It’s that time of year again.   You are probably planning your budget, setting goals, and designing an incentive and rewards program to align employee goals with your practice goals.  Sounds pretty easy, right? So why do we find it so hard to get everybody on the same page?

And what are you planning to do to try to solve the problem?

The following are six tactics that we teach our members to help them exceed their goals:

1. COMMUNICATE your employee goals and business goals often – We found that just like anything else in business, if you want to have a remarkable impact, you need to communicate well and often.  Employee goals are no different.  The more employees hear about their goals the more focused they will be on their goals.
2. Make employee goals and business goals TRANSPARENT – Explain the “why” to your employees.  Explain their WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) Explain why the goals are important, how they affect the practice and how exceeding the goals positively affects them personally.  Whenever you get a chance talk to your employees about the positive impact they can have on the practice.
3.  Make employee goals MEASURABLE – Use goals that can be tracked and presented back to your employees.  If employees are going to put effort into doing something they are going to want to see how they are doing.  Think about it like school.  A student puts many hours into a class and then takes a test or does a project.  That student is going to want feedback in the form of a grade or advice.  We have found that employee engagement increases as feedback increases.
4. Make employee goals ATTAINABLE – Employees will not put any effort into goals that they think cannot be achieved even if you think they can.  We have had success by starting out with smaller goals and increasing them little by little.  All of a sudden employees hit goals that they once thought of as unattainable.
5.  Give employee goals a TIME FRAME – Setting a time frame for goals allows you to do two things:
   
   • Change the goal after the time frame depending on the results.
   • Give feedback to your employees.
     Also, the structure of a start and end date helps with employee motivation. For example, I am going to enjoy a run more if somebody tells me to run a 5k as fast as I can, instead of telling me to go for a run until I feel tired.
6. INCENTIVIZE and REWARD all employees – Employees incentives and rewards have worked best for us when they include all employees at all levels of the organization.

Let us know what you are doing to exceed your goals by commenting on our blog.