If you want to successfully grow your business, then it’s essential to set clear goals for your company. Setting goals provides your organization with a sense of structure and purpose, and this helps to create a stable workplace for your employees. With the COVID-19 pandemic heightening uncertainty in all areas of life, goal-setting is now more important than ever. In this article, we’ll go over some of the ways in which setting goals for your company can help you be more productive and find the success you’re looking for.
1. Create a True Team
Coming together in pursuit of a goal can energize a team and form important bonds. Conversely, when everyone on a team is focused on their own work, with no bigger picture in mind, it can feel futile and pointless. But, most of all, when a group of people work towards a common goal, they feel more connected with one another. And strengthening connections between employees on your team is of the utmost importance during the COVID era.
Are you having a strategy session soon? Make sure you ask your team these questions first:
Employers and employees alike have seemed to enjoy the shift to remote work and all of the benefits that go along with it. Read more: Creating a Company Vision & Values for Remote Work.
However, one of the downsides of working remotely is that it can be more difficult to communicate with teammates. This makes your organization more vulnerable to problems and errors that rise as a result of miscommunication. When you have clearly stated goals, it helps to keep everyone in your organization on the same page.
Setting clear goals is especially important if you have part-time workers or contractors on your team. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, 40% of people are working less than before, and when you’re only working a few hours a week, you can start to feel disconnected from the company. If you’ve had to cut hours due to the pandemic’s economic impact, it’s crucial that you still try to make part-time workers feel like members of your team. Setting company goals can help these contractors and part-time workers feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves, part of a team working towards something important.
One way to promote teamwork and boost motivation might be to offer a reward when a team meets certain goals. This reward could take the form of anything from a cash bonus to a gift card to a virtual work party. As long as the reward is something that your employees want, it will encourage your team to come together and work with each other so that they can all reap the benefits.
2. Accurately Measure Success
Without goals, how do you measure your progress as a company? How do you know when it’s time to change course or make adjustments?
With clear, specific goals in place, you can accurately monitor and measure your progress as you work to achieve those goals. That’s also why it’s important for your goals to be time-bound — this allows you to objectively see whether you succeeded in accomplishing your goal or missed the mark.
If you want to set effective goals, make sure to monitor them from the very start. Consider conducting quarterly reviews where you get together with your team and discuss the company’s progress. Invite employees to brainstorm the ways in which you might go about achieving certain company goals. That way you can get an idea of what is and isn’t working, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
3. Make Better Decisions
In the COVID era, making the right decisions can be the difference between prospering and going out of business. Knowing the specific goals you and your team are working towards can help you make better decisions as a business owner. With concrete goals in mind, it will likely be easier for you to determine the areas in which you should increase or decrease spending.
Most of all, you’ll know what your priorities are. Rather than trying to work on everything at once, you can focus on the aspects of your business where you’d most like to see improvement and innovation. This enables you to be a more efficient entrepreneur, as you’ll be able to make quicker decisions that push the company in the direction you want it to go.
Setting clear goals won’t just help you be a better decision-maker, it will help everyone else in your company make decisions that benefit the organization, from management on down. When everyone is pursuing the same goals, your managers and other employees will likely have a better idea of where they should devote time and resources to.
4. Improve Focus
Having goals in place for your company can sharpen and intensify the focus of your employees. When they understand what they’re working towards and why, they can identify the projects and activities that are most worthy of their time and attention. In other words, clear company goals play an instrumental role in helping employees identify their priorities.
When employees know what to prioritize, they can be more productive. Rather than spreading themselves thin trying to spend an equal amount of time doing everything, they can focus on a few important tasks that will assist the company as a whole in achieving its short- and long-term goals.
Have you thought about bringing in a neutral, unbiased facilitator to run your next strategy session?
As you can see, setting clear goals can benefit your company in a number of ways. So how do you go about setting goals? To get started, you might try setting SMART goals. These are goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Using the SMART goals system is a great way to set any type of goal, be it personal or professional.
Watch: How to Set SMART Goals
Where do you want your company to be next year? How about in ten years? Setting goals can help get you where you want to be and realize your company’s true potential. Plus, along the way, you’ll be able to build a stronger, more motivated team dedicated to your long-term vision for the company. So start setting goals today and come out the other end of the COVID-19 pandemic stronger than ever.
About the Author:
Samantha Rupp holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. She is the managing editor for 365 Business Tips as well as runs a personal blog, Mixed Bits Media. She lives in San Diego, California and enjoys spending time on the beach, reading up on current industry trends, and traveling.
