Any business owner will know that a properly motivated workforce is a key to helping the company achieve its growth and profit targets. Unfortunately, different polls confirm that almost one-third of all workers are “unmotivated” at work. Even more shocking is a recent poll reported by Forbes Magazine that finds that 53 percent of all workers are currently unhappy at their current jobs. When a large percentage of your workers are either unmotivated or unhappy, this certainly will cut into productivity levels. In fact, Gallup’s State of the Local Workplace report finds that 85 percent of employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged at work. This has resulted in over $7 trillion in lost productivity.
But enough with statistics.
What exactly can small business owners and HR managers do to help improve the productivity, engagement, and happiness levels of their employees?
Fortunately, there are several different proven strategies to help improve the satisfaction of your employees. Office layouts, proper interior temperatures, and even small perks like a free coffee station have all been shown to help keep employees happy and engaged with the work they are involved in. Putting in the effort to create a positive workplace culture is another important element to improving productivity levels.
One of the most important aspects of a positive workplace culture is helping your employees design and implement workplace goals. When employees feel that they have a voice and opinion in designing their own work-related goals, this creates a sense of ownership and motivation with the work they undertake. This short article lays out a few strategies to help your employees discover how to achieve goals at work.
What Are Good Personal Goals For Work?
For employees to feel a sense of ownership and responsibility towards workplace goals, they need to feel that these goals are beneficial to themselves and their career, and not just for the company's bottom line. In many cases, workers and managers can work together to forge a series of goals that are linked to opportunities for career advancement. When workplace goals overlap with your employees’ personal goals and potential accomplishments, this increases motivation. Furthermore, if some of the identified goals require additional skills in order to achieve, this goal-oriented work approach could coincide with work-supported opportunities for advancing the education of top-talent employees.
Workplace goals need to be realistically achievable if they are going to help improve productivity levels. To help your workers create realistic and accurate goals, the SMART format is a good place to start.
SMART stands for all workplace plans, objectives, or goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable or Attainable
- Realistic, Relevant, or Results-oriented and
- Timely, Time-based, or Time-bound.
Organizing a seminar or training session on how to create SMART goals can benefit your employees.
Lastly, workplace goals also need to be sufficiently specific in order to be practical and implementable in everyday workplace tasks. To design specific and practical workplace goals, the Six W's framework can be helpful.
Your employees should be able to define:
- What the goal is
- Why they want to achieve it
- Which resources and skills and abilities are needed to achieve the goal
- Who will participate in the process of achieving the goal
- When the goal will need to be accomplished, or a specific timeline for advancing towards the end goal
- Where the goal will take place
Examples Of Personal Workplace Goals
The definitive goals your workers set will of course depend on the type of industry you operate within and the specific tasks of each employee. However, to get a better idea of what types of realistic, attainable, and specific goals your employees or company might set, here are a few examples.
- Over the next two months, I will complete a course in the top marketing software in order to improve the efficiency of financial data analysis for my company.
- During the next quarter, I will spend 25 percent of my time at work engaging in in-depth research of our company's main competitors to identify potential competitive advantages.
- In the next year, my team and I will research and implement the best time management resources and practices to improve the efficiency of remote working policies.
- As a team, we will come together to identify and implement the best wellness strategies aimed at improving the health and happiness of our employees in order to improve our workplace culture and productivity levels down the road.
Make Workplace Wellness Your Goal With Work-Fit
Work-Fit a national leader in providing wellness, ergonomics and injury prevention and management for your workforce. Our workplace wellness program is a great resource that can provide healthy lifestyle education and services that promote work-life balance, fitness, diet, exercise, and mindfulness for your entire workforce. Contact Work-Fit today to learn how we can help your company improve your workplace wellness culture.
