For any organization to grow, it has to come up with realistic employee development goals. These goals should reflect the strategy that the company wants to follow in order to achieve its objectives. One of the most common mistakes that many companies make is that they demand improvement from their employees without setting the goals. Simply demanding for improvement is not enough. You need specific and measureable goals. You should set the time-frame for which you will review the progress.
Employee Development Goals to Work Towards
1.Job goals
When an employee joins any organization, there is a clear outline of the duties that they will be tasked with. These duties often vary from one company to another even though the employees might be working on the same positions. You need to know how to shape these goals so that they contribute to your success. One thing that can be noted abut most organizations is that their employee development goals are not measured by specific time allocations and so, very little success is recorded from them. Because of this, it is good to review your employee development plan so that it is guided by time.
For instance, if the employment terms state that the employee should efficiently return phone calls from clients, your ideal goal would be for them to return the calls within ten, twenty or thirty minutes, depending on what is most appropriate for your organization. This way, you can hold them responsible when the phone calls have not been returned after some time. However, if you just say they should do so efficiently, there is no specific time when you can say that they have not performed as per their requirements. Sometimes, it is all about a little twist to the normal practices.
2.Project goals
In order to help an employee begin and complete a project, you should set clear project goals. One thing that you need to know is that these goals change as the project progresses. It becomes even more complicated when it is an on-going project you will have to keep changing and evaluating the goals from time to time. There are many stages that are involved in running a project and so, you should set a goal for every stage. For instance, you might ask them to find vendors or contractors in certain duration of time. This will make it easy for you to follow and reach the employee development goals.
The reason why you should not set general long term
employee development goals for projects is that you can’t really guarantee the direction that it might take and it might be quite difficult to manage them or even to stick to the original plan. Projects change depending on new developments. The best approach would be to break down the entire project into smaller steps and then come up with realistic goals for every step. Do not forget to set time for the completion of each one of them.
3.Professional development goals
Employee development programs can never be effective without proper professional development. When people talk about employee development goals, they often forget about this. It is important to encourage your staff to expand skills. This can be achieved through regular training and refresher courses. You might ask them to learn new software every three months or enroll in a short course every year. With that, you can be sure that they will acquire a lot of new skills which you can then tap into to make your organization better.
4.Performance goals
When it comes to performance goals, your main focus should be towards changing the employee’s behavior. Typically these goals need to be met in order to achieve a promotion or a salary increase. It’s important to keep your employees motivated so that you can adequately identify their strengths and weaknesses. Assessing employee productivity allows you to measure progress along the way and determine if your goals are being met.
Conclusion
Clearly, the benefits of setting employee performance goals are almost endless. What you need to do is to identify the areas in which your employees need to improve most and come up with goals to guide them. However, you should not set goals that you know are too difficult for them because they will be frustrated and therefore, less productive.
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