If you are looking for ways to get ahead in the workplace, have you considered the simple art of setting goals? Setting goals can really help you develop at work and set you on a journey for success on your chosen career path. It is amazing how goals can focus your mind. In this article, we consider five ways that setting goals can improve your work performance.
Before we begin, it might be helpful for you to sit back and think, what are my goals? These could be goals for your career, or just for managing your current workload. When considering goals, it is best to choose between one and three, or it can all get a bit complicated!
Goal setting helps you prioritise your time
It can be ever so hard to manage your workload sometimes! It is especially hard when you are trying to get ahead. Doing extra training, taking on additional tasks and being a supportive team member can mean your inbox is always full, and your to do list is ever growing. If this sounds like you, setting goals can be a helpful way of supporting you to make decisions about what new work to take on.
If you don’t have any clear goals, it can be too tempting to say yes to everything that comes your way. However, if you write down a couple of goals to guide you, then you can consult your goals before you take on additional tasks or training courses.
For example, you could a goal to learn a particular skill, or gain experience in a certain sector. If a new opportunity comes along that does not help you on the way to this goal, you can say no! Only accept work that helps you along your chosen career path.
It can be hard at first, but the only way to improve your work performance in the areas you value most, is to be rigid and focussed. Don’t let yourself get dragged away down any irrelevant rabbit holes, use goal setting to get moving down that career path.
Goal setting helps you finish your tasks on time, or even with time to spare!
We’ve all been there, the night before a big work deadline that we’ve known about for months and… so much work left to finish! The heart is racing, the coffee machine is working overtime, and you can only wince at the quality of the work you are churning out under pressure.
Good goal setting can really help you avoid situations like these. Goal setting is the cornerstone of successful project management – as soon as you get a new work project, sit down, and plan exactly how you can break down your work into small achievable goals to meet that deadline in a realistic way.
Rather than the work appearing as a huge overwhelming task, good goal setting will mean that you know what you are supposed to do each hour, each day, or each week, to get that work finished to a high standard and on time.
Being organised in this way will mean your work performance is massively boosted, and people will be coming to you for career development tips as you are quickly promoted for being the person who consistently delivers!
Goal setting motivates you to be more efficient
Picture the scene- it is a Friday afternoon, and you are already imagining yourself on the beach with a pina colada in hand. You want to check Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for the hundredth time, and nothing is stopping you! You know you have work to do, but surely some of it can wait till next week?
Goal setting can really help you here! If you don’t set goals for yourself, it can be so easy to get into a rut a work where you willingly waste time because you don’t feel any pressure. If you want to get ahead, it is important to motivate yourself to be as productive as you can be. Employers won’t look kindly upon you if they see that your performance drops off on Friday afternoons, or, any time at all!
If you set goals, it helps you to know what you need to achieve to deliver excellent work on time. If it is all laid out in front of you, you can see that by doing that bit of extra work on a Friday afternoon, you will be making your life easier next week. Good goal setting means that you allocate your time in a way that shows you that every second counts, and it helps to keep you on track.
Goal setting can help you become more efficient at work and help you get that promotion!
Goal setting inspires you to be innovative.
If you are just ticking along at work, and not bringing anything new to the table, you are not likely to get recognised or promoted. Do you want to remain stuck in the same job for years to come, or do you want to make headway along your chosen career path? Goal setting can really help you with career development by encouraging you to be innovative!
If you have a particular goal you are working towards, such as getting a promotion by the end of the year, your brain will start to look for ways to reach that goal. You will seek new opportunities to impress your boss, or volunteer to do that extra training course! Without a goal, you might fall into a rut of not wanting to take on anything new, being quite happy where you are now.
Working towards a goal may also get your creative brain juices flowing. If you are hungry to reach your goal, you are more likely to have great new ideas, and contribute innovative solutions to problems that come up in the workplace.
If you are the type of person that comes up with new ideas, you’ll be flying along to the next stage in your career in no time at all, all thanks to those motivating goals.
Goal setting helps everyone in your team
A sure-fire way to boost your work performance is by working effectively in your team. Setting goals in your team is one way to improve your whole team’s work performance as well as your own!
If your team is struggling to communicate, or no one is really sure what their role is, it can be really stressful. You might start to take on other people’s work loads for fear it won’t get done, which might mean you start to neglect your own work, or just get really stressed. It may also lead to conflict at work, which hurts everyone’s morale.
Goal setting can solve so many problems in teams at work by helping people to come together and work on problem solving as one unit. You could start by doing an amazing team building exercise to set team goals. Each person could also be given individual goals within the team, so that everyone feels valued. Team goal setting activities can help to bring people together and work together effectively to meet shared deadlines and targets.
Without goals, it can sometimes feel that a team is like a boat with no oars, or even worse, oarsman rowing in different directions. Goals provide not just the oars but the map of where each oarsman is getting to! Goal setting can really help your team, and therefore you, get noticed for the right reasons.
Your individual work performance will greatly improve if you know exactly what you need to do as an individual, but you also feel confident that every person in the team is doing their bit to contribute to the success of a project.
To summarise – goal setting can help you win at work!
Without goals, you might find yourself totally adrift in your work-life, not sure what to do from minute to minute, not sure how to prioritise, what to say yes or no to, or when you need to work hard to meet a deadline.
Goal setting is a really simple everyday discipline that helps you become more efficient, prioritised and innovative, whilst delivering excellent work both on your own and within your team.
It can be extremely helpful to physically write down your goals at your place of work, or at home. Invest in a white board and some colourful markers. I know we live in a computer age, but nothing can be more eye catching than a big colourful display by your workspace, constantly reminding you of what you should be focussing on!
Furthermore, your colourful white board and goal setting habits will be the envy of the office. Your managers at work may notice how organised you are, which never hurts your promotion prospects.
The practice and art of checking your goals before you begin each day, before you take on new work, or before each team meeting, can boost your work performance massively and help you on the way to promotion in your chosen career path.
Go out, set your goals today, and foster that winning mind set!