AS AN EMPLOYER, it is in your best interest to foster a sense of purpose and direction in the work environment for your employees. One way of doing this is by establishing goals. If you are a boss, supervisor or director, when the people who work for you have goals that they are expected to work toward, they will be more likely to be motivated by their jobs. Establishing goals for your employees will help them understand exactly what is expected of them and they may even feel inspired to take on more responsibility at work so that they can prove themselves and continue to feel the satisfaction of accomplishing their goals. Establishing goals will help you, as the employer, be able to review the performance of your employees more critically as you will now have a benchmark by which to grade each employee. Not to mention, on a broader scale, establishing goals will also increase the productivity of the business by increasing profits.

The first thing to do as an employer, setting out to establish goals for your employees, is to include them in the process. Involving your staff in establishing these goals will give them a sense of belonging—like they had a hand in bettering the company. Failure to include your employees could result in many of them holding some form of resentment toward the goals and even to you. Furthermore, resenting the process will make them feel like you are trying to impose unrealistic targets on them. To avoid all this, round up the staff in the boardroom and take some time brainstorming ideas with them about the goals that they should set for themselves. Make sure you listen to all their suggestions and also ensure that you incorporate them into your goal planning process. If you don’t do this, they could end up feeling that you were hoodwinking them and decided to just impose your own goals regardless of their input. Of course, as the boss and final decision-maker, you never have to consult with your employees about anything if you don’t want to, but management trends have shown that you get a lot further as a cohesive team if you do.

When setting goals with your employees, make sure that you avoid being vague. Vagueness will lead to misunderstanding and this will not accomplish anything. For the whole endeavor of setting goals to be successful, the employees must understand exactly what is meant by each goal. Elaborate on the goals that you are setting and, if possible, incorporate figures. Once you have these goals, make sure they are assigned to the right people. For example, the sales team should have goals that are specifically tailored to their strength to ensure that they deliver what is expected. You can even go a step further and tailor the goals to suit the personalities of your various employees. Giving them goals that can be supported by their innate characters makes it easy for them to accomplish them.