Seven great examples of performance goals and objectives

Looking for examples of performance goals for your employees to improve your evaluation process? Great! You’ve taken the first step towards improving your employee performance and motivation. How?

Well, by setting clear and well-defined goals you and your employees are on the same page about what’s expected of them. And when someone has a clear goal in mind, they’re more focussed on achieving it rather than just working without any direction.

That’s why goal-setting is so important for organisations and boosting employee performance.

In this article, we’ll walk you through seven types of performance goals and some examples to get you started.

Here we go.

1) Productivity

If you’re looking for examples of employee performance goals, then productivity and efficiency should be at the top of your list. After all, these are the two performance goals that every employer cares about and evaluates.

Productivity is simply the quantity of work that an employee does or the output they produce in a given period of time.

Examples of productivity performance goals:

Deliver 10 graphic design visuals to the client every week
Write 1500 words of content every day

2) Efficiency

This is one of the examples of performance goals that factor in the resources used to accomplish a task. So, an employee may be productive, but not necessarily efficient if they’re using too many resources to meet their productivity goals.

So, efficiency goals are focussed around achieving better results (output) by utilising fewer resources (input). You can set these performance goals based on an employee’s role, job responsibilities, and the kind of resources they use to do their job.

Here are some examples of efficiency performance goals:

Increasing the throughput of a production line by X% in one quarter by removing bottlenecks.
Increasing organic traffic for a website while reducing the amount spent on SEO through innovative SEO experiments.

3) Skill development

One of the important performance goals you should set for your employees is skill development. Every professional needs to upskill themselves to stay relevant in the ever-changing and evolving business environment.

But how can you measure skill development?

One easy way to do that is to encourage your employees to take training courses and see how many and what type of courses they’ve completed in a year.

You can tie up with an online course platform like Thinkific to offer a variety of training courses to your employees.

Examples of skill development goals:

Spend X hours every year on training courses, including 2 mandatory courses.
Complete an animated video production certification course by the end of the quarter.

4) Time management

When talking about examples of performance goals, you can’t miss time management. Though it is a kind of efficiency goal, it’s important enough to be assessed separately.

As an employer, you should not encourage employees to spend more hours, but to get more done in the time they do spend at work.

Encourage them to track their daily activities to see how much time they spend on different tasks. Train them to prioritise their tasks and focus on the most important ones first.

You can create a time management action plan for employees. Or use this simple activity log template that you can share with your employees to help them track and prioritise their tasks to manage their time better.

Image via MindTools

Here are some examples of time management goals:

Reducing the time taken to complete a task by X% within a month.
Completing all projects and tasks before the deadline and utilising the time saved for other tasks.

5) Collaboration

Improving collaboration skills is one of the examples of performance goals that are more qualitative than quantitative.

Of course, you’d want your employees to collaborate with each other and work together as a team to grow your business. But how can you measure employee performance on this goal?

Well, it’s complicated.

One way to do this is to find the number of projects or tasks on which an employee collaborated with other teams or team members within their team. This could include joint initiatives such as co-marketing campaigns. You can see how good the output was compared to solo projects and even ask for peer-to-peer feedback.

Another way is to trust your employees and have them do the work of proving their success in accomplishing their collaboration goals by l. Let your employees do a self-evaluation and list their accomplishments and specific instances where they did well while collaborating with others.

You can also improve team collaboration by partnering with an event agency. They can plan team-building activities, corporate retreats, or interactive workshops that strengthen collaboration across your organization

You use right type of CRM tool to centralized your business operations and quick access to the required information by your team.

Need some examples of performance goals that assess an employee’s collaboration skills?

Here are some examples:

Work on at least 3 inter-team projects every quarter and seek feedback from colleagues on your performance.
Spend X hours every month helping other team members complete their tasks.

Use virtual collaboration tools have been invented to make remote work as effective as possible. Examples of such goals should be that employees gain knowledge of various virtual communication tools, collaboration tools, time tracking tools, e.t.c. Having them learn their use and importance in a set period of time.

6) People management

People management skills are required at every job level to a certain extent and are not limited just to leadership positions.

A regular employee deals with clients, team members, managers, and a lot of other stakeholders on a regular basis. The two most important aspects of people management are client management and team management.

The first requires setting clear expectations and meeting them to keep the clients happy. An employee’s performance on this goal can be easily assessed by client feedback.

Second, on the other hand, requires delegating tasks and managing a team to improve the collective performance of the team. Here’s a simple worksheet for delegating tasks.

The performance of an employee in managing a team can also be assessed by the team’s overall performance and feedback of team members.

But what are the kind of performance goals one can set relating to people management?

Here are some examples:

Improve the quality of work for X client and get better feedback compared to the previous quarter.
Delegate 80% of tasks to the right team members and spend time only on the top 20% according to priority.

Given that this is a qualitative aspect of business, you should also encourage employees to set some personal goals, such as:

Becoming a better mentor
Building better relationships with team members
Developing better listening skills
Taking courses on improving communication skills
Or whatever aspect they need to improve on to develop better interpersonal skills

7) Innovation and creativity

A good workplace is one where employees feel empowered to take risks and try new things, even if they fail sometimes. And a good manager should encourage employees to be innovative and creative.

How can you foster a culture of innovation?

Add it as one of the performance goals that you’d consider while doing the annual performance evaluation. Set clear expectations about what goals would be considered under this category.

Here are some examples to get you started:

Take initiative and suggest ideas to improve existing systems, processes, etc.
Start a new initiative and update the reporting manager on how it’s going.
Try something new in your day-to-day work and share its impact, irrespective of whether it was positive or negative.

This is one of the performance goals that you should track, but not enforce strictly. Creativity does not flow under performance pressure, so be very careful to only encourage creativity and innovation, and not enforce it.

Apart from this you can find micro influencers to train and motivate your employees for better performance. Relevant and talented micro influencers always help you boost your employees morale.

That’s it, the end of our list of examples of performance goals. Now, it’s time to put these into action.

Ready to change the way you evaluate employee performance?

Setting clear goals for employees helps keep them motivated and working to achieve a set milestone. If you’re vague or unclear about what you expect from your employees, they’ll be working aimlessly.

Well-defined performance goals also help you build transparency in the performance evaluation process. This, in turn, breeds trust in you and your organisation.

So, use these examples of performance goals to set the right goals for your employees, depending on their roles and responsibilities. Ensure that you set realistic and achievable goals and don’t set your employees up for failure.