Things To Consider When Defining Business Goals

Business goals are an all important part of an organization. They are what a company expects to accomplish over a specific period of time, say 3-5 years. They give an organization direction, and setting them is what helps an organization measure results.

Business goals also help everyone in the organization (whether it is stakeholders, management or executive employees) acknowledge what the organization is trying to achieve, thus providing a rationale or a guiding beacon for making every decision. However, there are certain things that an organization must consider before defining their business goals. For example, one of the primary considerations should be that the business goals should be SMART, i.e. (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound).

In this articles let us discuss some more considerations that should be kept in mind when defining business goals.

1. Set SMART Goals

Of course, as mentioned above, goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound, which is to say that they should be clear, with every parameter defined. For example, “increase revenue” isn’t a SMART goal. While “increase the revenue attained by product by 10% in the next 5 months” is a SMART goal. Also, just setting a SMART goal is not enough. It should be followed through by concrete planning i.e. what are the steps you need to take to achieve this goal? Plan in detail, document your plans, and review them frequently from the day you decide to start a business to ensure that they succeed.

2. Put Mechanisms In Place To Ensure That Goals Are Achieved

After you have planned steps to achieve a goal, put them into motion by creating a mechanism that will help your organization achieve those goals. For example, if your goal is to increase employee knowledge and skill by 50% by next year, you need a learning and development program that has the potential to actually achieve it. Without effective implementation of a learning and development program such as digital learning (a combination of contemporary learning technologies such as eLearning and mLearning) that engages employees and delivers knowledge and skill development to them in a way that they feel comfortable with, your plans to increase their knowledge and skill will be frustrated. As well as this, this technique helps learners retain learned information for long periods of time. Goals without mechanisms to support it will never reach fruition, and remain just that – unachieved goals.

3. Make Sure That You Expend Resources In Alignment With Your Goals

Just like you need mechanisms in place to fulfil your business goals, you also need to plan which resources to expend when and where in alignment with your goals. Say if your goal is to increase sales, all of your departments must work in alignment with the goal. The marketing team, the lead generation team, the customer service and experience team, as well as the product development team must all think of ways to increase sales by doing what they can in their respective departments. By concentrating the lion’s share of your resources in the fulfilment of the current business goal is the way to achieve it in time. Although this may mean that you have to slow down certain other activities of your organization, it is important to proceed. Surveys reveal that resources are often spent on activities that do not align with the current company strategy, and thus do not add to the company’s growth.

4. Communicate Business Goals To Every Member Of Your Organization

It goes without saying that the business goals currently being pursued by the organization must be communicated to every employee in the organization. Usually business goals constantly evolve to adapt to changing circumstances. Every new development that brings even a slight change in the business goals must be communicated to the concerned teams, for them to change their mode of effort as required. Keep giving your employees short-term goals to fulfil in pursuit of the long-term business goal. This gives them a measurable sense of progress as well as frequent sense of accomplishment when short-term goals are achieved.

Business goals are only as effective as your planning, mechanisms, resources as well as your employees. Fine-tuning all of the above mentioned points will help take your business goals to fruition.

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