Working in a team has huge advantages, as it brings together a wide range of skill sets and experiences, and setting goals as a team helps you to build better bonds and solve problems as a collective. Goals that are specific to your team give everybody a common goal to work towards.
But what are team goals? Team goals are milestones or objectives that a team works towards together. Team goals are often used to measure points in a process or to develop skills across the team or the organization as a whole.
Team goals also help employees to feel more engaged and invested in the objectives of the organizations since they play a part in developing them. Setting goals as a team is also a chance for everybody to show off and develop their skills, and provide their unique experience.
Performance management systems and HR tools often provide guidance on how to set team goals, such as PulseHRM. With their performance management system you can set team goals and manage them easily. Below we’ll take you through six common steps in setting team goals, a few examples of what team goals look like, and how to measure their success.
Six Steps to Setting Goals As A Team
Setting goals as a team is about collaboration and communication. To motivate your team to reach these goals, you need to find the balance between getting the most out of individual skill sets and using them to achieve the ultimate goal. Let’s take a look at some useful strategies that can help you set goals as a team.
Keep the goals of the organization in mind: Ideally your goals should always contribute to the wider goals of the organization, so before your team goals are set, make sure the team understands the objectives of the organization.
For example, if your organization wants to improve customer acquisition rates, then an appropriate goal would be to design advertisements that boost website traffic. This goal contributes to the objectives of the organization and displays an understanding of the objectives.
The SMART system: Before any team goals are set, you should all understand the SMART criteria for setting goals. These are:
- Specific: The more specific your goal, the easier it is to tackle and focus on it. Therefore, you are more likely to succeed. Being specific also helps you to measure progress and create more effective action plans (more on that later).
- Measurable: If you have measurable goals it’s much easier to keep track of them. A measurable goal can also be split up into smaller, more manageable milestones that you can monitor. For example, measuring your progress towards a 25% improvement rate is a lot easier than measuring progress toward an ambiguous goal.
- Attainable: Team goals should be realistic to achieve within the time frames. If your goal is achievable you can be more efficient with your time and resources.
- Relevant: While you and your team may want to address a few issues at once, focusing on team goals that are relevant helps you prioritize the more pressing issues, and ensures you have all the resources you need to accomplish the goal.
- Time-related: Finally, in order for your team to work productively and efficiently to accomplish the goal, you should set clear deadlines.
Create an action plan: Setting a goal is only the beginning, you should also create an action plan that your team can follow as you work towards your goal. Your goal also needs to be measurable so that you can pinpoint clear milestones in your action plan.
A good action plan should also ensure that your team has all the resources it needs to carry out its responsibilities, such as equipment, software, and necessary training.
Let team members create individual goals: You and your team can become more invested in your team goals by setting up your own personal goals. In other words, once your team goal is set up, create smaller, individual milestones that utilize everybody’s skills, resources, and experiences.
Keep the SMART criteria in mind as you create these goals, so each member of the team has productive, achievable goals.
Assist with individual responsibilities: While you may have a group objective, each team member should have their own responsibilities and individual goals. You can do this by scheduling regular one-to-one meetings with team members to discuss the goal and your progress, ask questions, and raise concerns.
You can also provide advice and offer training to each team member in order for them to fulfill their responsibilities, and work with team members to achieve their individual milestones that help them keep track of their own progress as well as that of the team’s.
Furthermore, you can also provide regular feedback on elements of the team’s progress, and you can state how much you are willing to learn the concerns of the team and answer their questions and then follow that up with action.
Follow up: After you’ve reached the deadline to achieve your goal, arrange a follow-up with team members to celebrate your successes and also plan for future goals. If goals are accomplished, then you can recognize each other’s efforts and reward them.
This reward can be a gift, or maybe a celebratory meal. You can also follow up in one-to-one meetings and gather feedback on what went well and what could have gone better during the process of achieving the goal.
12 Examples Of Team Goals
Setting team goals that are achievable, measurable, relevant and specific can be tough, especially if you’re not used to setting team goals. Below, you’ll find 15 examples of team goals that you can use and customize to the objectives of your organization.
- Aim for an 85% customer service and support satisfaction rating by a given time.
- Revise and refine your business strategy by the end of the financial year.
- Review accounts over a certain amount of biannual spending and arrange a strategy meeting.
- Onboard 15,000 new online customers per quarter.
- Secure start-up funding to cover a year of activity.
- Increase social media presence by gaining more followers on Twitter, or likes on Facebook by 50,000 in six months.
- Hold two interviews per week over the course of three months to hire a new manager.
- Prepare for a product launch by finalizing pre-launch deadlines, guidelines and tasks before a chosen deadline.
- Follow an office-move checklist to complete the transition to a new workspace by a chosen deadline.
- Reduce overtime by 30%.
- Make sure that 100% of the team has been trained on new technology by the end of the month.
- Conduct at least one team-building activity per month.
Advantages of Team Goals
Setting team goals that you work on collaboratively is beneficial for you, your team, and the organization as a whole. Let’s take a look at some of those benefits.
- Team goals give team members a greater understanding of how their role fits into the operations of the group and the organization.
- Team goals give a clear direction for your team.
- Team goals encourage accountability and responsibility.
- Team goals improve trust and encourage collaboration.
- Team goals help team members to grow and develop new skills.
- Team goals help to measure individual and group progress and evaluate performance.
- Creating team goals helps you to prioritize and helps you to recognize overlooked areas.
Even just coming together as a group and defining your goals can be beneficial, and gives everybody time to reflect on their progress, what you have achieved, and what the next steps are. This process should clarify any misunderstandings and highlight any conflicting priorities. This process also helps team members to become more invested in the goals of the team. Setting goals for your teams is incredibly valuable and takes time to do properly.
Managing The Goal-Setting Process
While the SMART method gives you the structure for clearly defined goals, there are other aspects of the goal-setting process to take into account.
Align goals with objectives: Before you meet with your team, meet with your manager to make sure you are clear on what the organization expects from your team. This gives you a blueprint of what SMART goals you need to create with your team.
Re-frame goals in a way that is meaningful to your team members: You need to find out what motivates your team to accomplish their goals, and frame them in the appropriate way to encourage enthusiasm.
Listen: While the organization’s mission as a whole is a good guide to develop high-quality team goals, you need more information. Namely, the insights from your team on what can be improved, and their ideas on how your team can be successful. Be creative and engage with your team, listening to key ideas for setting and achieving your goals.
Recognize your contributions: As a leader you are part of the team, and you should identify what it is you need to do to accomplish your goals. When everybody is clear on what your goals are, it feels like more of a team effort.
Take your time: Gather as much feedback as you can from your team members and draft as many goals as you require until you find one that hits all the SMART criteria.
Make sure everybody is on the same page: This means making sure no team member is left feeling unsure, unmotivated, and left behind. Everybody should feel enthusiastic about achieving their goals and know what they have to do to achieve them. To make sure this is the case, have one-to-one conversations with your team members to clear up any concerns. After all, a key part of communication is listening.
Your team members will feel more incentivized if they actually feel heard and when accommodations are made if necessary in order for them to feel confident in accomplishing their goals.
How to Measure Your Team’s Success?
The most critical part of team goals is ensuring you know how all team members will measure their success. This could involve creating an accountability system that tracks everyone’s progress. When a team doesn’t achieve a goal, it’s often because there was no accountability system in place to motivate and encourage people. Some great practices for measuring success include:
- Decide on a goal-tracking process, and who is responsible for tracking different elements.
- Choose a technology that is easy to use and helps you clearly track your team’s work. This ensures greater accountability.
- Be aware of what data sets you need to measure progress and make sure that the relevant team members have access to that data.
- Schedule regular one-to-one meetings to get input from your team on progress that’s been made and any potential barriers to success.
- Provide progress updates. This can be measured weekly, monthly, or even quarterly depending on the goal. It is recommended to provide data and progress updates to senior management.
But throughout the whole process, make sure you focus on what motivates your team members. When measuring progress toward team goals, you have the opportunity to make necessary amendments to the team goals. Progress should be transparent, and you should be honest about barriers that have come up, or if milestones are not being met. It’s productive to have an open discussion about what is working and what’s not within your team.
Some team members may need additional support, and some team members may advocate for more resources and time, and it’s important to acknowledge that. When things are heading in the right direction, progress should be celebrated with the team members to further incentivize them.
Final Thoughts
Setting goals as a team isn’t easy, but hopefully the above examples and the steps you need to take have given you a better idea of how to set goals for your team. Performance management systems such as PulseHRM also help you better manage team goals, and always keep the SMART method in mind.
As long as your goals are specific, can be measured, are achievable, relevant and have clear deadlines then there is nothing your team can’t accomplish!
