It’s common knowledge that helping employees set and reach goals is one of the most critical parts of every manager’s job.
Goals give you and your team long-term purpose and direction, they can improve performance and lead to a successful company.
But, what should you do when your team doesn’t reach its goals?
Worried? Turns out you are not alone. It happens more often than you think, and teams constantly fail to meet goals, especially at the end of the quarter, at year-end or at the end of a sprint in technological companies.
In fact, setting achievable goals to meet over a set period of time is not always easy. Here are 5 top strategies you can do for helping your team achieve its goals.
1) Use Agile methodologies to reach your team’s goals
In the era of digital transformation, new forms of agile management have emerged. The Agile methodology allows teams to provide quick and unpredictable responses to the customer’s feedback and to market demand.
The so-called Agile methodologies, which generally promote a project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, facilitate rapid responses to changing conditions and monitoring the project development is constant with regular meetings, among other strategies.
Agile is a process that uses short development cycles to focus on continuous improvement in the development of a product or service that allow teams to work in small projects or short-term goals. With this way of working your team can make more effective decisions and adjust objectives, if necessary.
There are a huge variety of agile project management frameworks. The Kanban method, for example, is a process designed to help teams work together more effectively. A Kanban board is one of the most practical tools that you can use to manage your projects in a simple way. You can use Trello application to implement Kanban to visualize and maintain your tasks and workflows in a clear way week by week or by projects.
You can create separate boards for each of your projects or week activities that your team needs to execute. On the board, you can create all the lists you need.
The first list can be used as a prioritized To-Do list to manage tasks effectively. You can add another one where you can store all the tasks in the process (Doing list). The third list can be used to store review tasks. Finally, you can include finished tasks (Done) in the last list.
The best workflow in the world will still fail if no-one’s keeping an eye on it. So try to keep your board simple and clear and assign always someone to be in charge of a board.
2) Keep it simple… and motivated
Multitasking often makes you less productive. It’s easy to get intimidated when a goal is large so the best way to overcome this is to break the goal into small steps.
For the best delivery performance, you can help your team simplifying your internal processes. Try to be realistic in what you can achieve and keep it simple setting clear and small goals.
In fact, as it’s said, the greatest problem that’s been preventing you from accomplishing your biggest goals is that you’re not thinking small enough.
Make sure you also keep your team motivated. Your employees may have all the expertise in the world but, if they’re not motivated, it’s unlikely that they’ll achieve their true potential. Try to make time to simply talk with your team and be aware of what can demotivate them. Not dealing with the situation can lead to a more widespread problem and lost productivity.
With the use of agile tools such as those mentioned in the previous point, you will be able to detect signs of demotivation and be in a position to assist and re-energize employees.
One way to do this is to engage people by setting goals with them. It is much more motivating and can boost employee engagement and retention, don’t you think?
3) Ask for interdepartmental collaboration
Internal communication is key to achieving business goals, and it can improve productivity and efficiency. An effective internal communication plan is crucial when it comes to finding collaborations to achieve objectives during the product, service or project development.
Never underestimate the power of asking for help from those close to you. Sometimes, having a good internal communication you can get the help you need to achieve your goals.
To accomplish this, it is necessary to be clear and concise, sharing the reality of your team in a designated space for talk and exchange information. If in your company there aren’t spaces that encourage collaboration and constant knowledge sharing, don’t hesitate to promote them. Designing your office space to improve staff collaboration and creating a communication-friendly space you can improve your business productivity. Don’t forget the power of information sharing in your business
And don’t be afraid to ask for help, solutions are often closer than you think.
4) Achieve your goals by focusing on effective staff
Have you ever thought about hiring an expert per hours or projects that help your company to achieve your goals?
Hiring a senior expert profile can be crucial to support your team when they fail to achieve its goals. Qualified experts can reinforce in-house capability with flexibility and meet critical business needs in the right timeframe.
However, finding the right candidate can be a challenge, especially when you need to hire as fast as possible, right?
Recruiting can be especially difficult in the current job market and companies will likely need to work even harder to locate qualified candidates for skilled positions or professionals with high demand abilities such as tech or digital talent.
So when your company doesn’t have time and resources to carry out a recruiting process, you might consider using a recruitment agency or service to get the job done.
With hiring solutions like Wisar, you can get the right candidate quickly, you will reduce costs (a good portion of the cost is in the recruitment process itself) and speed up the employee selection process. Recruiting flexible professionals you can find the best talent that aligns with your business needs. Only for as long as you need it.
5) If you keep failing, you need to adjust your goals
If you keep failing and your team doesn’t achieve its goals it may be a good idea to readjust them.
The goals you set should be ambitious but they also need to be realistic. Perhaps you set deadlines that you don’t realize were impossible. Maybe you need more time or more people to meet objectives. In that case, redefine or argue (to yourself or whoever is responsible) the real situation in which you are and the reasons why this time your team can’t reach the objectives.
In fact, next time you have to set or accept goals, make sure each step follow the classic S.M.A.R.T. model. SMART is an acronym for the 5 elements of specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based goals:
– Specific: what you want to accomplish? Who is involved? Where? and how?
– Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress. How do you measure your progress? (This point is important to measure results and keep the motivation)
– Attainable: Is it realistic? Do I have the resources available to achieve this objective?
– Relevant/Realistic: Is it possible to achieve this objective?
– Time-related: Does the goal have a target date for completion?
If next time you set a goal you are sure it has been set smartly, you should not be afraid of rethinking it. It’s much better than living with the feeling that you’re not good enough.
Insolvency defines the situation where the business owner and board of directors become unable to pay the liability of the company. This situation, if further persists, can end up with the dissolution of the company. So, to deal with such situations, a good Insolvency Practitioner is needed.
In order to confront the rapidly-evolving market around us, working with flexibility and Agile methodologies can help your team set and achieve its goals.
By simplifying work processes and procedures, and using strategies to keep your team motivated you will improve performance.
Sometimes, it is necessary to rethink your goals and make sure that they have been designed to be smart.
Maybe it may be easier than you think now, and the only thing you have to do is to find a qualified professional with companies like Wisar, which offer you qualified professionals ready to work with flexibility.
Following these tips, we hope next time you meet your objectives. At least, we tried 😉
