The importance of investing in clear goals, follow-up and feedback!

03/11/2017

The importance of investing in clear goals, follow-up and feedback!

Johan Book writes his second article for HR2 Mentor, this time about the importance of investing in clear goals, follow-up and feedback.

Clarity and commitment are key to your business's success. What do your goals and those of your employees really look like? Properly designed goal work with connected follow-up and feedback increases efficiency by over 25 percent! And you're not going to say "no thanks" to that, are you?

Studies show that nine out of ten strategy implementations are not successful. You fail to achieve the goals set and simply fail to achieve what you want to achieve or achieve so much. The main reason is that managers fail to break down and refine the goals together with their employees. And if the will, priorities and goals of your managers and employees are not in line with what you want to achieve, then you have problems. Big problems.

Clear and engaging goals are like thunder honey, it makes us strong!
Clear, engaging and challenging goals are a hell of a lot of fun. And good. And useful. We like goals, then we have something clear we want to strive for and that we can plan and prioritize around. It makes us feel good, involved and community. Important factors for motivation and goal fulfillment. Unfortunately, studies show that we have a very great potential for development in terms of both goals, involvement, follow-up and feedback in our organizations.

If we start with the objectives, it is not enough for them to be clear. They must be engaging and properly formulated as well. The different objectives should be:

1. Performance targets, what are we going to achieve?
2. Process objectives, what are the phases to achieve the performance goals?
3. Learning goals, what should we learn to be cruelly equipped for success?

The performance goal may be fixed, but the current learning and process goal should involve your employees to a large extent. That they are involved and have an influence in developing the "solution". After that, it's time to ask yourself how best to improve follow-up and feedback on what you've agreed. But first, make sure the goals are properly in place!

Starting to follow up on your work will do you good!

Continuous follow-up and feedback on properly performed target work has been shown in meta-analyses to increase productivity by an average of 25 percent. So invest heavily in continuous and relevant follow-up and feedback. Using the methodology of AAR (after action reviews) increases goal progression, productivity and motivation. Sprinkle with encouragement and focus on following up on the hard work, that is, the process and learning goals, rather than the performance goals. The result is only one consequence of your hard work. Never forget that.

Take goals for goals and discuss them continuously as follows:

  1. What was the goal?
  2. What was the result?
  3. What did we do well? Why?
  4. What did we do less well and how do we improve this?

Run so it smokes, but with a clear direction, commitment and follow-up!

/Johan Book

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