How often are you going to get in a friend’s car if you don’t even know where they’re going? Similarly, it’s going to be very hard to convince current employees and job candidates to stick with your organization if you don’t have concrete goals you’re aiming for.
While you’ll always have that handful who are down for the ride regardless of the destination, crafting impactful goals that your team can have a significant influence on can boost your ability to attract and retain talent.
Not only do quality goals unify what your team is striving toward, but they can also drive performance, help with task prioritization and boost motivation.
Crafting Meaningful Goals
If you don’t know where to start with creating goals your team can get behind, reflect on your company’s vision and values. Any goal you set should be tied back to what your company stands for.
For instance, Ziehler Lawn Care’s purpose is to make life more enjoyable for both their customers and their employees. This is why their Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) is to make 20,150 lives more enjoyable by 2030 by growing to over 20,000 active customers and building a team of 150 employees.
Involve your team as you create your goals. If you want to garner support, these decisions shouldn’t be made in a vacuum. Employees can also have insights you may not have considered about a specific goal.
At Milosi, they set goals when they create their annual budget. Every employee has an annual performance review and goal-setting meeting. Their quarterly goals are reverse engineered to reach their yearly goal.
Breaking your goals down into more achievable tasks is key to not overwhelming your team.
When you reach these smaller milestones, make a point to celebrate them instead of simply pushing your team to focus on the next objective. Constantly moving the goalposts can drain your team and minimize their accomplishments.
Also, don’t overlook the value of making sure that your goals follow the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound) criteria.
Ask yourself and your team:
- Is the goal specific?
- Can progress be measured for this goal?
- Is the goal realistically attainable?
- How relevant is this goal to the business?
- What is the timeframe for achieving this goal?
While a lot of companies set goals around sales figures and growth of the business as a whole, don’t overlook other aspects of the business you can improve with concrete goals.
For instance, you could set a goal to reduce customer callbacks by 30% over the next quarter. This will improve your bottom line by increasing your efficiency but also enhance your overall customer service. If your company’s mission is to delight your clients and be a lifelong partner, focusing on strengthening every element of your customer service should be a priority in your goals.
Another possible goal is to work to reduce on-the-job incidents by 25% through better training and daily huddles that focus on safety. Many companies have found employees appreciate it when safety is emphasized and are more than willing to work toward operating safely.
Common Missteps When Setting Goals
When you’re in your brainstorming phase, it can be easy to see multiple areas of improvement and want to set goals for all of them. However, if you have far too many goals set at the same time, it will be far more challenging for your team to drive towards any of them effectively. In some cases, certain goals may inhibit the ability to complete others.
You don’t want to tell your sales team to close more enhancement jobs when you’re also asking that division to rework all of their processes. This could lead to work being completed at a slower pace than anticipated as your enhancement crews evaluate new job sequences.
This is why it’s important to talk to your field team to see if the goals developed in the office are actually achievable. Don’t forget to communicate the why behind a specific goal. Some individuals need to see the bigger picture before they can get fully bought in.
As you consider your goals, think through what behaviors drive those outcomes so you monitor the right metrics.
“For example, with enhancement sales, we monitor the number of proposals, proposal dollar volume, and aging proposals (proposals that remain open but haven’t been won or lost),” says Joe Socolof, COO of Landscape Workshop. “Tracking these behaviors ensures we are proposing enough work and following up effectively.”
Reviewing your progress is critical, as goals aren’t relevant if no one checks on them. At times, you may even need to adjust your goals.
Jason Cromley, CEO of Hidden Creek Landscaping, Inc., based in Hilliard, Ohio, says they initially aimed for a 25% increase in revenue in 2024.
“As the year started, it really looked like everything was on point,” Cromley says. “We were hitting budgets, and then for some reason or another, we just got some really slow clients, and so we had to re-forecast our budget. We’ll still see an increase of at least 10% from last year, just not the 25% we were thinking.”
How To Address When You Miss the Mark
Everyone loves to win, yet there will be times when your team falls short. Sometimes, it could be due to unforeseen external circumstances, and other times, it could have been a goal that was simply too ambitious.
In some cases, the team may not have committed to the goal.
When this occurs, don’t punish your staff for not hitting the goal. Instead, encourage open conversations to see what got in the way. Was it incredibly rainy that spring? Were team members reluctant or unwilling to use a new software tool?
Once you know the cause behind the failure, you can plan as a team what can be adjusted next time. While you can’t prevent rainy days, you can build out more backup plans to keep employees occupied and improve your messaging to clients so there isn’t an increase in dissatisfaction.
Also, not reaching your goal doesn’t automatically mean no progress was made. If you wanted to increase your maintenance contract revenue by 15% by the end of the year and your sales team go it to 10%, that’s still progress. Acknowledge your team’s hard work and express your belief in reaching the ultimate goal. Discuss if there is any way to better support them as they strive toward the target.
Don’t abandon your goals if your team fails to reach them in your allotted timeframe. You can adapt the goal itself or when you want to reach it.
