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Setting Goals for Your Organization and Measuring Them Properly
By Shawn T. Kiley

Aloha!

During my years in management one of the most difficult things with goal setting, especially when working in a team environment was measuring the goal. 

Setting a goal for your organization is the easy part. It’s the regular evaluation of whether or not you are meeting your goal that is a little more difficult. I have found that setting goals and measuring them in your organization is a lot like raising kids. If you’ll take a look at the table below, you’ll see what I mean. 

Your entire organization down to the lowest level, must be able to see themselves achieving the goal.  They must have a clear understanding of the goal; they need to understand that their behavior will be monitored during the goal achieving process; they must agree, at least in principle, that the goal is worth achieving.

Measuring the goal should include one or more of the following three elements: quality, quantity, and time.  For instance, if you operate a chain of retail stores and your goal is to have every customer who walks through the front door greeted within 20 seconds, no matter what, (as you can see, I place a strong emphasis on that because I feel it is extremely important), you’ll want every sales associate to know what that looks like. 

In this instance the staff is likely to come up with several reasons why they can’t greet every customer.  “The store’s too busy.” That’s the most common one I hear. Nonsense.  I have never seen a customer get offended by a sales associate who is helping them say “excuse me for one moment please,” and then warmly and sincerely greet the customer that just walked through the door with “Aloha or Hello, welcome to Acme Retail, please feel free to look around and let me know how I may assist you.” BAM!  Done.

It’s your responsibility as an operator to show your staff what that looks like and how it can be done.  Of course, there will be rare instances in which the customer cannot be greeted immediately, but those instances are rare.  Role play with your staff.  Take the role of both associate and customer.  Let a sales associate play customer and come into the store and not be greeted at all and then ask them directly, “Would you feel like shopping here?”

Now that we’ve defined our goal quality, what it’s supposed to look like, let’s take a look at how we are to measure it.

Following are components of an effective goal – one that describes performance standards that will “tell us what good behavior looks like.” Let’s then move to a time factor. We want our staff, our entire organization to understand the importance of greeting each and every customer no matter what every time.  Create a timetable that is realistic and that everyone can buy into.  “Can we achieve this in two months? Great! We will be evaluating your greetings on our shopping reports and this is now a “nonnegotiable” or “100% happening” policy of Acme Retail. We agree that we will all do our very best to greet each and every customer and we will have two months to get it right.”

Reward in open, critique in private. If you own or operate a chain, and a store has achieved their goal, reward them! There is a great book by Bob Nelson entitled 1001 Ways to Reward Employees . You’ll find that very few rewards require funds. Most employees just want to hear their boss telling them in front of others what a great job they’ve done. There’s one idea.  There are a thousand more in his book.  It should be on every manager’s bookshelf.

Follow up, follow up, follow up. If you’re not using your reports to achieve your desired results than we’re wasting each other’s time. You must make it clear to the employees that this is not just important to the organization, it is a requirement in order to work here, because we agreed in principle on it.

In summarization:

Realistic	The goal should ask people to stretch some, but allow the likelihood of success.
Understandable	The goal should be written in a context that everyone understands.
Measurable	The goal should include one or more of the following: quality, quantity, and time.
Behaviorally Focused	The goal should represent an observable behavior.
Agreed Upon	The goal must be agreed upon by team members.

Have a wonderful month.  Stay happy, because grumpy people rarely succeed, and call me if I can be of any assistance to you or your organization.

Until next month... Shawn