How to transform company goals into achievable team and individual objectives
By Dominique Nally, HR Consultant
The beginning of a new year in business is often associated with agreeing your company goals for the 12 months ahead. These goals are then cascaded down to your management team and finally shared with the rest of your workforce.
The sticky point often comes when trying to transform those company-wide goals into departmental and individual objectives that everyone understands and can commit to.
You may already be familiar with the SMART principles when it comes to setting objectives. In this article, we’ll focus on how to translate a complex over-arching company goal into a relevant objective that your employees will buy into. This will be supported by your company values, which you want to see reflected in everything you and your teams do.
Types of objectives
Let’s remind ourselves that objectives come in different shapes:
What should you try to achieve when setting objectives for your employees?
- Simplify as much as you can: spend time really honing in on what that teams and individuals can realistically deliver to help you reach the goal. It’s got to feel achievable or they won’t commit to it.
- Make it specific to the team or individual: what is their actual function or job? What do they do every day? Then turn this into an objective to which they can contribute successfully.
- Right goal at the right level: if your company goal is to ‘attract new clients by exploring new revenue streams’, consider which department is going to help you achieve this and in what way. Break it down to a team level first; then the managers in those teams can break it down further at an individual level. Your sales team won’t have the same objectives as your Marketing team or your IT team, but they can all contribute towards this company goal.
- All goals should be measurable: if managers can’t set measures for an objective, then it might need to be reworded or broken down further into mini objectives. Measuring progress against an objective is vital to motivating your workforce to achieving it. Breaking down an objective into several deliverables with clear timescales might be a better way to ensure it is delivered to expectations and on time.
- Keep motivation flowing:
- Break down large objectives into bitesize chunks. It will help commitment levels stay high if the individuals feel they can achieve each deliverable on time.
- Keep deadlines within the yearly quarters or shorter (but not too short). Ongoing objectives that spread across the year are likely to fall at the back of the priority list, so don’t give a 31st December deadline, when setting objectives and deliverables at the beginning of the year.
- Review progress against the objectives regularly and keep them organic – deadlines may need to be changed due to unforeseen events or may be reached ahead of the timescales.
- Close down objectives that have been reached and celebrate achievements!
- New objectives may come up throughout the year and can be added. I’ve seen one person with 15 objectives! This became a ‘switch off’ for the employee and upon review, it turned out that most were deliverables that fitted under one particular objective.
From company goal to individual objective
Let’s take a look at the examples below, from different sectors.
Have you set your 2025 employee objectives yet? OneHR can help with advice, guidance and training – get in touch!
