2017 Goals: You MUST do these three
If one of your looming tasks is setting 2017 goals for your organization, go ahead and check that off the to-do list. Here are some universal goals identified by Nikki Penn Consulting that are essential must-do's for any organization or business.
1. INCREASE REVENUE
Obviously the bottom line is at the top of the list for everyone. But not everyone is working towards this goal in the same way (work smarter, not harder, right?) Here's one way to increase efficiency you may not have considered: employee satisfaction. Research shows that 50 million work days are lost each year in the U.S. due to stress on the job, $11 billion is lost each year due to employee turnover, and 75% of employees are not fully productive
Reducing workplace stress and really engaging your employees means higher productivity for the whole organization (and a nice side effect of engaged, satisfied employees is retention, which equals HUGE savings).
2. GROW, BUT DO IT SMARTLY
Simply hiring more employees is not in-and-of itself going to help your organization – you have to hire the right employees. Anyone who’s had hiring regrets knows how essential this is. Hiring the wrong person has many possible side effects – the spread of employee frustrations, toxicity in the workplace, potential turnover, negatively affected customer service, and decreases in overall productivity.
So how do you ensure you're getting the right person? By taking the guesswork and biases and personality preferences out of the equation. Job Benchmarking has seen a huge rise in popularity in recent years, and for good reason. Using research and science to accurately define a position and its required aptitudes, soft skills, hard skills, and competencies means that you have a fact-based baseline for comparison when it comes to reviewing candidates. If a candidate has a great personality, great look and and great resume, but doesn't match the position's baseline, he's not a match.
Invest the money and time up front to define your organization's positions, and you'll reap the benefits for years and years to come.
3. BUILD BETTER RELATIONSHIPS.
Whether it’s improving relationships with customers, or improving relationships within the company or department, relationship building can make or break an organization. As tycoon Richard Branson said, “If you look after your staff, they’ll look after your customers."
It can seem like a lofty idea, with no real concrete steps. But building better relationships can actually be less touchy-feely and more scientific fact-based than you think. The "whole-person assessments" now available to businesses and organizations unlock keys to better relationships and communications with just the click of a mouse. These assessments provide the quickest, most accurate way to get to the root of employee problems (and untapped strengths). They show an analysis of the individual employee, and can even be tailored to the organization’s focus, like sales.
Soft skills assessments can give insight into the organization’s customer service strengths and improvement needs, and the Emotional Quotient assessment can reveal emotional intelligence, often even a greater predictor of success than mental intelligence. If your organization hasn't used assessments, it is missing out on an unbelievable force multiplier.
If your organization is ready to tackle increased revenue,
smart growth, and better relationships in 2017,
call or email Nikki Penn Consulting for more information on our
job benchmarking, assessments, and employee satisfaction tools.
A little more on understanding goals and why they're important...
According to Locke and Latham, goals affect individual performance through four mechanisms:
· Goals direct action and effort toward goal-related activities and away from unrelated activities.
· Goals energize employees. Challenging goals lead to higher employee effort than easy goals.
· Goals affect persistence. Employees exert more effort to achieve high goals.
· Goals motivate employees to use their existing knowledge to attain a goal or to acquire the knowledge needed to do so.
Setting individual performance goals provides a framework for translating the goals of the organization into smaller chunks that are then assigned or delegated to individual employees. This needs to be done for an organization achieve their overall goals to the extent that each employee does his or her part in completing the right job tasks in effective ways.
