Are you SMART enough?

If you aren’t measuring the performance of your business, how can you improve it? More importantly, how can your team help you to achieve your goals?

Quantitative data

Numbers. Sharing numbers allows you to communicate in a way that is more quantifiable, data driven and not steered by feelings, which in turn is more target driven.

Ask yourself: What key milestones do I want to hit?

Share this data with the rest of your team. The best way of sharing these are through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), as this way you are able to track your progression in real time. The most popular measure in business is profitability, but it can be anything you wish to monitor.

The majority of KPIs are created by senior team members at the top tier who may not be focused on the day-to-day tasks of the business, and are instead focused on creating goals for the future.. This means that the rest of your team are unaware of how their work is aiding you in achieving your key milestones. If everyone within the team understood how they impact the KPIs, they are able to provide value to the business, and as a bonus, they would be motivated to perform efficiently and more productively to act on these goals.

Measuring the right KPIs

It is imperative to share the right aspects with your team when it comes to KPIs. For example, if you were aiming to sell websites and offer bonuses to those that sold the most websites to help hit the target, then you would find the majority of your team looking for quantity over quality. If one team member came back with three websites worth £60,000 in total, versus a team member that brought in ten websites worth £30,000 altogether, the second team member would receive the bonus. This, of course, isn’t beneficial to your business. Therefore, when sharing KPIs, ensure you explain the objectives clearly, so that they align with your business targets.

SMART Goals

We have all heard about SMART goals and yet so many still don’t fully utilise this simple, but effective, goal-setting concept. There is a correlation between effectively set personal goals that align with your business’s overall strategy and an increase in both team and business performance. These goals should be created with the SMART framework in mind, and then evaluated and readjusted where required:

• Specific- Team state exactly what it is that they want to accomplish
• Measurable – Progress needs to be able to be tracked
• Achievable – Challenging, but attainable by your team
• Relevant – It should make an impact on the overall business strategy
• Time-bound – Establishing a reasonable deadline to achieve the goal by

Setting these goals allows your team to see how and where their job role fits into the bigger picture of your business targets. It holds people to account, which helps your team grow and develop over time, by taking more responsibility.

By communicating your targets and objectives with your team, you enable them to see the business as their own, increasing their awareness of the business’s KPIs and consequently making them more business savvy. However, it is easy to overwhelm your team with too much information. Instead, keep it simple and actionable, enabling your team to perform better. Focus on just three key metrics. It also enables them to further contribute to the development of the business, and feel like part of the success, increasing their engagement and growth within your business.

Dig a little deeper:

• Find out more about KPIs – bit.ly/video-what-is-an-okr
• Read further on measuring what matters – bit.ly/read-measure-what-matters

Chew on this:

Are your overall business goals SMART? If not, how can you change them to make sure they are?