Encouraging your employees to set professional goals for themselves will help build morale across your workplace. In turn, your employees will become more productive in their roles. Thus, managers should strive to assist employees in setting clear goals, providing guidance on which goals are right for each individual. Helping them set goals that are ambitious yet attainable will lead to maximum results.
Here are several key benefits of setting goals that will have a lasting impact on your organization.
Putting people in touch with their own desires
The process of setting goals helps people to become aware of what they truly want to achieve. They become more in touch with how they feel about their work and what they would like to change about it. Without pausing to consider which goals they want to achieve, people may not understand where they want to go in their careers. They might wander aimlessly rather than having clear aspirations to work toward. The process of goal-setting itself provides vital direction that gives an individual a strong sense of purpose. Goals help people understand their personal vision and mission, making them more invested in their work.
Increasing motivation
Having goals greatly enhances motivation. People with goals know what they want to achieve, and that inspires them to reach higher on a daily basis. With appropriate goals, employees feel more engaged in their jobs and more enthusiastic about their work, because the act of working toward a goal provides a daily incentive to strive for greater success. Work becomes more enjoyable and rewarding as a result. Employees will avoid procrastination because they understand exactly what they need to do to accomplish their goals, as motivational speaker and author Brian Tracy says—and just as importantly, they genuinely want to do it.
Enhancing clarity about one’s course of action
Goals also improve focus, guiding one’s actions each day. Employees will be able to prioritize more effectively when they have clarity about what they are trying to achieve. They’ll know which activities should command a higher proportion of their time and which tasks are lower-priority. Thus, goal-setting promotes effective working habits like carefully blocking out time at the beginning of the week.
Sustaining momentum through continued progress
Goals allow people to measure their progress, and measuring progress greatly boosts morale. When employees see themselves reaching key objectives that serve as stepping-stones to their goals, they’ll feel more and more confident that they can achieve their primary goals. In other words, smaller successes give people the conviction that they can achieve great things. Goal-setting is addictive, and it inspires us to keep reaching higher. In turn, monitoring progress shows people whether they are on the right track, providing vital guidance along the way.
Building character
Over time, achieving goals builds character. People who achieve goals become people who know they can achieve goals, as well as people who have the discipline to do the work required to reach them. Because they know they can fulfill their aspirations, they develop the willpower to persevere through the difficult times, certain that they will accomplish what may once have seemed impossible. Goals help people create strong habits that extend beyond any particular goal, benefiting employees and their companies throughout their careers.
Because goal-setting puts people more in touch with how they feel about their work, people with strong goals also have a higher level of self-mastery. This means they continuously take action to guide their career, pursue projects that make the most of their talents, and are the type of people that others look to as leaders and role models.
Help your employees to set goals by discussing what they ultimately aim to achieve in their career and determining how those priorities align with your organization’s needs. You’ll be able to more clearly observe all your employees’ progress once you’ve defined their goals together, allowing you to make more effective and well-grounded organizational decisions. Goal-setting provides metrics of success. Setting goals with all your employees will allow you to accomplish more together, growing as individuals and as an organization.
