Feb 19 2008
How To Keep New Employees On Track
Employees need to have clear goals and objectives in order to encourage them to develop their skills and confidence and ensure that they remain on track within the organisational context. Employers should strive to create a supportive and structured approach to helping employees to remain focussed on work goals. This article seeks to examine some practical ways to help employees stay on track.
1. Involve the employee in establishing clear objectives
This may be obvious but in my experience it’s surprising how regular employees have goals and objectives forced upon them with little or no involvement in the process. If the employee is excluded then how can they take ownership of the goals set for them? The best way to involve the employee is to ask them what they would like to achieve, what aspirations they have an what training needs they can identify in their own circumstances.
2. Appoint a Mentor
All new staff should be appointed a mentor to help them learn the ropes and keep them on track until the feel more confident. Employee orientations are a great place to introduce them to their mentor so that they know who to go to ask questions or ask for support in their day to day duties. Ensure that the mentor is an experienced member of staff that is both approachable and an effective worker, that a new employee can learn from.
3. Use a consistent approach to objective setting
It is important that a system exists to set goals and objectives and this is applied consistently throughout the organisation. Consider using Personal Development Plans (PDP’s). These are a tool of preference in most large employers. PDP’s are simply written documents tailored to the needs of individual employees that contain a mixture of five personal development goals and five corporate goals. PDP’s provide a uniform but personal approach to goal setting which can be evidenced and reviewed at a later date.
If you do decide to use a personal development plan then consider using an approach to objective setting called SMART. This is used in a number of industries.
a) Specific - Keep your objective to the point and don’t waffle.
b) Measurable - Is your objective something that can be easily measured.
c) Achievable - Is your objective something that the employee can achieve even if it is a challenge.
d) Realistic - Is your objective realistic and within the boundaries of possibility.
e) Time bound - Is there a timescale you can put on achieving the objective?
Adopting a SMART approach to objective setting will lead to clear concise objectives which are easy to record, measure and assess.
4. Short Term and Long term goals
It is critical that an employee has a mixture of short and long term goals within the organisation to enable motivation to be sustained. Too many short term goals and an employee will quickly become bored and disinterested having achieved them. Too many long term goals and they will struggle to maintain enough motivation to achieve them. It is usually advisable to set five short term and five long term goals to create the right balance, but be willing to vary the amount based on individual employee needs and ability levels.
5. Review Goals Regularly
Organisations often make the mistake of failing to review employee goals leading to poor levels of monitoring and staff perceiving goal setting as a purely superficial exercise. Research shows that staff are more likely to achieve goals if they know that the organisation they work for will review them regularly. Having taken time to set goals ensure that your organisation schedules time to review these and assess progress made in achieving them. This will also lead to improved job satisfaction for employees as they have a means of reviewing the progress they are making and will lead to highly levels of productivity for the organisation.
If goals have become unrealistic then remove them and replace with new goals. Remember good goal setting is a dynamic and flexible process it should never be viewed as a one off activity or it will undermine the whole process.
TIP: Consider reviewing goals every three months.
6. Keep a Record of Agreed Goals
This links with the importance of having some written form of personal development plan (PDP). PDP’s are a great way to record what goals have been agreed. It is much easier to review progress on achieving goals if you have a good written record.
7. Reward employees for achieving goals.
Rewarding employees when they achieve goals is essential for showing an organisations commitment to the process. After all, goals are agreed to enable the organisation to improve and increase its productivity, so give staff a share of the improvement through appropriate rewards.
8. Agree Evidence Requirements
It is paramount that you agree from the outset what evidence should be provided to demonstrate that a goal has been achieved. Without evidence how can you verify if a goal ha been achieved. Evidence can take a variety of forms depending upon the objective. Meeting a sales goal might be easy to evidence as you can physically verify the sales revenue, but improving customer service might mean evidence being collected from observations of that employee during interactions with customers.
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Tags: goal setting, objective setting, SMART objectives
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