What is your purpose at work? If you struggle to answer that question, it’s likely because you don’t have a clear goal. Employees, managers, and leaders alike all need goals that align their day-to-day work with the organization’s broader objectives. But these goals need to be clear, fleshed out, and measurable, so progress is obvious and easy to communicate. Performance management tools like 15Five can centralize your goal-setting efforts and give you the data you need to get visibility and alignment that leads to better goals.
Key takeaways:
Setting a goal directs your efforts towards a predefined destination, which allows you to prioritize the actions you take according to that destination. It turns disjointed, uncertain acts into a driving force that carries you to whatever you identified as being worth all that effort. Setting goals is essential in self-improvement and similar pursuits, but in the workplace, these goals become the centerpiece of your organization’s broader strategy.
Whether your leaders manage individual employees very closely or employees are trusted to be more self-directed in their work, their goals have a direct impact on everything the organization does. They’re essential to your performance management efforts, since they give you something to measure an employee’s performance against.
Finally, a dedicated, proactive approach to goal setting ensures that the work your employees do is aligned with the organization’s broader priorities. That doesn’t just mean everyone is working towards the same goals, but they feel like they’re working toward something greater, which is essential to keeping employees engaged.
Setting goals isn’t as simple as stating a goal and calling it a day. Various goal-setting methodologies allow you to turn a vague objective into an iron-clad plan you can follow, measure, and adapt as needed. Two of the most popular goal-setting methods are:
A goal-setting methodology allows you to turn a list of priorities into a goal that’s clearly defined, easy to communicate, and easy to measure. But where you keep a goal after it’s fully fleshed out can impact whether that goal is even accomplished. That’s where goal-setting software comes in. You can use a variety of platforms for this, from project management platforms to performance management tools. Using this software allows you to:
No matter what framework, software, or strategy you use, goal setting has to involve the following elements.
Solid, robust goals align employee priorities with the team’s purpose and the organization’s broader goals. This allows:
Building and maintaining that alignment depends on close communication between each level of your org chart, which can be helped by using performance management software and similar tools.
Goals need to be easy to measure, easy to communicate, and easy to iterate on. Using a goal-setting framework is essential to making your goals clearer. Some of these frameworks actually have you identify metrics you can measure while working on a goal, while others might only help you narrow the range of activities that contribute to that goal.
Goal-setting doesn’t end when your goal’s written out on paper—or in your goal-setting tool of choice. It’s a constant process, from the initial conceptualization of that goal to its completion. It involves constant action towards those goals, regular check-ins on progress, and adapting as conditions change. That requires a consistent commitment from employees towards their own goals and from managers towards supporting their employees.
Employees need continuous feedback from their managers to know that they’re doing their best work—or at least to know how to improve the work they’re doing. The same can be said when it comes to their goals. Employees need their managers to help guide them towards accomplishing their goals, and that’s where feedback comes in.
You might have an iron-clad goal one week, only to find out it’s completely irrelevant the next. Instead of stubbornly sticking to that goal as it was set, you need to build enough flexibility into it so you can adapt as needed. That might mean switching up the metrics you use, changing the focus of your goal, or moving the timeline.
You give employees the tools they need to do their best work, whether that’s technology, the right space, or access to the right experts. Think of setting goals as just another element of this. That’s because setting goals has an impact on everything from employee engagement to employee retention and productivity. This also affects your organization’s overall performance.
Employee engagement is closely tied to productivity. Highly engaged employees believe in your mission and are driven to do their best work. But with only 32% of American employees feeling that their company’s mission makes their job important, tying the mission to day-to-day work is vital. Having the right goals makes that link evident, not only guiding employees in working towards that mission, but helping them feel like what they do matters.
Similarly, employee retention is closely tied to goal-setting. Nearly half of employees say they want their next job to give them more opportunities to do what they do best. That means employees, managers, and leaders need a clear, common understanding of what that means, and goals are the best way to do that. With a clear, robust goal, employees can ensure the actions they take every day match what’s expected of them, and they can give feedback to managers about what they should be working on.
Finally, goals have a massive impact on productivity. Having a goal is crucial to keeping employees motivated, since they know what they’re working towards. It also helps keep them accountable, which gives them more ownership over their work and motivates them to find opportunities for improvement.
Additionally, clear goals tell everyone on the team who’s responsible for what and how it’s going to get done. This allows for clearer collaboration not just within the team but across teams, as well. When you replicate this across the organization as a whole, you get teams all working towards clear objectives, aligned around broader goals, and the productivity benefits compound.
With the right process, you can set and track goals for employees at any level of your org chart reliably, repeatedly, and improve the way everyone works. Here’s a step-by-step guide for building that process.
You likely have a clear idea of your organization’s mission, but do you know how to achieve it? Do you have clear priorities in place? Or does your leadership tend to follow market trends? While keeping up with the market is important, you should have a solid foundation of clear priorities. That way, everyone in the organization can set goals that align with these priorities. You should also clearly define desired outcomes for each priority, ideally in a way that’s easy to measure.
The two most popular frameworks for setting goals are OKRs and SMART goals. Each framework has its advantages and disadvantages, which are important to consider before applying it to your organization.
OKRs are the strongest framework for building alignment throughout your organization, since they use a format that’s repeatable, easy to iterate on, and flexible enough to accommodate all sorts of teams. The goals you create with them may be a little less fleshed out, but they’re clear and easy to measure.
SMART goals allow you to build robust goals that are clearly-defined, measurable, and achievable. For goals that need the extra work for that extra clarity, this is often the best framework. That said, it’s not necessarily applicable to all goals, and it’s not the best framework for building alignment across teams.
Alignment is essential for keeping goals relevant and achievable. An individual employee’s goals have to build on the goals of their teammates and contribute to the team’s overall objective. Building that alignment depends on managers being acutely aware of what everyone is working on and how this contributes to the organization’s overall goals.
A performance management platform can manage everything from goal-setting to soliciting feedback and supporting employee development. On the goal-setting front, these platforms give you a central place to store goals for all employees (while keeping them private) and track progress towards them.
80% of employees who receive meaningful feedback weekly describe themselves as fully engaged. To keep employees committed to their goals, managers should schedule regular check-in sessions and give employees an avenue for sharing updates on their progress.
Once you have a basic goal-setting framework in place and processes to support it, there are manyways you can get more out of every goal. Here they are.
Leaders need to lead by example, and goal-setting is no different. By regularly sharing the company’s mission and the goals they’re setting for themselves to uphold that mission, leaders can set the example for the rest of the team. They should also be involved in guiding alignment between individual goals and company objectives.
While you might not want all goals to be transparent to everyone, especially in situations where you’re guiding low performers towards building up their skills, some transparency in goal-setting helps with alignment and team cohesion. The key is to get consent from employees before sharing their goals.
A continuous feedback loop creates an ongoing dialogue between managers and employees, contrasted with traditional performance reviews that typically only happen quarterly or even yearly. Continuous feedback loops allow managers and employees to discuss performance through surveys, regular 1-on-1 sessions, and more. These are essential to improving the outcomes of every goal.
Employees are more motivated to work towards their goals when their achievements are recognized. By identifying and rewarding milestones on the way to achieving these goals, you can show them that their work matters and give them that extra push. Recognizing achievements can be done privately in 1-on-1 sessions, publicly in all-hands meetings, or asynchronously in dedicated channels in your chat app.
Continuous learning and development is a win-win. It gives employees the support they need to learn and fine-tune the skills they need as they advance in their careers, while employers can plug skill gaps and build up their talent. When employees set goals, ensure they’re aligned with their learning and development objectives. That way, they aren’t pulled in multiple directions; everything they do contributes to broader objectives.
An added benefit of using performance management tools and similar technology? You get a treasure trove of data you can use to build better goals, adjust your approach to goal-setting, and refine how employees work towards those goals. AI-enhanced tools can improve this even further, serving as a first line for answering questions and requests employees might have about their goals.
Performance management tools and similar platforms are essential assets when setting goals. Here’s why.
One of the challenges of goal-setting is where you keep goals once they’re fleshed out. A performance management tool can give managers a single place to check on the goals for their entire team, while employees can check their own goals in the same place. Additionally, managers and employees alike can review historical goals and improve their goal-setting approach over time.
Performance management tools typically pull data on organization-wide initiatives in dashboards that give managers and leaders visibility on objectives and progress towards them. This makes aligning goals across teams much easier.
Performance management tools like 15-Five use AI-assisted reviews to help managers and employees alike draft better goals, reduce bias, and save a significant amount of time. These AI features also streamline performance data and turn it into insights that tie directly into the goals you’re setting.
A dedicated performance management platform supports continuous feedback loops, 1-on-1 sessions, and similar initiatives with a layer of technology that facilitates recurring tasks, reminds you of what needs to happen, and improves visibility on feedback.
Your goal-setting framework will serve as a strong foundation for helping employees do their best work and building up your talent to plug skill gaps and complete increasingly complex tasks. But just like other aspects of your organization, the way you set goals will have to adapt to future trends.
Most performance management platforms already have some AI-assisted features built in. Many of these features use similar technology as popular chatbots, allowing for everything from drafting goals to analyzing insights from performance data. But as technology evolves, these platforms will become even more capable, and AI will take on more goal-setting tasks. Agentic AI, for example, will allow these tools to independently take actions that managers would have otherwise.
Your tool stack can often be your biggest obstacle when managing performance and setting goals. Managers know they need specific data to set better goals, but that data is often trapped in tools they either don’t use often or don’t have access to. That’s why software integrations will become more important in your goal-setting framework as it evolves; this software can move data between your performance management platform and other tools.
As managers and employees alike become more data-conscious, they’ll have more information on hand to personalize development goals. This will lead to more precise goals that specifically target an employee’s best areas for improvement, matching their priorities with the organization’s needs.
Remote work might not have been the future, but hybrid work definitely is. According to Gallup data, 51% of employees with remote-capable jobs have some kind of hybrid work arrangement. If your goal-setting framework doesn’t account for the challenges that can come with hybrid work, from lower visibility on employee work to proximity bias, you’ll effectively be disadvantaging half of your employees. Goal-setting frameworks will need to evolve to account for this.
Goals make employees feel like they’re working towards something greater than just five o’clock. But it’s not just about writing a one-line objective on a piece of paper and calling it a day. Setting goals for employees requires a robust framework that’s repeatable and flexible, so each goal supports employees in their work while aligning day-to-day tasks with broader organizational goals.
But with the right technology, the right framework, and just enough alignment between leaders and employees, you can give everyone the goal they need to reach their full potential.