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Effective objectives make a big difference to employee retention. OpenBlend explore how to make sure they are part of your performance management framework
“Should I stay, or should I go?” Making effective performance objectives part of one-to-one conversations can be a significant deciding factor for employees when they are faced with job opportunities elsewhere. Are they part of your performance management framework – or are poor objectives contributing to your employee turnover?
We are in the age of the Great Resignation. People (1 in 20, at the end of 2021) are quitting their jobs in record numbers, driven by a desire for a better work/life balance, less stress, more career progression and greater wellbeing. In short, people are looking for work that makes them happy.
Yet what makes an employee ‘happy’ differs from person to person. The importance of having the right conversations, that recognise every employee as an individual, is inarguable: in today’s climate, you cannot build a sustainable business model without taking a people-centric approach.
But conversation alone is not enough. For one-to-one meetings to be effective, and succeed in retaining the right employees, they need more than just talk. They need action. They need objectives.
Why are objectives important?
People and performance management is redundant without effective objectives. When employees and managers collaborate on the goal setting process it helps to improve employee retention, engagement, and performance. Not only that, but it encourages employees to take charge of their workload and output, personal development and their growth.
Best practices for setting effective objectives
What do effective objectives look like in practice? And how exactly do you ensure that the process of setting them drives action, outcomes and accountability, improves performance and helps your company to retain its employees?
Setting objectives that inspire employees to perform at their best and produce great results is no easy task, and it is just as important to make sure that employee objectives are not only measurable and achievable but align with key business objectives and the bigger picture of what an organisation is trying to achieve.
Below, OpenBlend explain the key steps to follow when approaching objectives can help your employees to succeed in setting and reaching their objectives.
Review and set them regularly
An occasional, sporadic objective is not useful. It’s even less useful if objectives form part of the annual review process. This type of objective setting is difficult to measure, difficult to maintain and difficult to achieve.
Without regularity and continual review, it’s easy for objectives to drop off the radar. And while there is nothing wrong with long-term objectives, it’s more conducive to performance to review current objectives and set fresh ones on a regular basis. This not only ensures that employees are working towards relevant objectives, but that their efforts are aligned with the business.
By committing to the process of setting keeping the objective process regular via weekly or bi-weekly one-to-ones, your objectives become part of a framework, that creates a pattern of recognising their efforts, sharing continual feedback and reminding them of their purpose.
Set clear timeframes
A key part of SMART objective setting is setting clear timeframes. An objective without a timeframe is easily pushed to the bottom of the pile: one that’s timebound is easier to prioritise. Set a deadline for every objective, without fail.
Make them measurable with achievable actions
For objectives to work, they need to be achievable, they need to be measurable, and that means setting clear actions. Vague objectives that feel too big, never-ending and/or immeasurable at the start can feel insurmountable, but broken down into smaller tasks and measured regularly, they become more attainable.
Mark the journey with milestones
When regularly reviewing, measuring and setting objectives, it’s important that they are broken down into smaller scale achievements that mark the process and signal that the employee is on the right track to achieving their objectives. We call these milestones. And when it comes to employee retention, milestones are just as important as objectives in keeping your employees engaged with their work and maintaining their performance.
Why? Because setting lots of disparate, large scale objectives rarely works: it creates confusion and it’s overwhelming. Make sure that the objectives you and your employees set remain focused. When you set one, big objective that’s broken into achievable milestones, it’s always going to be more successful than a disconnected scatter-gun approach.
Whether it’s career progression, personal development or a delivery-based objective, milestones help move objectives along. They foster a sense of achievement, enabling employees to have the satisfaction of reaching every milestone on their journey. This dynamic approach to progression is one of the key points that will stop employees from having their head turned by competitors.
Think about the type of objective you’re setting
Objectives shouldn’t just relate to delivery, like completing a project, or increasing sales. Personal development is just as important, and truly effective employee objectives should cover broader ground. To set effective objectives, they need to be holistic. You need to be able to consider what motivates your employees, how they feel about the objectives that they are working towards and how the achievement of those objectives sets them on the path that they want to take with their career progression.
Make them co-created and the process more collaborative
Employees and managers both need to be able to set objectives to reflect personal and commercial needs. Employees may not always recognise what they need to work on from a commercial perspective, while managers shouldn’t have to guess what their employees want or need to achieve with their objectives. The best approach to objectives is one that allows for continuous collaboration.
Communicate purpose
Every objective should have a clear purpose, as opposed to simply setting an arbitrary outcome. On the delivery side, for instance, ‘raise marketing conversions’ could become ‘raise marketing conversions to reach Q1 financial targets’. By creating visibility around the bigger company picture, employees can get a better understanding of their objectives’ relevancy and importance within the business.
Gartner research shows when employee goals are aligned with organisational priorities employee performance increases by up to 22%. So it goes without saying, the more that the purpose of employee and business goals are aligned, the better the commercial and personal outcomes.
To find out more, download the OpenBlend guide to performance objectives.
