Effective Organisational Goal Setting — 5 Benefits

Setting goals at any result oriented and accountability prone organization can sometimes feel like making New Year’s resolutions. This becomes all the way more important in difficult economic situation such as the current pandemic.

In fact, goals give you and your company a sense of purpose and a reason for doing what you’re doing. The idea seems promising at first, and you have no trouble getting everyone on board, but a few weeks later, those goals are least remembered, if not forgotten. Effort must go into keeping the goals alive and the reinforcement and implementation part and the whole organisation must be able to relate to the bigger picture instead of just focusing on departmental or divisional goals.

In this article, we’ll make an attempt to understand how SMART goals benefit the organisations. Also, let’s discuss why identifying objectives is important in the first place.

5 benefits of setting SMART goals

Always remember that defining organisational vision, mission and value statements should be an outcome of the goal-setting exercise, not the other way round. Some organisations, especially their HR functions work in isolation on framing Vision, Mission and Value Statements, without having access to the broader organisational goals which eventually turns to become a meaningless exercise.

Now let’s review how an organisation can benefit from a goal setting exercise.

1. Employees connect well

Imagine participating in a race and just before the start, you discover that there was no finish line — it would probably seem pretty pointless. A professional work environment that lacks clear goals can feel the same way. This doesn’t happen only in startups or small sized organisations but we have seen this happening in medium and large local and multinational companies too where annual bonuses or salary raises are awarded equally to everyone without differentiating the high and the low performers. If you view this ritual from a high performer’s standpoint, it must be pretty frustrating.

Researchers have found that setting goals can help employees feel a greater connection to their organization. Not only does this contribute to increased optimism at the workplace, but it also encourages better employee performance.

2. Shared Vision

At the leadership level, this could be annoying to find out that the departments and their individual employees have been devoting time to projects that work toward seemingly different objectives than of the organisation. How can you avoid this issue? Get a copy of the organisational goals at the very outset and derive functional goals out of the broader organisational goals. This can help ensure everyone is aligned and help you understand when it may be necessary to give feedback that can get workers back on track.

3. Accountability

Once you set a goal, the next step is to start evaluating whether you’re making progress or not. Instead of gauging general effort or rewarding employees on the face value, you can measure milestones. This can help ensure that they aren’t just working eight hours a day, but are working in the right direction and towards a specific outcome.

Accountability is an assurance that an individual or an organization will be evaluated on their performance or behavior related to something for which they are responsible. The term is related to responsibility but seen more from the perspective of oversight. Accountability, on the other hand, means that the employee is held responsible for successfully completing the task and will have to at least explain why they failed to do so.

4. Quantify success

The pursuit of success is actually a part of our cultural DNA. All of us want to be successful in whatever we do in our lives and many see it as the basis of today’s human progress, which promises that every person can achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative.

However, despite a drive for obtaining success in our culture, the meaning of success isn’t fixed. It can be different things to different people, and there is no possible way of defining success in a way that is representative of every individual person. Although there’s no objective definition of success, there are other ways to arrive at a more impartial meaning.

Without setting goals, there’s no real way to identify when a project or an assignment gets completed. To avoid needlessly prolongating something and risking burnout, leaders have to assign goals to their teams that will clearly define success — as well as indicate how far you’ve come and how far you have to go to achieve them.

5. Fulfilment

Happiness and fulfillment at work make the best kind of employees. When morale at the workplace is high, employees will stay not just because of the salary and perks, but also because of the environment they work in. Hone your employees’ can-do attitude with these five things that make employees happy and fulfilled at work.

It’s hard to beat the satisfaction you feel by meeting goals — even small ones. This sense of fulfillment can make the work you do seem more meaningful. It can also bolster your overall employee satisfaction and retention rate, because tracking goal progress can help employees better understand how their efforts impact the entire organization. They’ll likely feel more valued. That could mean you’ll experience lesser employee acquisition cost in the future.

In short, effective goals are intentional. These are not dreamy vision and mission statements. They aim to do more than just hope and dream. They should help you think ahead, anticipate roadblocks, capitalize on momentum and achieve your intended outcome.

Finish line

Always remember that goals don’t have to be the bane of your employees’ existence. When done properly, setting goals can improve commitment materially and help clarify an employee’s role — the single biggest driver of organizational health. Goals give people something to work toward and challenges them to improve. In determining how to measure organizational performance, know that setting smart goals can help you and your team define where you want to be and help you keep track of your progress.

Learn how sometimes smaller things in our lives make huge impact and you can take some learnings on a personal and professional level by following me on LinkedIn and on our official website. Also follow us on social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

Muhammad Sajwani is the Founder, Managing Director and Principal Consultant at Evolve HR which aims at transforming, enriching and evolving Human Capital of Pakistan. At Evolve HR, him and his team thrives in challenging assumptions that hinder organisational aspirations, by creating innovative solutions that yield maximum impact, scalability & benefit to a wider base of stakeholders. As a Business Coach and Organisational Consultant, Sajwani knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.