By Syed Balkhi
Employee performance goals are an excellent way to unlock the potential of your team and your business. Let’s explore this interesting topic and show you several crucial goals that will help you take your brand to the next level.
Do you want to help your team realize their full potential while growing your business in new and exciting ways? If so, you’re in the right place!
The key to making all of this happen is establishing and managing employee performance goals. Under the right conditions, setting goals for yourself and the people around you will help everyone learn, grow, and improve over time.
If you’re not familiar with performance goals and how they work, don’t worry – we have you covered. Today, we will define the term, explain why you should set goals, and then go over 6 different types that can benefit businesses across all industries.
Let’s begin!
What are Employee Performance Goals?
First of all, employee performance goals are targets set by managers and HR for employees to achieve over a period of time. They can also be self-driven goals established by individual team members. They provide a sense of direction and motivation for people so they can improve their skills and grow professionally.
There are many different types of goals depending on an employee’s position and role. For instance, a graphic designer may have slightly different performance goals compared to your senior graphic designer. Similarly, social media marketers and SEO specialists will have totally different goals.
For managers, tracking performance goals allows you to evaluate employees objectively and help them develop professionally.
Why Set Goals?
One of the main reasons you should focus on setting strong goals for your employees is it improves employee engagement. Believe it or not, only 36% of workers say they are engaged with their job. When people feel apathetic about what they do, they don’t perform as well as their more involved counterparts.
Goals are also helpful because they provide a clear sense of direction to every person and team within your organization. It’s easier for people to advance and hone their skills if they know what’s expected of them.
Imagine how you would feel if a supervisor said they wanted you to improve but wouldn’t tell you how. Sounds frustrating, right? You can easily avoid this uncomfortable scenario by establishing spreadsheets with key performance indicators (KPIs) for your team and asking them to fill in their stats each week.
Here are a few other specific reasons you should think about setting goals for your employees:
- Track progress: Performance goals give managers and employees a way to track their progress over time. By setting specific, measurable goals, you’ll have a benchmark to compare against so you can see if that employee is improving in key areas. This information can help when it’s time to provide feedback.
- Get everyone on the same page: Goals also help ensure all employees are working toward the same objectives. This alignment leads to less wasted effort and conflict and more collaboration and support across teams. Since department goals translate to individual goals, everyone understands how they fit into the big picture.
- Establish accountability standards: When managers and employees agree on a set of objectives and a time frame, a level of accountability to achieve those goals is created. This gives managers a tool to evaluate performance and helps employees take ownership of their work and career growth.
- Boost sales and customer engagement: Ultimately, performance goals are crucial for driving sales and user engagement. If your employees don’t have a weekly conversion goal or know how many new followers they need to get each week, it’s easy for long-term business goals to fall off track.
6 Types of Performance Goals You Should Track
Now that you understand performance goals and how they can help, let’s talk about specific types of goals and how they apply to your company.
Sales
As the name implies, sales goals represent an increase in customers, conversions, or profits. They provide a clear target, which can help motivate your sales team and push them to convert leads into revenue.
This is a common metric for retail associates, marketers, and account executives since most people in these positions are responsible for turning visitors into happy customers and finding smart ways to boost profits.
I suggest establishing weekly sales goals based on quarterly projections so you can identify when someone is falling behind and help them get back on track or make adjustments as needed.
So, this might mean requiring product specialists to convince 10 new subscribers a week to sign up for a free trial – which typically leads to at least one new sale. It could also mean setting goals for your retention team that involve convincing customers that your product is worth their time, which will reduce your churn rate.
Customer Satisfaction
If people are not happy with your brand, you’re going to see a significant dip in sales, engagement, and new customers. On the other hand, if people love your product and have an excellent experience, you can expect to see an increase in customer retention and satisfaction.
You can track satisfaction by setting up a feedback loop for people who engage with your company. Use email, customer service, and social media to gather feedback from your audience. Next, review the answers and use what they say to make gradual improvements to different aspects of your website and marketing.
Each support representative should have a specific goal they need to meet each quarter. You can then work with your team to make sure they give customers the best experience possible.
For example, you could require individuals to maintain a 90% satisfaction rating on their post-chat surveys. If everyone reaches their goal, the company will have an average rating of 90% or better – not bad!
Social Media
Believe it or not, over 4.74 billion people use social media. Combine this startling statistic with the fact that 59% of these people turn to social sites when they want to buy something online, and it’s easy to see why it’s so important to have clear social media goals and objectives.
If you’re doing well on social media, there’s a good chance other aspects of your business are looking good, too.
Social media performance goals will vary based on what each person does for the account. For instance, customer service representatives are responsible for keeping response times down, while marketers are tasked with reaching new followers and boosting engagement.
Tracking and maintaining social media goals will help you improve your strategy, fine-tune your brand voice, and engage with customers in meaningful ways.
Quality
Quality goals are all about saving time and reducing errors across the board. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a physical product, digital software, or offering a service; quality will determine how people feel about your brand.
Ultimately, you want to strive for consistency, accuracy, and excellent products every time, but it takes a little time and effort to get there.
You’ll need to establish quality goals for various roles that are involved with the execution and testing of your products. For example, you could ask developers to have a 99% code coverage rate to keep things running smoothly and effectively. It’s also not uncommon to ask QA teams to have an accuracy rating over 99.5% to keep errors to an absolute minimum.
Setting these standards early ensures everyone knows what’s expected of them and customers get the best product possible.
Teamwork
A lot of businesses and HR leaders don’t track teamwork goals as much as they should. The truth is, when you foster collaboration and cooperation among your team, they’re more likely to report feeling engaged and satisfied with their job, which means better performance.
Team-building meetings, exercises, and optional events are all excellent ways to invite everyone to get involved and be a part of the group.
The thing that makes these goals a little different is how you approach the metrics. I don’t think it’s a good idea to require everyone to join an optional group. Instead, make it known that communities exist within the company, such as places for gardeners, readers, and people who enjoy writing for leisure.
My advice is to announce these clubs and get others involved by inviting them to share their thoughts at meetings and work together on projects. Collaboration is a powerful way to bring people together and boost productivity, so don’t neglect this vital performance goal.
Personal Development
While sales targets and quality standards are crucial, you shouldn’t overlook personal development goals. These goals focus on individual growth, empowering employees to enhance their skills, knowledge, and career aspirations.
Establishing these goals, or allowing employees to take the initiative, comes with a whole host of benefits. For one thing, team members will be more motivated to show up if they feel supported in their position.
When you allow people to flourish by providing them with things like premium online classes, books, and mentoring programs, their skills will improve, which means they feel more valuable to themselves and the company.
When it comes to offering development goals, it’s important to remember that each person is different. You’ll have some employees who are simply not interested in cross-training or honing their skills over time – and that’s okay. I recommend focusing on the people who genuinely want to improve so you can invest in people who want to stick with your company and do great things.
Tips for Setting Your Team Up for Success
The last topic I want to talk about today is how you can create goals that will set your team up for success. Here are a few rapid-fire tips worth keeping in mind when planning and establishing employee performance goals:
- Meet with each employee at least once a month: 1:1 meetings are a great way to assess what employees want from their time with your company and identify potential roadblocks. You can use this information to set goals that match up with their interests.
- Clearly communicate goals and expectations: Don’t tell them to check a KPI sheet to see their goals. Talk to them so you can be sure they understand what you expect and ask questions if needed. ‘
- Set S.M.A.R.T. goals: Most goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (S.M.A.R.T.). This setup ensures you can track, review, and act accordingly when you check performance goals for both individuals and teams. The only exception for this is teamwork goals since those interactions are a little more open-ended.
- Ask for feedback: Like all areas of business, feedback is crucial for long-term growth and success. An employee might have a suggestion for a new goal or want to make a change based on unforeseen circumstances.
- Celebrate wins: Finally, don’t forget to celebrate wins with your team. If a department reaches its goals for the quarter, give everyone on the team a shoutout in the company chat or recognize them in your internal newsletter. This seemingly small gesture will go a long way toward building rapport and getting people more involved in the process.
- Don’t be afraid to change over time: Like most things, your goals will change over time. I like to take a quick look at our objectives each quarter so I can figure out if we need to make any adjustments to ensure the success of our business and our team.
Final Thoughts
There you have it. Now you know a little more about 6 major types of employee performance goals and how they can help you take your business to the next level. As you develop goals for your team, remember the tips outlined today, and you’ll be in a better position to create a roadmap for success. I suggest starting by checking to see how a majority of employees across all departments are doing so you can choose goals that are fair, actionable, and achievable.
About the Author
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.
