By John Rampton, founder of Palo Alto, California-based Calendar, a company helping your calendar be much more productive.
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Fresh starts and renewed motivation are inherent to a new calendar year. That makes it a great time to set some ambitious yet attainable goals for your team. The milestones set will mark the path forward if you make them clear, monitor progress and measure outcomes.
Goals for KPIs like sales quotas and profit margins are common and valuable. But employees have realigned their priorities. They’re less driven to top the sales charts and more driven to achieve feelings of worth, belonging and purpose. Your goals should pay special attention to that transformation as well.
Establishing goals for team collaboration and engagement requires a little more thought and planning than, say, setting a target for customer churn. But particularly now, these goals are equally valuable for your team and the company as a whole. Here are some ways to jumpstart your efforts to make next year a great one.
Improve Team Collaboration
You know how important collaboration among and between teams is for creating great products and services, delighted customers and contented employees. You also know collaboration can be a tall order in a remote or hybrid workplace. That’s why setting a goal to increase it is a worthy one.
You can use multiple strategies to improve team collaboration, but how do you measure it? Too often, leaders rely only on observation and instinct. However, measuring collaboration is possible if you know what to look for.
If you don’t already have a baseline, establish one by surveying team members to uncover their current perceptions about collaboration on a scale of 1 to 10. Have them rate statements such as “Team members are open to discussing project options,” “Team members have the resources they need to produce their best work” and “Important decisions are discussed before they’re made.” After you work on addressing identified trouble spots, have employees retake the survey to see whether scores rise overall.
You can also inventory individual activity on your collaboration software. How many times a day does each team member report status, ask questions, share documents or message other team members? It will be obvious who is and isn’t collaborating on a project. Use your one-on-ones to encourage increased participation by setting individual goals and a team meeting to set an overall goal for collaboration.
Don’t forget to track KPIs related to employee and customer satisfaction and employee turnover to see whether increased collaboration results in meeting or beating goals for those indicators. Collaboration can be measured. You just may need to get a little creative to do it.
Increase Team Engagement
Engaged team members are more productive, dedicated and vested in the success of their team and the company as a whole. They’re also happier with their jobs, which means they stick around for the long haul. Setting bold goals for increasing your team’s engagement and working toward them is a valuable exercise in leadership.
Work-life balance, support for career goals, health and safety concerns and other fairly subjective issues are drivers of employee engagement. Moreover, engagement may ebb and flow at certain times of the year. That makes setting and measuring goals a little more challenging, but it’s not impossible.
Start with your own assessment of your current team members. Based on observation, classify each as actively engaged, not engaged or actively disengaged. Consider factors like demonstrating a positive attitude, contributing to discussions, asking for and providing feedback and being willing to help other team members. Use one-on-ones to discuss where you believe each employee stands with regard to engagement and suggest ways you can work together to move the needle for each of them.
Next, look at data such as employee turnover rate, absenteeism, unused paid time off (PTO) and employee promotions, raises and bonuses. Use this data to set goals, such as reducing the number of employee resignations and increasing the number of PTO days used during the year.
Check in with individual team members for feedback when they appear to be becoming either more or less engaged. Recognize the efforts of those who go the extra mile to encourage more of the same and to serve as an example to other team members. The rules of engagement aren’t the same for every employee, but the value of their commitment is.
Set Them And Go Get Them
Clear and compelling communication plays a key role in setting goals for your team in the new year. So make sure each team member knows the goals you have established and the indicators you’re using to measure achievement. Report progress or the lack thereof at periodic intervals and ask for feedback about why team members think they’re moving forward or what’s holding them back.
Don’t just set collaboration and engagement goals and forget them. Give your team the leadership support it needs to reach these objectives. And when they do, don’t neglect to celebrate wins in collaborative and engaging ways.