• SMART goals

A list of example smart goals for a wide range of professions, industries and business functions. Measurement: completion of training and at least 4 presentations by Q4. Information Technology Management Retire the legacy billing system by moving remaining functionality to the new system to reduce annual license and maintenance costs. SMART goals are meant to address all of your major job responsibilities. Remember, goals are intended to focus attention and resources on what is most important so that you can be successful in achieving your priorities. SMART Goals are goals for your day-to-day job. Support for Military Men and Women Brentwood Hospital's Military STAR Program is designed with the understanding that everyday military men and women are challenged with deployments, general service demands, trauma and compromised psychological wellness. The Military STAR Program.

SMART goals

You could say that the whole human endeavour is geared towards setting and achieving goals. Goals are part of every aspect of life: how you conduct your relationships, what you want to achieve at work, the way you use your spare time... Everything comes down to priorities, and what you would like to accomplish in every aspect – whether you make a conscious choice or go with subconscious preferences.

Without setting goals or objectives, life becomes a series of chaotic happenings you don't control. You become the plaything of coincidence. Accomplishments like sending someone to the moon, inventing the iPod etcetera are the result of a goal that was set at some point. A vision that was charted and realised.

What is SMART goal setting?

SMART goal setting brings structure and trackability into your goals and objectives. In stead of vague resolutions, SMART goal setting creates verifiable trajectories towards a certain objective, with clear milestones and an estimation of the goal's attainabililty. Every goal or objective, from intermediary step to overarching objective, can be made S.M.A.R.T. and as such, brought closer to reality.

In corporate life, SMART goal setting is one of the most effective and yet least used tools for achieving goals. Once you've charted to outlines of your project, it's time to set specific intermediary goals. With the SMART checklist, you can evaluate your objectives. SMART goal setting also creates transparency throughout the company. It clarifies the way goals came into existence, and the criteria their realisation will conform to.

What does S.M.A.R.T. goal setting stand for?

Why not think of a small goal you want to set right now, personal or professional. To make your goal S.M.A.R.T., it needs to conform to the following criteria: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Specific

What exactly do you want to achieve? The more specific your description, the bigger the chance you'll get exactly that. S.M.A.R.T. goal setting clarifies the difference between 'I want to be a millionaire' and 'I want to make €50.000 a month for the next ten years by creating a new software product'.

Questions you may ask yourself when setting your goals and objectives are:

• What exactly do I want to achieve?
• Where?
• How?
• When?
• With whom?
• What are the conditions and limitations?
• Why exactly do I want to reach this goal? What are possible alternative ways of achieving the same?

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Measurable

Measurable goals means that you identify exactly what it is you will see, hear and feel when you reach your goal. It means breaking your goal down into measurable elements. You'll need concrete evidence. Being happier is not evidence; not smoking anymore because you adhere to a healthy lifestyle where you eat vegetables twice a day and fat only once a week, is.

Measurable goals can go a long way in refining what exactly it is that you want, too. Defining the physical manifestations of your goal or objective makes it clearer, and easier to reach.

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Attainable

Is your goal attainable? That means investigating whether the goal really is acceptable to you. You weigh the effort, time and other costs your goal will take against the profits and the other obligations and priorities you have in life.

If you don't have the time, money or talent to reach a certain goal you'll certainly fail and be miserable. That doesn't mean that you can't take something that seems impossible and make it happen by planning smartly and going for it!

There's nothing wrong with shooting for the stars; if you aim to make your department twice as efficient this year as it was last year with no extra labour involved, how bad is it when you only reach 1,8 times? Not too bad...

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Relevant

Is reaching your goal relevant to you? Do you actually want to run a multinational, be famous, have three children and a busy job? You decide for yourself whether you have the personality for it, or your team has the bandwidth.

If you're lacking certain skills, you can plan trainings. If you lack certain resources, you can look for ways of getting them.

The main questions, why do you want to reach this goal? What is the objective behind the goal, and will this goal really achieve that?

You could think that having a bigger team will make it perform better, but will it really?

S.M.A.R.T. goal setting: Timely

Time is money! Make a tentative plan of everything you do. Everybody knows that deadlines are what makes most people switch to action. So install deadlines, for yourself and your team, and go after them. Keep the timeline realistic and flexible, that way you can keep morale high. Being too stringent on the timely aspect of your goal setting can have the perverse effect of making the learning path of achieving your goals and objectives into a hellish race against time – which is most likely not how you want to achieve anything.

SMART+ goals

Another thing that's very important when setting SMART goals, is formulating it POSITIVELY. Remember that what you focus on, increases. So when you focus on NOT doing something, all you think about is that thing. And it will increase. So don't 'stop procrastinating', but 'achieve a daily discipline'.

SMART goal setting with YourCoach

The certified life and business coaches at YourCoach can support you and your team in setting SMART goals and objectives, turning them into measurable goals and following up on their completion. That means training, helping, steering and cheering on the solution of your personal and professional challenges.

Our SMART goal setting coaching trajectory can be used in all aspects of life. From the start of a business to refining existing processes; from finding the perfect partner to staying together. It brings clarity to your plans and free up energy for achieving your goals.

Interested in S.M.A.R.T. goal setting?

If you're interested in a coaching session using SMART goal setting or any other coaching technique(s), let us know! Contact us for more information, rates or to make an appointment.

Writing SMART Goals for Employees (With Examples)

A colleague once told me “I have a really important goal in life…I want to climb Mt. Everest, someday.”

While he was absolutely serious in his demeanor and spoke at length about why he wanted to do it, the short conversation revealed he had never done any climbing before. Further, he had hardly done research into what it actually took to climb the world’s tallest peak. And while I was intrigued by his personal ambition, his lack of research and even a basic plan indicated to me that he was not really on a path to achieving his goal.

Setting goals – whether they be for mountain climbing, your retirement plans, or for your employees – is a valuable exercise for any endeavor. Performance goals establish targets to measure both progress and success. Additionally, they also align priorities and drive focus on a central set of objectives.

Unfortunately, when setting goals for their organizations, many managers make the same mistake my colleague made as he spoke at length about climbing Everest. When goals are poorly defined, unreasonable and lack a strategy for achievement, we set our employees (and our teams) up to fail.

To improve how we set goals for our teams, we’re going to dig into the SMART goal-setting method, as well as provide some good examples of SMART goals for employees.

Why Set Performance Goals for Employees?

Whether or not your organization has a formal performance management system, it’s always a good idea to set goals for your staff each year. Employee goal setting has three distinct advantages.

First, by establishing goals for employees, you are defining expectations for output. For example, if you set a goal for your employee to generate one market intelligence report every month, your employee knows that at the end of the year he or she will be on the hook for twelve reports.

Second, setting employee goals drives focus. When done correctly, the employee’s goals should align his or her work to the broader business strategy and initiatives.

If your company wants to grow sales by 10%, for example, your sales team members should have goals that tie directly to that 10% of growth in some manner (such as, growing sales in each of their territories by 10%). If you set goals that have no connection to the business objectives, your employee will struggle to see how his or her efforts support the organization’s mission.

This worksheet serves as a template for writing SMART goals for employees, and includes examples. A simple framework and series of questions will help managers and employees develop goals that are specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and timed.

Free MRH Download: SMART Goal Development Worksheet

This MRH worksheet serves as a template for writing SMART goals for you and your employees. A simple framework and series of easy questions will help managers and employees develop goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed.
You can find all of our free templates on our TOOLS AND TEMPLATES PAGE.

Third, setting performance measures that challenge the employee gives him or her a chance to learn and develop their skills during the process. Be creative when assigning individual objectives for each employee, and tie goals to their specific developmental needs, where possible.

It is worth noting that performance goals are not simply about meeting metrics or driving employees to work hard. Rather, you should also include goals that go beyond an employee’s day-to-day activities and that will drive the overall enhancement to your organization.

Writing performance goals that include things like developing a new process, reducing product cost, or filling some gap that exists in your firm pushes the employee beyond just doing their job and asks that they contribute to the strategic needs of the organization.

In short, performance goals should drive employee behavior, challenge your staff personally, and ultimately help the business improve.

Employee Performance Goals Should:

1. Set expectations for the upcoming year.
2. Tie employee’s activity to the overall business goals and vision.
3. Drive behavior and activity.
4. Challenge the employee as a means of developing skills.
5. Drive towards an enhanced state of the business.

The S.M.A.R.T. Framework for Goal Setting

Now that we’ve explained their importance, how do I write employee performance goals that drive behavior? The answer is easier than you might think.

The best way to write good goals for employees is to make them S.M.A.R.T.: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based. The S.M.A.R.T. goal concept is used widely by businesses and organizations to define performance targets for individuals as well as the organization as a whole.

Unlike “climbing Mt. Everest someday,” by using the S.M.A.R.T. concept you will ensure the goals you set for employees are detailed and reasonable. Additionally, this framework for setting employee goals makes it easier to clearly identify whether or not a goal was achieved at the end of the year.

To illustrate how this model works, let’s explore each component of S.M.A.R.T. a little further.

Specific

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When setting goals for your staff, you must first be specific in what you want them to achieve. Ensure that the targets you set are clear and easily understood.

If your goals are vague and extremely broad, not only will your employee struggle to perform them, but you will have a hard time assessing the employee’s success when it comes to writing your performance evaluation at the end of the year.

Here is an example of a performance goal for a property manager, that illustrates the difference between a specific and non-specific goal:

• Non-Specific: “Ensure property is secure.”
• Specific: “Verify that all unoccupied properties are locked and secured once per month. Confirm all public gates and entry points are functioning properly once per week.”

Here is another performance goal example for a product developer or engineer:

• Non-Specific: “Improve product performance.”
• Specific: “Enhance the Enviro-Lite bulb design by year end, in order to increase product life by 1000 hours.”

When goals are specific and detailed, it drives accountability and clearly establishes what the employee needs to achieve without the ambiguity.

Measurable

The most common mistake we make as managers when setting employee goals is defining targets that we cannot measure. Further, it’s not just that the goals are vague or non-specific, but we sometimes choose targets we can’t even quantify.

Writing good performance goals should signal to the employee what they need to do. Properly written goals should also make it easy for a manager to say if the employee did or did not achieve their objective.

A common example of a goal we might see reads like this: “Support the Sales team.” How do you measure support? How can you clearly say the employee did or did not support the Sales team? Was their support enough?

You can improve goals by including performance targets that can be measured in a straightforward way. This means that goals should be quantitative and descriptive in nature.

Here is an example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal for a business development representative, illustrating the difference between being measurable and not:

• Non-measurable: “Develop new business proposals.”
• Measurable: “Pursue, write and submit 5 new business proposals to customers by the end of the year.”

Goals can also be written to describe a degree of progress that is to be achieved. Here is an example of a performance goal for a project manager that illustrates this idea:

• Non-measurable: “Meet project milestones.”
• Measurable: “Complete all phase two Aurora project milestones by August. Complete 50% of phase three Aurora project milestones by year end.”

The best way to write measurable performance goals is to think numbers.

Attainable

The goals you set for your employees must be achievable, at least within the context you set around the goal. It doesn’t mean the goals should be easy – by contrast, effective goals should stretch the employee and challenge them.

Still, performance goals should not be impossible for the employee to satisfy, either based on the targets set or by the nature of the goal itself.

For example, your human resources employees should not have goals to develop new software products. It’s not what HR does. Further, writing attainable employee performance goals should result in measures that are feasible and practical.

For an HR generalist, the following examples compare the difference between an attainable and unattainable measure:

• Unattainable: “Complete all new on boarding procedures for new hires within 24 hours of their start date.”
• Attainable: “Complete all new on-boarding procedure for new hires within 30 days of their start date.”

In short, writing employee goals that are attainable means the measures should be achievable under normal circumstances and given the necessary resources.

Realistic

When setting goals for employees, make sure the targets you establish are realistic. By realistic, it means your goal should reflect something that is practical, when compared to historical achievements.

For example, your Sales team should not have a goal to double sales in the first quarter if you’ve never had more than a 5% growth in a single quarter before.

Further, to make goals realistic, they should consider things like resources, financials, available skill set and other objectives.

Returning to my colleague who dreamed of being a mountain climber, in order to reach to the top of Mount Everest – while a lofty challenge – he would need years of training and tremendous financial backing to achieve his goal. Until he actually began to take steps in this direction, his goal was not very feasible.

Time-Based

The last piece of the S.M.A.R.T. goal writing framework has to do with the timeframe for completion.

Another one of the most common mistakes we make when setting goals for employees is not specifying a time by which they need to achieve the goal (“climbing Everest…someday”).

To make your goals S.M.A.R.T., they need to have a timeframe established. The timeframe can be a specific date, a time of year, a quarter, a month, etc. Timing can also be quantified in terms of a frequency for recurring activities (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly).

To illustrate this, consider the following example of a performance goal for a healthcare worker:

• Not Time-Based: “Attend professional development training.”
• Time-Based: “Attend at least one health-related professional development seminar per quarter, or 4 by year-end.”

For a manufacturing supervisor, time-based goals may be something like this:

• Not Time-Based: “Conduct process audits.”
• Time-Based: “Conduct at least two process audits per week. At least 75% of processes must be reviewed by the end of each quarter.”

Including both the time-phasing of various pieces of goals as well as defining and end date helps outline steps and sequences by which the goal is to be achieved.

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Examples of SMART Goals for Employees

Now that we’ve explored the details of the framework, here is a list of examples of SMART goals for employees. In the examples below, we illustrate the difference between poorly written goals and SMART goals that are specific and measurable at the end of the performance cycle.

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Writing Performance Goals for Employees

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Performance goals are an essential management vehicle for driving focus and setting expectations among employees. By using the S.M.A.R.T framework, managers can establish clear objectives that make it easy to measure performance at the end of the year.

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