Clearly articulated individual goals are a powerful engagement driver. Quantum Workplace Research indicates that employees with individual goals are twice as likely to be engaged. Performance management systems facilitate these conversations, aligning personal aspirations with organizational objectives.

Goals help people and organizations achieve more, faster, with less. Goals can be a powerful tool in your organization too. Here are some of the most impressive benefits of employee goal setting.

• Increased alignment. Goals unite employees, managers, and leaders around a common purpose and shared objectives.
• Clear direction. Goals provide guidance to employees, like how they spend their time, which projects are highest priority, which teams to collaborate with, and the amount of effort to give their work.
• Thoughtful planning. When employees have a goal to achieve, they are more likely to create and execute a plan to meet that goal.
• Performance motivation. Goals motivate, inspire, and fuel higher performance. They energize employees and drive tenacity.
• Effective evaluation. Goals help measure performance. They provide a clear path and method for evaluating individual, team, and company success by comparing actual to desired performance at key milestones.

The most important factor to employee goal setting is ensuring alignment between individual, team, and organizational goals. Organizational alignment is a key differentiator between high-performing and low-performing companies. In fact, research by LSA Global found that highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster, are 72% more profitable, and outperform unaligned peers in employee engagement, customer satisfaction and retainment, and leadership.

Once your metrics are aligned throughout the organization, follow these 8 tips for setting SMART goals.

When picking out the right solution for you, there are many things to consider. Your employee goal management software should promote transparency, alignment, and collaboration across the organization. Look for features such as:

• Cascading goals: align organizational, team, and employee goals
• Collaborative tools: share goal progress and ownership across teams
• Interactive newsfeed: celebrate and stay aligned on goal progress
• Flexible formatting: choose from OKRs, SMART goals, or something else

Aligning and tracking employee, team, and organizational goals efficiently and accurately requires a partner you can rely on. For the last 20+ years, our customers have trusted us to deliver reliable expertise, technology, service and results.

We help you uncover meaning.
Understand what's truly driving employee performance. See the connections between goal attainment, engagement, retention, and business outcomes.

We make action easy for everyone.
Goal setting and tracking needs to be easy for everyone. Our solutions help reduce headaches for HR, integrate into manager workflows, and encourage employee involvement.

We’re a partner you can rely on.
You’re on a journey – and we’re with you every step of the way. You can rely on our dedicated team to provide strategic guidance, ongoing coaching, timely tech support, and safe and secure practices your programs need to be successful.