beneficial to a company. To ensure the balance is achieved, companies should seek to embrace professional development, foster intrinsic motivation, and align goals and outcomes.
Tiffani Martinez, Human Resources Director at Otter PR, excels at putting the “human” back into “Human Resources.” She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Keiser University with a BA in Business Management and a focus in Human Resource Management. Her professional background is in non-profit and Property and Casualty insurance with focused knowledge of the needs of Florida residents. Her tenure in non-profit led her to manage one of the top 100 largest churches in the nation with more than 2,000 members. Her passion is in conflict management where she strives to take in all perspectives, ensuring all parties are respected and heard with fairness and empathy.
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