Why employees do not have goals

     The late Zig Ziglar spoke about many different subjects that were designed for motivation and being a better sales professional. One of the subjects that Mr. Ziglar spoke about was the reason that people don’t have goals. Mr. Ziglar outlined the four reasons that people don’t have goals. There are four basic reasons people don’t have goals: Fear, self-image, never been sold and they don’t know how. When thinking about goals, there are two distinct categories of people in every company that are a main driver of goals, managers and employees. Sadly, at a lot of companies it is easy to find lots of goals that the managers have, but what about the employees. Like it or not, companies do not operate without employees. Given the fact that 80 to 90 percent of companies are made up of employees, it makes sense that employees have and achieve goals.

Fear
     In the business world, there are many things of which to be afraid. Having a fear of goals means that you are either afraid to document that you failed or that you are afraid to admit you don’t know how to write goals. Employees are eager to prove to their managers that they are good at their job and can achieve goals and for some failure is not an option; however, for some the fear of failure is great. In today’s job market, finding your dream job can be a challenge and as an employee you want to be successful. It is natural to be afraid of something you don’t know how to do, the key it to overcome this fear. As an employee, you are going to miss goals and you going to fail. Start by learning the basics of writing goals and SMART goals is a very simple way to create goals.

How having goals can create a more productive workforce.

     According to a recent article by Gallup, employee engagement in the United States is at 34 percent, which is an increase over last year’s survey. While an increase is good news for the workforce, there is still the remaining 66 percent of either not engaged or totally disengaged employees that are plaguing the workforce. To break this down a little more, let’s look at ACME Widget company that has 100 employees, 34 of the employees are rock stars and are always working and getting the job done. Fifty-three of the employees are not engaged at work. These people do what they need to get by, but are not really adding to the bottom line and are not loyal. The remaining 13 employees are completely disengaged. These people do very little at work, are negative and are a cancer to the company. These 13 employees could be eliminated and the impact would be minimal to the organization.

  There are many reasons why employees are not engaged at work. It is far too easy to be distracted and find something to help kill the time, such as social media or water cooler talk. Disengaged employees spend more time getting out of work then actually working.

How to write and maintain goals to be successful in the workplace

Over the course of the last five weeks, we have focused individually on the parts of SMART goals and how each piece is important to creating a good well-balanced goal. In week one, we focused on “S” or goals that are specific. Week two, we focused on “M”, goals that are measurable. Week three focused on “A”, goals that are achievable or attainable. Week four, focused on “R” or goals that are relevant and finally in week five, we focused on having goals that are timely or time-bound.

The last five weeks have had plenty of bad examples and it is very easy to get goals wrong. In this recap, we will show you a couple of good examples of goals.

How to write and maintain goals to be successful in the workplace

In the fifth and final issue of SMART goals, we will discuss the “T” or time-bound component and why it is important goals have time periods that are measured.

When creating goals, it is important to have a review period. The review period allows you to evaluate whether or not the goal has been achieved or not. The time period needs to be long enough to truly achieve the desired results, but not so long you lose focus on the desired outcome. The review date is the point in time a result will be due; most goals are tracked with a 30-day review period. If your goal requires more attention, you may need to have weekly or even daily review time-frames.

Bad Example:
You are a used car sales person and you set a goal to sell more cars. This goal misses the mark on many of the other letters in the SMART acronym, but also lacks a defined time period. Without a defined review period, you cannot evaluate if you have truly sold more cars or not. It is important to have the review period to measure against.