If the end of the year offers us the possibility to check our achievements, celebrate them and then took a well-deserved rest, the beginning of each new year is always about looking forward. Is well known that January has a special energy that makes us set new goals and encourages us to work on achieving greater things. Setting the new year objectives is a strategy, from our perspective.
First, we need to establish the difference between purpose and goals. The purpose is what we pursue and gives us the direction that we need to follow, while the objective means action and point us to what we need to do, keeping our direction and focuses our attention on palpable activities. For example, if the purpose of a company is to increase the employee’s level of engagement in their daily activities, the goal can be implemented as an action that contains motivation mechanisms and employee recognition.
Second, we need to make sure that the goals we set are clear, realistic, achievable, with a specific deadline and not beyond the employee's capabilities as unrealistic objectives can lead to frustration. Experts recommend the utilization of a SMART objective scheme that covers the minimum requirements for an objective to be considered appropriate.
The SMART in SMART goals stands for SPECIFIC – MEASURABLE – ACHIAVABLE – RELEVANT – TIME-BOUND
The importance of setting goals lies in four major functions that drive company strategy:
1. Provide direction to the business- by incorporating a clear and concise vision;
2. Motivates employees - by encouraging long term planning vision and unifying employee’s actions;
3. Promotes evolution by enabling managers to undergo a learning curve and take action when necessary.
4. Allows measurement of results - because, in practice performance always translates into results.
Objectives can be classified in several categories. They can be: individual objectives, team objectives or company objectives. For example, the individual objectives of an employee can refer to self-management, learning a new set of soft-skills, gaining know-how in new communication technologies (3 social media apps) or developing negotiation skills. On the other hand, if we refer to company objectives they can be, for example, financial objectives seeking to improve revenue or net profit, or operational objectives oriented towards the tactical aspects of company’s strategy execution.
Broadly speaking, the company objectives are either internal oriented - referring to the business growth, or external - meeting client's needs. Both type of objectives have as a base a generic category of objectives that are directly targeting productivity and performance. It is a well-known fact that the employees are the the engine to every company. Their performance is the key to the organization financial growth and client success.
In order to meet an objective, we require more than just formulating them into simple phrases. They need to be accompanied by highlights of the challenges, concrete actions to be taken to achieve them, a specified deadline and last – but not least – a reward associated when successfully achieving them.
Because the last two year have dramatically changed everyone's activity, due to COVID19 pandemic, the companies had to review their objectives and their strategic implementation. Managing the organizational process, business development and the employee’s motivation requires to have new approaches based on the actual context. Among them is the integration of feedback and check-in function that are a new major trend for 2022. Furthermore, we need to adapt the objectives to the hybrid working environment for which the majority of companies opted.
The Performance Management Module of Co-Factor Digital Platform lies on the latest global trends in terms of management performance and the Platform offers the users a set of action tools associated to the set objectives for each company, like OKR’s, check-in, performance timelines, leader boards and real time feedback. Thus, whatever are the objectives that you will set for this challenging 2022 you will find anytime the support needed to achieve them using our Co-Factor platform.
