Are You Set to Grow in 2014? Creating Clear Performance Goals

Do your employees understand what you want?  Resolve to create performance clarity.

This is the 2^nd installment of a discussion about fuzzy job expectations and how to fix them.  If you read my last piece, you know there is a ton of research proving that when employees have more clarity about their jobs, they deliver higher performance.

The 1^st step in clearing up fuzzy expectations is an accurate job description.  And yes, everyone thinks job descriptions are a pain, but a good one gets you a better bottom line.

With the job description cleaned up, tackle the 2^nd part of job clarity: clear employee performance goals.  Read on to learn the secret goal sauce that many managers swear by, because using it improves performance in every job and industry.

Clear Job Expectations = Better Bottom Line

When employees are over-stressed, bad things happen. Things like tension and burnout. Errors. Lost business. Now, some managers believe that stressed employees just need to get tough, suck it up, and do their jobs, which would be a great solution if it worked.  It doesn’t.  Even if you and every manager you know thinks sucking it up improves performance, it doesn’t.

Stressed employees make more mistakes, have lower energy, and produce less.  The words “exhaustion” and “cynicism toward work” are sometimes used to describe the results of high job demands.

If “highly stressful” describes your workplace, it means that the ROI on the big investment every company has tied up in employees is lower than it should be.  If excessive workplace stress continues, employees begin to leave and ROI goes down even more as employers spend thousands to find, hire, and train replacements.

An easy way to de-stress a job is to tell employees what you expect.  And yet, many managers don’t know how important it is.

When employees understand what is expected of them, they can tolerate greater levels of job demands, even when the demands are pretty high.  De-stressing doesn’t have anything to do with making a job easier; it is about making job expectations clearer. When there is high role and performance clarity, stress goes down and performance improves, even in high job demand work like medicine or the military.

The Secret Ingredients in Clear Goals

Work goals accomplish 2 things: they describe manager expectations and they create a framework for feedback and coaching, making even difficult discussions easier.

Begin by writing draft goals and then talk them over with employees to refine them.  The conversation gives managers the chance to learn what is really going on by listening to the people who do the work. (You have seen Undercover Boss, right?)

A performance goal is a description of a future achievement. It links an employee’s work with the organization’s overall goals.

The easiest way to build goals is to follow the “SMART” model.

Here is a template that helps you identify the basic elements of a SMART goal.

Sample 1

Sample 2

Do your employees know the performance expectations for their jobs?  It is risky to assume they do.  The few minutes it takes to make sure both manager and employee understand the job and performance expectations means better financial performance.

For more information, contact Deborah – deborah@affintus.com .

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