In the workplace, goals are crucial for success. Goals keep you on the course during rough times and help you stay focused on issues that matter. Goals provide employers the benefits of helping employees stay on course, aligning employee goals with organizational goals, etc. The very process of goal-setting can be further enhanced by using goal-setting software for your business needs.
Tag: goal setting software
10 Reasons to use Goal Setting Software
Setting goals is a crucial task any organization should take with great importance. It gives the management and employees a sense of purpose and direction. Imagine running a race without knowing where the finish line is. How meaningless it would seem to most people – putting in the efforts of working every day without an end goal. And because we would like to avoid such a situation, we have to set goals. Goal setting has its many pecks, and that’s where goal setting software comes into play. Goal setting software helps you plan, manage, and track your goal, ensuring you are working with a sense of direction.
The goal setting software can assist any business with goal setting strategy, and in this article, we will discuss ten reasons you should use a goal-setting application.
Provides Clarity and Transparency
Goal setting provides clarity to management and employees of an organization. And using goal setting software helps you to achieve this. A study by Inc. showed that 70% of companies ranked “communicating business goals” as an effective way to have high-performing staff members.
Another study by Gallup shows that employees whose managers engage them in the goal-setting process perform 3.6 times better than their counterparts in the dark. Meaning employees show better engagement when they understand why they should achieve their goal.
Transparency means that everyone within the organization knows the goals, why the company sets those goals and their part in achieving them. Transparency allows for inclusion, which helps with the business direction. Clarity and transparency are at your fingertips if you use the target-setting software. Employees can access the breakdown of the company objectives into goals and where they come in.
Helps Employees See the Bigger Picture
The first reason ties into this point. Staff members who see themselves as part of a bigger picture are likely to work harder towards achieving their goals. They do this because they see how their contribution affects the overall organizational goals.
According to an article on Harvard Business Review, employees should see how their goals fit into the larger organizational goals to get the best from them. Their Interaction with the goal-setting software can aid this process.
The best goal setting software in the market has the features to help achieve this.
Also Read: 5 Most Common OKR Myths Busted
Helps to Automate and Track Progress
In recent years, automation has become something of a buzzword. It’s a term often thrown about, and the surrounding hype is something to be envied. The truth is, there is a good reason for this hype.
Various studies like this have shown us proof of the buzz – a primary reason being an increase in productivity and reduced costs.
Automating activities like tracking, managing, and scoring makes it easier to attend to other essential activities. Artificial intelligence will carry out the repetitive process for you. Doing this makes it easier to carry out goal-setting strategies.
The goals can be customized for each employee and easily tracked from the platform by the manager in charge. The automation allows for tracking and feedback to be seamless.
Keeps Employees Accountable
Staying accountable is one of the hardest and overlooked activities in a company. It’s easier to give end-of-year feedback to an employee than to monitor and track the employee’s progress. According to The American Society of Training and Development, you are 65% more likely to achieve your goal if you have someone tracking your progress.
A goal-setting software presents you with the platform to achieve this goal.
Being accountable can bring out the best in an employee, and the best goal setting software in the market can help you achieve such.
It Becomes Easier to Manage a Team
Managing a team of people can be a tough task, and it isn’t unusual for team leaders to lose sight of the progress reports of team members because of other pressing matters. One of the many factors that ensures a company achieves its organizational goals is teamwork. When you and your team have a common goal in mind, it helps unify team members to meet the set targets.
A unit or department sets a target and then breaks them down into individual targets for each person. Each member then tracks their goals as individuals and as a collective. Since each member has access to the team’s overall goal with goal-setting software, they can keep each other in check.
A reliable goal-setting software ensures individuals can view the departmental goals. They also help individuals see how they contribute to the overall departmental goal. When departmental goals are readily accessible by team members, it helps them stay focused.
Also Read: 6 Traits of High Performing Teams
Provide a Platform for Feedback
Getting feedback from your manager is an important task. Unfortunately, this task only occurs once in a blue moon and often performance reviews take place at the end of the year. A study by Officevibe revealed 4 out of 10 workers feel disengaged when they get no feedback. They are also two times likely to feel detached from the organization.
It gets more interesting as the study also shows only 58% of managers believe they give adequate feedback to their employees. This information provides us with some fascinating but understandable statistics. Another interesting finding in this study was 65% of participants said they wanted more feedback.
Among employees that receive feedback weekly, 43% of them engage well with the business objectives. On the other hand, only 18% of people stay engaged without weekly feedback.
Feedback also presents a way to improve and see things from other people’s perspectives. Peer-to-peer feedback can also help to de-escalate tensions between members of an organization. To gain an efficient feedback framework – it’s best to use an application that can provide a brilliant platform. The best goal setting software on the market has a feedback column where team members and other added members can give constructive feedback.
Goal Setting Recognition Tools Can Help Improve Employee Morale
In any modern office, recognizing the efforts of employees of any organization is necessary. A study by Gallup shows that the number one reason employees leave their jobs is because the company does not recognize their efforts.
Another study by SHRM also shows employee recognition helps to reduce frustration in the workplace by 28.6%. Both studies highlight how effective recognizing employees’ achievements are – especially in recent times where workers need more than good pay to stay in a job. The pandemic has seen employees reflect on their career goals and have seen many people opt to resign.
Recognizing and rewarding the efforts of employees is more significant than ever. And using the goal-setting software is a brilliant way to monitor and reward meeting goals and objectives – boosting the employees’ morale.
Recognition can be as simple as using the software to publish the goals met to fellow peers. A goal-setting software can aid you by helping build a culture of rewarding and recognizing the best talents in your company.
Improves Communication within the Organisation
A survey of 400 companies by Inc. found companies lose up to 37 billion per year because of poor communication. We cannot overemphasize the importance of good communication, as it is crucial to achieving the goals of an organization.
Efficient communication helps the management convey the organization’s vision to the staff members. It allows for feedback from employees and helps improve productivity. The advantages of having efficient communication are many, but some key ones include:
- Improves the workplace atmosphere.
- Reduces the amount of misinformation and confusion.
- Helps to increase the commitment of the employees.
Acknowledging how vital good communication is, is not enough to align employees with the organizational goals. That is why gaining and using goal-setting software is an admirable first step you can take. The importance of the goal-setting application is in the number of communicating features it possesses. The best products in the markets have features to promote communication between employees and management.
Also Read: Be A Better Manager And Avoid These 5 Mistakes
It Promotes Collaboration
The importance of goal setting means collaboration between departments is a powerful aspect for achieving organizational goals. No department is an island because it takes the effort of all to achieve the different targets the business has set out to do. For the departments to work well together, there are tools the company will need to function effectively, and one of them is a goal-setting tool.
One thing this tool brings to the forefront is its visibility. All employees can track the set goals and their progression, allowing for ease in cross-team collaboration. Working cross-team to solve a common company problem is a task that is doable with such software.
Another use for goal setting is it aids when working remotely or at home. It’s easy to keep up with your department worksheet and other departments if both departments are on a project. The best goal-setting apps in the market have features that help monitor the progress of other team members.
Flexible Goal Formatting for Different Departments
Different departments need different metrics in order to give a fair assessment. Good target-setting software is flexible enough to accommodate different goal formats. Some examples of goals and their tracking formats include:
- “Hit $15m in the first quarter.” – We can track the goal in dollars.
- “Increase sales of product X by 5%.”- the goal’s format is in percentage.
- “Visit the company’s 10 new sites for inspection.” – This goal is measured in numbers.
- “Send out a performance survey on Friday.” – This is a simple binary type goal. It requires a “done” or “not done” kind of goal format.
The best application out there has the flexibility to format and track different goals as the need presents itself.
In conclusion, goal-setting software will be a big plus for your business. It can help you take your business to a whole new level where direction, accountability, and clarity become the norm.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you set effective goals? Click below for a live demo!
Product Management OKRs : Examples
For holistically product-based companies, product managers and their product management team is the backbone of the organization. From Google to Microsoft to Amazon, every successful organization has talented product managers to provide the perfect solutions to their customer’s problems. They work with cross-functional teams and help everyone to be on the same page with what customers want. They are a part of a myriad of activities which include:
- Understanding customer requirements and translating them for the development team
- Build and design product roadmaps
- Enhance existing feature of the product
- Research on competitors
While it is not as easy as marketing or the sales team to set OKRs for those in product management, having OKRs help them stay focused and measure their success. In this article, we will share some sample OKRs for your product management team that will help you get started. But before we take a look at the OKRs let us take a look at its history and what are okrs.
Also Read: The Essential Guide To OKRs: Your Ultimate Tool To Setting Winning Goals
OKRs : A Brief History
“OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over.” – Larry Page, Co-founder of Google.
The concept of OKRs was first introduced by the former Intel CEO, Andy Grove, in the 1970s. But it was relatively unknown until it was introduced in Google in 1999 by John Doerr. Doerr was introduced to OKRs while working at Intel. To Google, it is a part of their culture, and they consider it a management methodology that helps them focus on the same issues throughout the organization. Organizations such as Amazon, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Netflix, Microsoft, Disney, Zynga, etc., credit OKRs for their success.
What Are OKRs?
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) comprise of:
- An Objective: It is a clearly defined goal to be achieved
- 3-5 Key Results: Measurable steps to track the progress of the objectives
Each set of Objectives and their Key Results should answer two primary questions: ‘What is that we are planning to achieve?’ and ‘How to achieve it?’.
Almost every organization globally uses the OKR methodology to set their goals because of its multitudinal benefits. Here are some of them:
- Short term and agile
- Easy to align
- Improves Transparency and Accountability
- Time-Saving
- Tracks progress and help prioritize tasks
- Improves Team Collaboration
How To Write Good Objectives?
- Plain Language – Use a language that everyone understands, avoid using specific jargon and acronyms. The intention here is not to make things sound fancy. The right intention here is to convey the goals with clarity
- Start With A Verb – Begin with a verb to describe the action and the desired direction. It helps in understanding a clear target to achieve and gives direction to the employee
- Challenge the Status Quo – Objectives should be set in such a way that it challenges your current way of working otherwise it would be ineffective to move your business forward
- What’s Holding You Back? – Understand what problems are holding you back from moving forward and executing your strategy
- Clarifying Questions – Use the Questioning method to move from abstracts to specifics of your OKRs. This will reduce confusion and help everyone understand the true objectives
- Use Simple Rules – Use simple rules while drafting your OKRs. Have your own set of key criteria for objectives which are straightforward and simple to follow
- Limited and Time Bound – Set no more than three objectives per quarter so that they remain impactful. Having too many objectives takes away focus from the priorities.
Also Read: Employee Engagement: Why Is It Important For Organizations?
How To Write Good Key Results?
- Keep Them Simple And Clear – Make them simple and easy, so that they can be easily communicated understood by others
- Assign Owner – Assign an owner who takes the responsibility of creating and achieving the key results and is responsible for updates on the progress
- Use Positive Language – Use positive language while creating your key results as it will enhance motivation and increase commitment
- Limit the Key Results – Set a minimum of three and maximum of five key results for every objective. Setting few will not be challenging, and setting too many will be difficult to achieve
Also Read: 360 Degree Feedback : 7 Tips To Get Started
With an insight into what is OKRs and how to write them, now let us take a look at some of the sample OKRs.
Objective 1: Research and Understand what users want
Key Results:
– Interview five Tier 1, ten Tier 2, and fifteen Tier 3 clients
– Sales Team or the Product Team interviews recent churned out customers
– Analyze Client Exit Surveys of past quarters
Objective 2: Deliver Version 2 of the project by the end of ______ (Time Frame)
Key Results:
– Wireframe review and sign off on UI prototype
– Review and sign off on Mobile Responsive screens
– Ready for hand-off within the timeframe
Objective 3: Enhance features and improve usability
Key Results:
– Identify and handover bugs to the development team
– Research on competitor’s products
– Connect with high level executive (clients and non-client)
Objective 4: Employee engagement and development of team members
Key Results:
– Each team members attends one training session each month
– Team members set their OKRs for each quarter
– Peer feedback is conducted half-yearly
– Two best performers from each quarter is rewarded
10 Things To Look For In A Goal Setting Software
Goal setting software can help an organization manage goals and track them across the board. But if you are looking for a goal-setting software, other than creating and tracking goals, what else should the software accomplish? And more importantly, how can it become a valuable addition to your organization’s workflow?
Continue reading “10 Things To Look For In A Goal Setting Software”
7 Steps To Setting Workplace Goals And Making Them Happen! [Infographic]
![7 Steps To Setting Workplace Goals And Making Them Happen! [Infographic]](https://engagedly.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/HeaderSettingGoalsInfo.png)
The first step to achieving success is setting effective goals; the next is creating a plan to achieve these goals. How do you create effective workplace goals that drive you to accomplish them? Continue reading “7 Steps To Setting Workplace Goals And Making Them Happen! [Infographic]”
Why Engagedly Is The Ultimate Goal-Setting Software That You Need!
“Goals are very important!” Well, don’t we all know that already? But achieving those goals is more important than just setting them. To achieve goals, we need to keep track of our progress and plan a strategy.
Continue reading “Why Engagedly Is The Ultimate Goal-Setting Software That You Need!”