No matter if you are leading a startup or a large global organization, goal setting is an extremely significant practice for ensuring that your organizational teams are highly engaged. How? Let’s find out!
Without the presence of a clear goal for striving, work can become less meaningful and lack a specific direction. An absence of a goal will result in the absence of a purpose, both in the short and long term. And without a purpose, there is generally a reduction in commitment, productivity, and engagement from the teams who are left wondering: “what is the point?” in everything they do in the short and long span of time. Add to this the organizations working remotely and scattered all across the globe, establishing objectives has become arguably one of the most influential things for organizations belonging to each and every industry.
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When remote teams have become the new norm, goal setting comes into the picture and prevents them from feeling disconnected and disengaged. Research shows that the employees and teams who work with goals tend to be 14.2 times more inspired at work and 3.6 times more committed to the organization. Having challenging yet attainable objectives not only work to engage and support the organizational teams but provide all sorts of different benefits.
Expectations and metrics for success
Establishing objectives helps in putting the benchmark for success. This helps the leaders and employees regulate the progress while working towards attaining those objectives. The matter is not at all different when it comes to remote teams. Setting measurable objectives serve as the basis for expectations and metrics for success. Moreover, it helps in clearing out the confusion in terms of what the teams should be working towards in the broader landscape. When clear and specific objectives are established for remote teams, it also makes the process easier for the new employees to start with their work from day one. It can be quite overwhelming for anyone to start at a new organization and when they are a part of a team scattered across the globe, getting acquainted with the organizational culture can be even tougher. Goals play a huge role during performance reviews as well. It helps the management in determining the evaluation criteria while simultaneously reducing recency bias.
Forming prospects for recognition
When you establish objectives across your entire organization for your employees to strive towards, you establish an ideal prospect for employee recognition. Employee engagement doesn’t only play a part in making employees feel good, but it’s also an incredible method for promoting engagement and fostering connection within the entire team. The number backs this fact. The majority of the employees feel that employee recognition is increasingly important when operating remotely. Moreover, employees that receive frequent recognition from their organizations are known to be more engaged than the ones that don’t. Having set objectives is an incredible way for recognizing employees for their contribution, especially when they are scattered around the city, country, or the world. You can single out employees or teams for contributing to a certain organizational objective.
Fortify the mission and values
Establishing organizational objectives is a brilliant way to fortify the mission and values of your organization and ensure they remain present in the mind of your employees. Your mission and values should serve as the guiding light for everything that your employees do. However, there’s always a risk for them to forget it when they are working remotely. The pivotal point is to create a team where each objective and value are aligned with the ultimate goal of the business. For this, you have to ensure that you spend time establishing your organizational mission and vision right at the start. This helps to make sure that your teams become authentically aware and highly engaged with the organizational mission and values right from the start.
Unity the entire team
When your team is operating remotely and is dispersed across the globe, you need to determine ways for bringing them on the same page and make them feel like a unit. Establishing objectives is one such manner through which you can easily do so. When your teams have common objectives to work towards, they become unified and work with a common sense of purpose. Now the benefit of goal setting isn’t just limited to bringing your teams together, it is also related to better professional results. The alignment of employees with organizational vision and objectives is vital for the success of the business. Without this, the employees are not clear about what to prioritize. They always remain unclear about how their contribution makes a difference in the ultimate objective of the organization. This is the reason that once an organization aligns their employees to their objective, they experience a higher rate of retention and enhanced execution.
Several goal-setting approaches have taken over the industries in today’s era. However, the one that stands out due to its advantages and relevancy is the OKR approach. Contact us now for proficient guidance about the goal-setting process for your organization.
Gaurav Sabharwal
CEO of JOP
Gaurav is the CEO of JOP (Joy of Performing), an OKR and high-performance enabling platform. With almost two decades of experience in building businesses, he knows what it takes to enable high performance within a team and engage them in the business. He supports organizations globally by becoming their growth partner and helping them build high-performing teams by tackling issues like lack of focus, unclear goals, unaligned teams, lack of funding, no continuous improvement framework, etc. He is a Certified OKR Coach and loves to share helpful resources and address common organizational challenges to help drive team performance. Read More