It’s that time of year again. You are probably planning your budget, setting employee goals to meet the budget, and designing an employee incentive and rewards program to align employee goals with business goals. Sounds pretty easy, right? So why do we find it so hard to get everybody on the same page?
And what are we planning to do to try to solve the problem?
The following are six tactics that we have implemented that have helped us exceed our goals:
1) We COMMUNICATE our employee goals and business goals often– We found that just like anything else in business, if you want to have a remarkable impact, you need to communicate well and often. Employee goals are no different. The more employees hear about their goals the more focused they will be on their goals.
2) We make employee goals and business goals TRANSPARENT- We explain the “why” to employees. We sell them on the goal just as we would a customer on our product. We explain their WIFM (What’s in it for me?) We explain why the goals are important, how they affect the company and how exceeding the goals positively affects them personally. Whenever I get a chance I talk to my employees about the positive impact they can have on the business.
3) We make employee goals MEASURABLE- We use goals that can be tracked and presented back to our employees. If employees are going to put effort into doing something they are going to want to see how they are doing. Think about it like school. A student puts many hours into a class and then takes a test or does a project. That student is going to want feedback in the form of a grade or advice. We have found that employee engagement increases as feedback increases.
4) We make employee goals ATTAINABLE- We have found that employees will not put any effort into goals that they think cannot be achieved even if we think they can. We have had success by starting out with smaller goals and increasing them little by little. All of a sudden employees were hitting goals that they once thought of as unattainable.
5) We give employee goals a TIMEFRAME- Setting a timeframe for goals allows you to do two things:
- Change the goal after the timeframe depending on the results.
- Give feedback to your employees.
Also, the structure of a start and end date helps with employee motivation. For example, I am going to enjoy a run more if somebody tells me to run a 5k as fast as I can, instead of telling me to go for a run until I feel tired.
6) We INCENTIVIZE and REWARD all employees- Employees incentives and rewards have worked best for us when they included all employees at all levels of the organization. When we only use manager incentives and rewards and ignore our front line employees, our results were not as successful.
Let us know what you are doing to exceed your goals by commenting on our blog.
Topics: Blog
