Have you ever wondered why your projects are always behind schedule or why your employees are losing interest in their work? A simple answer to this might be that employees at your workplace don’t have clear goals to direct them. Many organizations fail to understand the importance of goal setting, and as a result, they fail miserably.
Goal Setting benefits not only the employee but the organization as a whole. Considering the importance of goal setting, a good amount of time should be devoted to it. In this article, we will discuss why goal setting is important for your employees.
Useful In Motivating Employees
Goal Setting is an easy way to keep your employees motivated in your workplace. Having no specific goal to work on can lead to lower morale of the employee, and ultimately affects the productivity of work. On the other hand, achieving goals keeps them motivated and improves their confidence and job satisfaction.
Helps Prioritizing Work
Having a clear goal in mind helps in focusing on priorities. Once the goals are decided, they can be taken up for completion in order of their priorities. This allows tasks to be completed on time and in a logical order. Ability to prioritize goals shows an employee’s ability to plan and focus ahead. This makes them better prepared and clear on what work needs to be completed and by when.
Improves Decision Making
Goals help in enhancing the decision-making skills of the employee. They serve as a guide in the decision-making process. Before taking any decision, an employee will evaluate it against the goal that they are trying to achieve. Every decision is taken based on the outcome of the decision. Similarly, this applies at an organizational level, where every decision is taken thinking about how it will affect the business. Goals are useful for employees when they come across challenging projects as that helps in making wise decisions.
Teamwork & Collaboration
When individual goals are linked to organizational goals, it promotes teamwork. The leaders and managers must let every employee know how their goal is linked to the organization’s goal. The employee will understand the importance of teamwork once they know how they fit in the overall organizational goal and how their goal is linked to their peers.
Tracking Success
When goal setting is done correctly, it will help in measuring employee and organization success. The ‘SMART’ way could be used to set a goal so that they can be measured quantitatively as well as qualitatively. The SMART method stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For employees, a successful goal should be a specific one for which progress can be measured and achievable on time. Measurable goals will help everyone evaluate the results and help them know what was effective.
Also Read: How To Use Smart Goals For Employee Engagement?
It Acts As A Guide
Goals setting guides employees in moving forward in the organization. It acts as a roadmap for the employee towards achieving what they want. For example, if an employee wants to become a CEO someday, writing down that goal with details on what steps they will take to achieve it, can help them with the goal. Properly thought and stated goals will not only guide the employee continuously but will help in improving the skills and capabilities of the employees.
Helps In Time Management
If you want to improve how you manage time – stop doing what doesn’t need to be done! -Peter Drucker.
Time is one of the most important resources for every business. Having a clear goal in place will help employees to manage their time effectively. Goals help in prioritizing work and prevent employees from working on irrelevant things and getting distracted.
For example: When you have a deadline for a web application project, setting specific goals for each module of the project will help you finish the project on time and eliminate distractions.
Thus it can be rightly said that goal setting at any organization makeup for a focused and driven workforce. Employees are more involved and engaged with the work they do, which leads to better productivity for the employee and ultimately for the organization.
Originally published on Engagedly