5 Strategies for Setting Smarter Business Goals

Business goals can be a lot like New Year’s resolutions: If you’re not careful, they’ll be nothing more than wishful thinking.

According to Inc. magazine, there are four main types of business goals:

• Service goals, which focus on improving customer service satisfaction or customer retention.
• Profit goals, which concentrate on increasing profits by a certain percentage.
• Growth goals, which relate to the expansion of the company (e.g., through new employees).
• Social goals, which focus on giving back to the community (e.g., through philanthropy or volunteer programs).

No matter which type of business goals you want to set, follow these strategies to ensure you and your team can see progress and succeed:

Strategy 1: Make your goals specific. Setting a goal such as “We will improve our hospital’s information technology (IT) services in order to better serve our patients, the hospital staff, and the public” is too far-reaching and too vague. Instead, you should set detailed goals that concentrate on specific objectives, such as improving the reliability of the IT infrastructure by reducing server downtime or making the user interface of the hospital’s picture archiving and communication system (PACS) more user friendly.

Strategy 2: Make sure your goals are measurable. You must be able to measure progress toward reaching a goal. Otherwise, you won’t know whether you’ve reached it. For example, if your goal is to make the PACS user interface more user friendly, you might use the number of Help desk calls regarding PACS usage as the measurement. It’s a good idea to include the measurement as part of the goal, such as “Making the PACS user interface more user friendly to reduce the number of Help desk calls concerning its usage by 50%.”

Strategy 3: Assign action items to individuals — with deadlines. When setting goals, it’s important to document what actions need to be taken to reach the goal and the individuals responsible for those actions. Setting a deadline for each action will help keep the team on track.

Strategy 4: Devise a plan for reaching large goals, creating subgoals if necessary. If you want to set a large goal, it’s helpful to devise a plan for reaching it. Such plans often include subgoals. For example, the goal of improving the reliability of the IT infrastructure by reducing server downtime by a certain percentage might be broken down into subgoals like creating high-availability server clusters and installing redundant power supplies in 100% of the server facilities. Like the main goal, each subgoal should have an associated metric, assigned action items, and deadlines.

Strategy 5: Create enthusiasm and celebrate successes. Let’s face it: Reaching goals can be hard work. You can help motivate team members by creating enthusiasm for reaching the goals. You should explain what’s in it for them. For example, you might point out that improving the reliability of the IT infrastructure will mean a lot fewer trips to the office at 3 a.m. to deal with a server failure.

Equally important is celebrating successes. For example, you might treat the team to a pizza lunch and recognize the accomplishments of each team member. Even a sincere “thank you” to each member can go a long way in recognizing his or her contribution.

When setting and carrying out your goals, it’s important to be flexible. Things change, so you might need to adapt your goals, action items, or deadlines.

[cta]US East will help you set and reach your goals. Contact US East at info@useastusa.com or by phone at 212-840-3444. Or visit our website.[/cta]