Imagine that you get in a car with no objective other than to drive until the gas tank goes empty. What are the odds that you’ll actually arrive at an interesting destination? What are the odds you’ll end up stranded on a stretch of road with no way home?
Goals don’t just give you a destination to aim for or a finish line to cross. They’re what you compare day-to-day efforts against to maintain consistent productivity, ensure you don’t run out of resources, and avoid misunderstandings with collaborators. Personal goals keep us productive and efficient. But when data-driven goal-setting becomes a foundational element of your company culture, you’ll see benefits at scale.
Goals can transform the way teams work and make your organization more productive, but they have to be the right goals. According to Locke and Latham’s Goal-Setting Theory, foundational research in the field, the most difficult goals produce the highest levels of performance, but only when they’re within the limits of a person’s ability.
So how do you set goals that are both difficult and motivating? And how do you make this an organization-wide practice?
Key Takeaways:
- Specific and challenging goals consistently outperform vague directives.
- Employee motivation and goal setting work together to drive sustained performance.
- Frequent feedback and measurable progress improve goal achievement rates.
- Structured systems like OKRs operationalize the science of goal setting in the workplace.
- Organizations that align employee goal-setting with strategy build stronger engagement, accountability, and results.
Unlocking employee motivation: Why goals change behavior
The average employee receives 117 emails and 153 messages from apps like Teams and Slack daily. Besides just being distracting, each communication has the potential of adding another task to that employee’s workload. Without any direction in prioritizing them, employees can quickly get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks, making some progress on some tasks, but not actually completing any of them. Context switching (i.e., switching between tasks and tools) comes with a real cost.
Not only does the time spent on individual tasks decrease as you work on more tasks simultaneously, but time is actually lost just to the act of switching back and forth (up to 75% when switching between five tasks). Clear goals allow employees to filter out tasks that don’t fit with their priorities, narrowing their focus towards essential work. Instead of requiring them to sift through work based on vague characteristics, goals are an automatic filter for what matters and what doesn’t.
That’s not all these goals accomplish, however. A goal can make day-to-day work inherently more satisfying, but only when it doesn’t lead to micromanagement and excessive oversight. According to Deci and Ryan’s work on Self-Determination Theory, people have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
They need to feel like they control their behaviors and goals, have mastery over tasks and actions, and feel connected to others. Goals give employees a path towards mastery and can formalize the relationship between their work and that of others. Finally, when they have a hand in setting these goals, they have more autonomy over their day-to-day work.
Goals eliminate distractions, fulfill basic psychological needs, and give employees clear milestones that lead to satisfying progress.
Designing goals that improve employee motivation
Setting effective goals depends on three essential factors: how they’re built, how they relate to broader objectives, and how ambitious they are.
Building high-impact goals
A pre-defined goal-setting framework gives you everything you need to set goals that both improve productivity at the individual level and create consistency across teams. Two of the most popular frameworks for doing this are OKRs and SMART goals.
OKR stands for objectives and key results. With this framework, you choose a target you’re trying to reach and list metrics you’ll use to track progress. OKRs are particularly well-suited to standardizing goals organization-wide, but they offer less guidance in setting your overall objective.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. They allow employees to break down a vague objective into something they can reach, with a clear understanding of why it’s important and how it’ll be achieved. This framework creates more robust goals, but they can be more challenging to align.
Aligning goals
Individual employees should have a hand in setting goals they’re motivated to pursue, but no goal should be completely independent from the rest of the organization. Goals should cascade down from broader organizational objectives, ensuring alignment as every individual, team, and department works towards a common purpose.
This isn’t just for the organization’s benefit. Purpose is a key driver of employee engagement, and a goal that’s completely disconnected from the rest of the team and the organization is inherently less motivating. Employees need to feel like their work contributes to something larger than themselves, and misaligned goals can prevent this.
Ambitious vs. impossible
While difficult goals lead to higher performance and motivation, they still need to be achievable. An impossible goal kills motivation, whether it’s due to an unrealistic timeline or just being beyond an employee’s capabilities. An effective goal pushes employees to stretch beyond their comfort zone without setting them up to fail.
Milestones can both solidify the difference between a stretch goal and an impossible one while keeping employees motivated along the way. They’re check-ins to evaluate performance and course-correct, triggers for recognizing employees as they succeed, and alignment points for comparing goals.
Goal setting in the workplace: From annual reviews to agile systems
Many organizations still rely on traditional annual performance reviews to set goals. This rigid system has some strengths, like aligning managers and employees on past performance or producing clear documentation for reviewing performance trends. That being said, it has significant limitations as a goal-setting methodology:
- Static objectives: Setting objectives yearly means these objectives rarely reflect your organization’s real priorities throughout the year. They don’t allow for any flexibility as conditions change.
- Delayed feedback: A reliance on annual performance reviews often means employees don’t get frequent feedback, despite the majority of them wanting more. This makes them less motivated to pursue their goals.
- No real-time visibility: Managers have an important role to play in helping employees course-correct when they’re not progressing towards their goal. But when goals are only reviewed yearly, it’s much harder for them to do that.
- Weak cross-team alignment: Cross-team alignment requires frequent adjustments and check-ins. Annual reviews don’t cut it.
In the same way organizations are shifting from annual performance reviews to continuous feedback systems, you should be shifting from annual goal-setting to continuous goal-setting. That doesn’t mean you’re constantly scrapping and rewriting goals; it just means you’re setting them more regularly and reviewing them through 1-on-1s, check-ins, and alignment sessions.
Quarterly check-ins on goal progress are a good place to start, but managers can have more impact by dedicating part of each 1-on-1 to checking in on goals.
Technology as the enabler of modern goal setting
If setting, tracking, and revising goals seems overly daunting, it’s likely because you’re not using the right technology. Many managers rely on spreadsheets or, at best, project management tools to track goals. While these might be better than having no system at all, they have some drawbacks:
- Little visibility: While you can share a spreadsheet throughout the team, it’s not usually the best way to get visibility on broader goals or performance trends. They’re either too sparse or too unwieldy, quickly becoming unreliable.
- Inconsistent updates: Because spreadsheets need to be updated manually, they’re rarely up to date when you need them to be. That makes keeping employees accountable more challenging, since your spreadsheets don’t reflect real progress.
- Disconnect between goals and performance conversations: With unreliable spreadsheets as their sole goal-tracking system, managers don’t have the data they need to have deep, accurate performance conversations with their teams.
Technology that supports modern goal-setting should guide you in setting those goals, help you track progress towards them, and guide feedback loops towards meeting goals. That’s where a performance management platform like 15Five comes in.
15Five’s Perform platform has built-in features for building OKRs, measuring progress, and kickstarting conversations about your goals. It helps align teams around common objectives, supports managers in working with employees to reach those goals, and turns goals into data points that can be used in performance conversations and HR initiatives.
Want to learn more about what 15Five can do for your goals? Find out more here.
Building a culture where goal-setting drives motivation
Alignment isn’t just important for ensuring goals contribute to the organization’s broader objectives. It also supports employees in setting goals and working towards them. Your company culture can make the difference between employees setting goals, feeling motivated to reach them, and employees seeing goals as just another box to check off. Here’s how you make sure your culture supports goal-setting and self-motivation.
Roles throughout your hierarchy
Leaders don’t just define the company’s vision; they create clarity. Through their direction, a vague initiative like “let’s get better at setting goals” can turn into “we need achievable goals that promote alignment and motivate people.”
For managers, the responsibility lies in accountability. They need to develop an approach that supports employees in sticking to their responsibilities while helping them course-correct when needed.
Finally, individual contributors and teams have a role to play in keeping the goal-setting process transparent. They can (and should) give feedback on the process, request clarity on expectations, and share their goals widely.
Widening focus beyond output
Performance metrics can tell you a lot about what employees achieve, but they shouldn’t be your main focus. Goal-setting is about keeping employees motivated and engaged, and reducing their efforts to a number works against this.
Keep employee engagement drivers in mind as you improve your goal-setting process and track progress towards goals. Employees need you to measure their progress efficiently, but they also need to feel like these goals align with a sense of purpose.
Turning the science into sustained performance
Goals don’t just give a manager ways to direct their team’s work, they’re key to keeping employees productive and engaged. Clear, achievable goals motivate employees to improve their skills, contribute to a greater objective, and collaborate more efficiently. Setting goals correctly requires a framework that strikes a balance between building robust goals and promoting alignment across teams.
If each team uses its own framework, maintaining that alignment becomes a challenge. Worse, some teams will see gains in motivation and productivity from working towards their goals, while others will just get frustrated as they update spreadsheets that don’t seem to do much for them.
Discussions around goals shouldn’t happen in yearly performance reviews. Data-driven initiatives and processes can give you a foundation for setting better goals organization-wide, while dedicated performance management platforms like 15Five empower you to turn goal progress into data points for broader analysis.
Want to see what 15Five can do? Book a demo here.
