The other white meat in the world of goal tracking

    In the business world, there are many different ways to measure goals; two popular methods are SMART goals and OKRs. Much like SMART goals, OKRs requires action and a measurable outcome. OKRs comprise an objective—a clearly defined goal—and one or more key results—specific measures used to track the achievement of that goal. The goal of OKR is to define how to achieve objectives through concrete, specific and measurable actions.

The biggest difference between SMART goals and OKRs is that OKRs are frequently set, tracked, and re-evaluated, usually quarterly. OKR is a simple, fast-cadence process that engages each team’s perspective and creativity. Creating alignment in the organization is one of the main benefits. The goal is to ensure everyone is going in the same direction, with clear priorities, in a constant rhythm.

Why your team is not reaching their goals?

    Are you satisfied with where your company is right now? Are you selling the number of widgets you hoped to? Or gaining new clients to help increase revenue? Although there are many reasons why employees are not engaged at work, many times there are roadblocks along the way, preventing employees from being successful. People, or better yet, employees create unneeded roadblocks that prevent them from being successful.

Time
     Many employees come to work with intentions to be productive and achieve their goals. Then, before they realize it, they have spent an hour gossiping about what happened to Sally or talking about the Walking Dead. In every business, there is a need to have meetings; however, at some organizations, there are meetings after meetings. Then, there are employees who have time management issues. There are numerous reasons that kill time in the work place. The key is to have a clear set of tasks or objectives to ensure you stay on track to accomplish your goals. As a manager, it is important to work with your team to create goals and tasks, helping eliminate things in the workplace that waste time.

Why are your employees not working?

   If you have ever managed people or departments, then you know a lot of time and money goes into the recruiting and training of new people. An odd thing happens after someone is hired and starts working; they become engrossed in the culture of the organization and this culture sets the tone for the new hire. With nearly 70 percent of the workforce not engaged at work, it is imperative companies look at ways they can get their people working.

Recruiting & On-boarding

     Whether or not you believe it, employee engagement starts on day one or sometimes before the first day. Your recruitment strategy or even your background screening process sets the tone for how things are done at your company.  In this day and age, if you still have candidates apply using a paper application then either you are a small company or you are a non-progressive company and some people will pick up on that. This could mean your other systems are older or out of date. For some, this is not a big deal and some may even welcome it; however, for others, they will be turned off by this and may not be committed to giving 100 percent effort in their job.  When you think about the candidate experience, the process to apply should be easy and your website should give candidates all the information about your organization, so they want to work for you and be engaged.

     Have you ever began a new job only to get there and realize within the first week that you made a mistake? The first day or week for some, can be the deal-breaker when it comes to engagement. Imagine it is your first day and you are really excited, but when you arrive at work, you don’t have a computer to work on or your trainer doesn’t want to train you or there is no one to train you and you have to figure it out on your own. These things start to set in your mind that maybe the company doesn’t care about employees and after a while you stop caring about the company. First days should be exciting and new people want to feel welcomed and feel like they belong.

   I recently did a series of articles on SMART goals and how to write a smart goal. It is important to realize that all of the goals in the world will not help you to be successful without tasks. Tasks are the day-to-day actions that you must perform, to complete the task. Just like creating SMART goals, your task should be somewhat SMART to ensure that it is driving the goal results that you are looking for.

Be SMART with your Tasks

A Task is defined as: A piece of work to be done or undertaken.

Using the same acronym I will show you how to create SMART tasks to be successful.

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Relevant
T – Time-bound

     The task that is created should be specific to the goal you are trying to achieve. For this article, we will use the following SMART Goal to create SMART tasks:

Reduce overtime in the department from 150 hours per month to 50 hours per month by the end of the fiscal year with no increase in incident reports.