Whether it’s in your personal or professional life, goal setting is absolutely a necessity in order to achieve success. Research has shown that goal setting serves four basic functions: provides guidance and direction, facilitates planning, motivates employees, and helps evaluate and control performance. With AssessTEAM, setup for SMART goals is easy, providing effortless tracking of achievements and simplified reporting on overall project status.
Setting goals for a business usually involves the entire organization, and can be an overwhelming, challenging task as it may include such important items like company wide budgets, product management, vendors, customer lists and so much more. Pulling all this together may be a tough challenge, but it is absolutely worth the effort to learn how to implement SMART goals – goals that are Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Relevant, and Timely.
S = Specific
-What must be accomplished?
-Who is responsible for this project?
-What steps are needed to achieve this goal?
These are the three most important questions you must ask yourself and your team when creating specific goals. You must also use action verbs that focus on exactly what needs to be done, and who is going to do it.
M = Measurable
This step in the creation of SMART goals helps you to clarify what you want to achieve and how to quantify team efforts in order to achieve them.
Now that you’ve pinned down exactly what your goal is, you must be able to track the progress of not only the team, but also yourself as a manager. This doesn’t necessarily have to be in the form of a numeric scale or statistic, it just has to be measurable in some way, so that your team knows when you have reached or are close to reaching your goal.
A = Achievable
In this step, we must ask ourselves – is this goal practical? Business leaders with years of experience will tell you that employees are typically motivated by goals as long as they aren’t unachievable because they are unrealistic. Being ambitious is great, but you must also be practical.
R = Relevant
If your primary goal is to increase profit instead of sales, then setting a goal to attract new customers may not be the best idea. Instead, you need to focus on retaining existing customers and increasing their transaction spending or reducing production costs. Make sure the goals you are setting makes sense for your business.
T = Time-bound
It is absolutely essential that you establish a time frame to accomplish your goal. It motivates your team to conclude the established endeavor. Without a set time frame, your overall objective may be diminished because it may take much longer to accomplish it when there is no set end date.
SMART goals examples
As a business manager, setting goals too high to be achieved or too low to motivate can lead to numerous issues within your team. It is vital that you set goals for your team that are both achievable and attainable. When goals are not well thought out, team members may no longer feel the need to work towards the overall success of the company, because they lack motivation and feel that they have nothing to aim towards.
We have listed below 3 examples to help you create your own SMART goals and keep you and your team focused on what it is you are trying to achieve.
1. Increase the Website Traffic by 30% before December 31, 2020 (for a Digital content manager)
- Specific: Increase the number of people that visit our site by 30%
- Measurable: Increase our yearly website visitors from 100,000 to 130,000
- Achievable: With our social media and marketing teams’ experience and web tools in place, we can achieve this by prioritizing this objective over others
- Relevant: The more traffic we have, the more profit we make, and the larger our audience reach becomes. Also, the goal seems very much in line with the job duties of a content manager.
- Time-bound: We have set the goal’s target for December 31, 2020
2. Grow Market Share by at least 10% by the End of the Year (for a Regional Sales Director)
- Specific: We know the target audience, geographical region, the product line, and the level of growth (10%) we want to achieve
- Measurable: We will measure our goal by tracking new customers and growth in new markets, and overall growth in current markets
- Achievable: Our market share grew overall by 8% last year so this increased goal is doable
- Relevant: Growth goals increase market shares
- Time-bound: We will reach this goal by the end of the year
3. 90% of Team Members will Have Completed New Inventory Management Software Training by the End of Third Quarter
- Specific: 90% of staff must be trained on the new inventory management software as soon as possible
- Measurable: We have 300 employees; at least 270 need to complete the training
- Achievable: A of employees majority have already received training. The training is web-based and easy to access making this goal achievable
- Relevant: This training will allow our team to merge onto the new platform. Once people are comfortable with the new system it will become more efficient
- Time-bound: We want to achieve this goal by the end of the third quarter
You would never build a home without clear and concise plans. The same should be said for your business goals. By creating SMART goals, your team will work as both individuals and as a team towards clear, well-established objectives. Without clearly outlined goals, you and your team will encounter problems when trying to put plans into action.
Below are 2 examples of goals that are vague and unclear, and how to rewrite them as SMART goals:
Example 1Vague goal: “Learn and implement new social media strategies”SMART goal: “Learn three new social media strategies (specific) and implement them on Facebook and Twitter (specific) by the end of next month (timely). Record effectiveness of these strategies in terms of users reached, users engaged and new users engaged (measurable).”
Example 2
Vague goal: “Increase employee productivity”
SMART goal: “Train the team so that at least 90% of our department objectives (specific and measurable) for this quarter are met (timely).”
In conclusion, by creating SMART goals, you will always have the assurance that you are setting attainable and achievable goals for your team that will lead to the growth and success of your organization and those around you.