How to Motivate Employees with Achievable Goals

Posted by Richard Dimarco Barea on Jan 29, 2015

In our last two blogs we discussed how Johnny HR created specific and measurable SMART goals. Now Johnny needs to be sure they are achievable for his team. Most of his team’s time is spent selling and servicing all the customers that come into the store. Johnny needed to make sure his reps have enough time to complete their training goal. Setting an unreachable goal is as valuable as a mirage in the desert to a weary and thirsty traveler.

Johnny HR knew the third criterion stresses the importance of SMART goals that are attainable. While an attainable goal may stretch a team in order to achieve it, the goal should not be:

too extreme
out of reach
complex
distracting from other goals

He lifted his hands to his lips (like Michaelangelo's 'The Thinker') and thought about his SMART goal:

It was not extreme to have Sales Reps read PowerPoint presentations
It seemed reachable to be done (depending on time given)
There may be too many PowerPoint presentations to read and learn
It may decrease sales performance

He lifted his head and reached for a pen with his right hand and changed the measurable component of his SMART Goal to say:

"Create, display and reinforce employee education through an employee recognition program by developing an educational 3 PowerPoint and track achievement through a CrewHu contest that quantitatively ranks & rewards those who filled out the 3 Surveys!"

With a few strike-throughs he had made his SMART goal more attainable and felt confident that his employees would be motivated to improve customer service by 5%.

There were two more questions to be asked to make sure that the goal was achievable and they both asked the question How?

How can the goal be accomplished?
How realistic is the goal based on other constraints?

Johnny thought of his team's daily schedules and he thought of the technology they used. Since the job description required them to have experience with PowerPoint he was pretty confident that they could read and learn the educational material. But the Sales Reps didn't use CrewHu (the employee engagement software) yet and he knew he needed to give them appropriate time to consume the education and get used to using the software. He thought he could do this in 2 easy steps:

Step 1: Create a Goal to get everyone trained

Step 2: Create the Customer Service Contest in CrewHu

He also took into account their duties and decided it would be best to have them read the Powerpoint during their non-selling hours from 8am-9am every Monday and engage in CrewHu during the workday where he could post on the spot questions to his team and give recognition awards to those who answered correctly. This employee recognition program would allow them to put these new concepts into practice with clients in real-time! He felt even more comfortable with this clear division of tasks and concluded that it would not affect his Sales Reps 1-on-1 time with the customers!

He determined that the goal would be achievable if he allotted a specific amount of time for learning and reinforced learning by using an employee recognition software. But how much time did he need to give to ensure success?

Find out how Johnny made his goal more 'Realistic & Timely' in next week's article entitled 'How to Create Realistic and Timely Goals for Employee Engagement.'

CREATE SMART GOALS LIKE JOHNNY, CLICK BELOW...

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Topics: employee engagement, smart goals, achievable

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