Goal setting is an important practice – particularly in the workplace. Research (Goal setting and worker motivation) has found that setting strong goals boosts performance, increases effort, inducing stronger focus and helping prioritise. They act as motivation to go beyond the basics of your job.
Let’s delve deeper into work goals and why you need them.
What are work goals?
Before you set work goals, you need to understand what they are and why you should set them.
What are work goals? Work goals are targets or objectives that you aim to achieve. They help you gain experience and improve your skills. You can have personal development goals, such as ‘improve work ethic’ or ‘develop workplace relationships’, or professional development goals, like completing a certification course or becoming a manager.
You may be questioning why you should set career goals, well here are four reasons why:
- Direction: professional goals can act as a guide because they can help you answer questions such as ‘what do I want to learn?’ and ‘what do I want to achieve?’ When you know what you’re working towards, your priorities become more focused.
- Clarity: By having set clear goals it can help you see the bigger picture. You are able to manage your time and resources better since you now know the skills you need to develop, how to develop them, and by when.
- Motivation: Setting short-term performance goals keep you motivated and on track to achieve your overall goal. You can measure progress toward these short-term goals and identify where improvement is needed.
- Career development: the process of setting and defining goals helps you develop both personally and professionally.
Getting started with creating work goals
So you know what goals are and why you need them but how do you set them?
You can use the acronym ‘SMART’ to help you with your goal setting.
A smart goal is:
- Specific: Your goals should be as detailed as possible to leave no room for procrastination or excuses. Set real numbers with real deadlines.
- Measurable: Ensure your goals are trackable and not too vague. For example ‘finish the marketing course by May 30th’ is a measurable goal that gives you a clear direction.
- Achievable Work towards a goal that is challenging but possible. Evaluate the steps you need to take and the amount of time required to complete them.
- Relevant: Your workplace goals must be related to what you want to achieve in your career.
- Time-bound: Always set deadlines or a defined period for your goals. This provides clarity and creates a sense of urgency to take action.
To give you inspiration when setting you career goals, here are five suggestions:
1. Complete a certification
Set the goal of completing a course related to your current role or the job you’re aspiring for to develop your knowledge. Certification courses are great at helping you improve your skills and provide insights into your industry. Understandably, adding a course to complete on top of your daily workload can be hard to handle. For better organisation and clarity on the tasks you need to complete daily or weekly, you can use a Work Operating System such as monday.com to help. The system features nine different project board views and the ability to group tasks, meaning you’ll never lose track of what to work on or when.
2. Ask for feedback regulary
Setting this goal is crucial for your career development. While you might have an idea of where you need to improve, feedback from peers, managers, and your team could give you a different perspective and open your eyes to any gaps you might have missed. Using monday.com can help you collect feedback regularly via forms within project boards. You can customise each form, allow anonymous submissions, and share different forms with different departments.
3. Learn a new tool or software
By learning how to use new tools or use existing software more efficiently can help you work faster and complete more tasks. The more tools you learn, the larger your work scope gets, allowing more opportunities to be explored. Furthermore, learning new tools and introducing them to your peers or manager identifies you as a knowledgeable employee. For example, becoming proficient with monday.com can help you organise your work more efficiently. monday.com’s easy-to-use, intuitive, platform means you’re not going to invest hours in getting up to speed. Moreover, by introducing monday.com to your team can boost your workplace collaboration.
4. Improve your communication
Communication is integral for developing workplace relationships and how you’re perceived. It also impacts your team’s work efficiency. Workplace communication goes beyond verbal communication. It includes chats, emails, comments, etc. If you want to improve, you can take public speaking or communications courses, etc. To assist with streamlining your entire workplace communication you can use monday.com. The WorkOS has dynamic project boards that allow for in-task comments, a discussion page for the whole team, and integrations with third-party apps like Gmail.
5. Utilise your time
Better time management is a great goal when you’re trying to complete your work more efficiently. However, this is easier said than done, especially if you’re working from home with distractions that lead to procrastination. To achieve your goal you can time track, which helps create a sense of accountability. This leads to better deadline management and might even improve your work-life balance. monday.com has the feature to track the time you take for each task. You can then review this information and if you thought you could complete a task in two hours but the time tracker says you took four, you can evaluate where you’re going wrong. The platform also allows you to set clear deadlines and milestones for every project and sends notifications to keep you focused.
You’re ready to take those goals
Setting work goals are crucial for your personal and professional development. Once you’ve set your goals, you can focus on reaching them with the help of WorkOS platforms such as monday.com.
Contact us to learn how you can start planning and crushing your goals with monday.com.
