Three Steps to Apply Your Talents to Goal Setting

As an employee, you can have a lot of power over what your goals look like for the next year. Many companies cascade goals down through the organization, linking individual goals with the overall strategy. Instead of waiting to hear what those goals are, though, you can pull together ways you best contribute to the business.

Here are three steps to follow when creating individual goals that you might bring to your manager:

1.     Tap Into Your Talents and Interests: People perform best when they’re working on what gets them energized and excited. While your job might include not-so-fun tasks (everyone has something administrative to do), make it clear to your manager where you do your best work and where your passions lie. For example, a retail store manager still has to set the schedule every week, but she could also be great at hiring and onboarding new associates. When she thinks about her goals, her talents in hiring and onboarding should be on the list.

2.     Make the Goal Measurable: Before bringing a new goal to a manager, make sure that you’ve thought through how you’re going to measure progress on that goal. Without these metrics, your own manager won’t know if you’ve accomplished that goal, made progress or are behind. When hiring and onboarding store associates, our manager can put some time metrics against her goals: Hire associates within two weeks of opening, associate proficient at point of sale system within two days, and so on.

3.     Bring It Back to the Business: Identifying your new goal isn’t complete until you’ve also included how it relates back to the business. Our store manager might get a lot of fulfillment by getting to focus on hiring and onboarding, but she also needs to say how that would be relevant for the store’s goals or even the company’s success. Her goal could include pulling together best practices for other store managers so all stores improve their hiring and onboarding processes.

Make sure you’re including your manager in the development of these goals, giving them plenty of notice that you want to work on these individual goals. If you surprise them too late, you might not get to focus on these areas. By being proactive, you’re working on things that help you perform better, but also help the performance of the business.

Connect Learning Back to the Job

With the Internet, it’s never been more obvious that the skills you learn in school could drastically change over the years of your professional career. The Internet (as we know it) didn’t exist prior to 1991, yet graduating college students are incredibly savvy about SEO and mobile connectivity.

When you don’t have the option to go back to school, get updates through skills-based learning.

Learning exists to help you do your job better, and learning management systems have matched the most-needed skills with training modules. Instead of classes on topics too vague or high-level to be useful in your daily job, today’s learning dives into the proficiencies that you actually need.  

Here’s how a flexible learning strategy can help you perform better:

·       Learning to update your skills: You might have already learned something once, but your brain fills up fast. If you need a refresher, you should be able to breeze through some short learning modules that help you remember what you covered before. For example, you might have to work on a new machine in the shop, something you’ve done before but it’s been awhile. A quick tutorial will get you up to speed and moving products down the line in no time. 

·       Learning just in time: Usually more tactical, these types of training courses will cover skills you need to perform a function or get you background information when you need it. The idea is that you don’t spend five weeks in classes to get where you need to be. If you’ve got a sales meeting and you’re pitching the most recent updates to a product, just-in-time training should have a short video of the product updates along with some talking points so you don’t sacrifice the sale.

·       Learning for the long term: These types of training courses might include strategic perspectives or behavioral development that you don’t need right away. Learning how to communicate as a manager (when you’re not a manager) will help you practice early in your career, help your soft-skill development and help you better understand the communication techniques your own manager uses.

You can always learn, and unfortunately, the pace of change means you’ll be constantly learning on the job. When you’re in need of some information, check out your company’s learning management system. You could find the answers you need before you have time to ask questions

Different Strokes for Different Folks - Customizing Performance Reviews for You

For performance reviews to be a valuable part of performance management, they have to mean something to the employee, manager and organization. Relevant measures help people understand expectations and plan accordingly.

But what happens when the expectations set are too vague?

People get frustrated. Vague competencies or goals are like telling an employee to “do better.” Do better than what? Do better how? Sure, there might be some general understanding of what “better” might mean, but without specifics, performance won’t follow.

For example, “do better” for a salesperson could mean win more deals. However, winning deals by, say, discounting the product or service not only reduces profitability, it makes it harder for the firm to maintain the value of the service. Other salespeople can’t sell at the set price if a salesperson is undercutting them. So yes, more deals were closed, but at what cost?

Customizing goals and competencies can make it much easier to encourage the behaviors that lead to improved performance. Using customizing features in your performance review systems makes the process more meaningful for everyone.

Here are three ways you can customize your performance reviews:

1.     Change the language: Your company might have its own lingo, so integrating that into your performance review system will help employees relate what they do each day with the appraisal’s measures. It can be as simple as swapping out “customer” with “patient” for hospital performance management, or you can translate all the competencies and goals into your company’s vocabulary. As you use an internal language to customize your company’s appraisal, make sure it’s still clear what’s being measured.

2.     Define the goals: Using specific goals helps employees stay on track with the company’s strategy. To make goals more meaningful, cascade goals down from the business’s strategy through employees at all levels. Help a line manager see just how his efforts will contribute to the business. Then take it a step further and ask that line manager how else he might contribute. He might have a new way to work with suppliers that you might never have known about. His own professional goals would then change a process or service, delivering even more value to the company.

3.     Ask for clarity: Competencies are often built into performance reviews to help measure employee effectiveness, but did anyone ask the employees if the competencies were clear? Competencies can sometimes become too general when leaders want only a few competencies that many employees can be measured against. “Effective communications” can mean something different to lots of people. In some cases, you’ll either need to add definitions to those competencies, or go ahead and make a few versions of the competency so it’s relevant.

Customizing competencies and goals can add work to the performance management process, but the work will be worthwhile. With specific and relevant measures, it’ll be easier to see how well employees are performing and link that to the performance of the business.

You Have To Compensate Employees

You’re probably familiar with the dreaded announcement: No raises this year — again. Announcing that a pay freeze is continuing is messy business. Employees hate to hear it, and managers hate to be the bearer of bad news.

There can be a host of reasons why there isn’t enough money to reward people for their performance. When it comes down to a choice between paying the light bill and giving a bonus, the light bill wins every time.

But if you’re moving into a fourth year of pay freezes, it’s time to find a way to compensate employees for what they’ve done. Compensation isn’t everything, but if basic financial needs aren’t being met, employees can’t give you top performance. Compensation is a type of reward, and rewards show that the company recognizes the difference between great performance and poor performance.

If you’re treating everyone like poor performers by failing to reward them, don’t be surprised when that’s the kind of behavior you get.

Instead, think about how you can make small compensation changes that have a big impact. Try looking at your compensation plan with these ideas in mind:

·       Shake up the budget: Where can you shift some money around? Giving a 5 percent raise to everyone might not be possible, but finding a few dollars for bonuses could help keep your hard workers engaged. This is where you really have to match performance and rewards, because you’ll only have budget for the top performers.  

·       Get consistent: Are you offering new hires competitive salaries while current employees’ pay lags behind? You may not have the budget to bring everyone up to market rates, but make sure there aren’t major discrepancies among similar roles. Help hiring managers understand compensation options and find ways to match internal salaries to preferred rates.

·       Find variety: If you think about compensation as a reward, there are suddenly more options. You can provide managers with flexible funds that can be used for spot rewards — like sending an employee to a conference or taking the team to a congratulatory lunch. Non-cash rewards can’t replace raises, but they can help your people feel appreciated throughout the year.

Just because an employee hasn’t left yet doesn’t mean their loyalty should allow you to hold back on compensation. Budgets are tight, but you should find a way to grant rewards to employees who deserve them. Hopefully, you’ll then drive improved performance, which might result in better opportunities to raise compensation in the future.

Setting Goals That Mean Something

Unless you’re in sales, goals can seem vague and unrealistic. Instead of a clear goal, like increase sales by 5 percent, vague goals take on the similarity of New Year’s resolutions — be a better team member, communicate more frequently, and focus on personal development. No wonder most resolutions get dropped before February.

Instead of generalizing goals, get really specific. Set both quantifiable and qualitative goals that mean something to employees.

·       Find the numbers. Most employees’ duties can be measured in a quantifiable way. Some metrics are easy (sales), and some are going to be a little trickier (customer satisfaction). For each goal an employee has, make sure there’s a way to measure it and track it with numbers.

·       Check the numbers. Do some digging to make sure those metrics reflect what’s important to the business. For example, number of leads can be important for a sales role, but converting those leads to sales is even more important.

·       Narrow qualitative goals. How people do their jobs is just as important as hitting milestones. Qualitative goals can naturally lead to vague descriptions, but you can help employees narrow those goals to specific desired outcomes. Instead of learn to write better, make the goal more specific, like learn three writing techniques used by top industry writers and apply them to company materials.  

·       Ask your employees. Your employees probably have a good idea of measures that accurately reflect success on the job. Set goals together so that business gets taken care of and the employee is part of the goal-setting process.

·       Follow up. Progress reports are important to help people not just follow goals as well as meet them. Without specificity, it’s hard to know an employee’s progress or if something has impeded the completion of the goal. By following up on a regular basis, goals can be adjusted and obstacles can be removed. Both the employee and the business will be better for it.

Spend time on goal setting and make sure the goals you set are meaningful to the employee and to the business. Articulating what’s expected early on means people stay on track. And by keeping your employees involved, you’re likely to see high performance and great success.