Setting employee goals gives your employees something to strive for and work towards. This not only benefits your employees, but it can benefit you as well. Many employees want to advance and earn more money. Setting goals for work evaluation helps them to see what they need to do to work towards a position that may be higher in ranking or better paying than the position they currently hold. This can motivate your employees to work harder, so they can achieve their goals. As an employer or business owner, hard-working and motivated employees benefit you, just as much as it can benefit your employees.

When you are helping to set goals with your employees, it is important that you provide them with realistic goals and feedback on what they can do to achieve these personal goals. Sit down with your employees and find out what each hopes to achieve over the course of their career, and then put together a plan that can help them reach smaller goals and larger goals. Having goals will not motivate employees if their goals are unachievable or they do not know how to reach their goals. Working hand-in-hand with your employees to set and come up with a plan for their goals can help ensure you both are on the same page and can equally benefit from the goals.

What makes a good employee goal?

When you are helping your employees to set goals, it is important that you learn what a good employee goal is versus something that is generic. For example, an employee saying they want to advance and earn more money is generic. An employee stating that they want to work towards becoming a supervisor would be a specific, actionable goal. Something that is too generic can be difficult to set specific steps to work toward, whereas steps can easily be drawn up and worked towards for something that is a specific employee goal.

As you sit down with your employees and come up with the types of career goals they are looking to make, you should be setting goals using the basics of setting what are known as S.M.A.R.T. goals. S.M.A.R.T. goals stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Each goal that is being set should meet each of these criteria. So, when setting goals for work evaluation, ask yourself if the goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. If you can say yes it is to each of the criteria, it is a good goal. If you cannot say yes, then the goal needs to be modified so that you can say yes to each criterion.

Examples of goals for work

Coming up with goals for work can be challenging for both you, your management or leadership team and your employees. As such, providing everyone with examples of goals for work or sample employee goals for work may help you to see the direction you should take as you help your employees set goals. Here are a few of the examples of goals for work that you should strive for.

Developmental goals for employees

As you set goals for your employees, you will want to set developmental goals. A list of performance goals for objectives examples may include learning how to work a specific machine, learning how to a new skill for the company on the computer or furthering their education so they have the education needed to achieve their goal. Career goals examples or performance review may include what their next career move is, or what position they are working toward achieving next as they work their way up the career ladder.

Employee goals for performance reviews

Setting goals for an employee to reach is important. You want to ensure that the goals are laid out for each employee and are measurable during performance reviews. Annual performance review employee self-evaluation examples may include asking the employee how well they feel they are doing at their job, how well they are reaching their goals and what areas they feel they can grow in. Sample employee comments on performance review examples include letting an employee rate themselves and, rating their growth, rating how close they feel they are to their goals and what, if anything, you can do to help them grow.  Some of the work goal examples for evaluation that you want to include are measurable performance-related criteria, such as how much they made in sales or how many credit applications an employee processed.

Personal development goals for leaders

Everyone in your company should have goals, including personal development goals for leaders. A list of performance goals and objectives for managers may include how well their team rates them, how approachable their team feels they are, how well their team feels that they communicate, and how well their team is doing in meeting company goals. A great leader will want to set goals that can help them to better communicate, work more effectively with their team, and possibly even reach a higher position within the company.

Goals for bank employees

Bank employees should have goals that are related to their line of work within the bank. For example, a bank teller may have a goal related to speed. You want to ensure the tellers are working quickly to get customers through the line. They may also have a customer satisfaction goal, ensuring customers are satisfied. Loan originators in the bank may work to get new loans and close loans. Their goals should be related to these factors.

List of performance goals and objectives for customer service

Those who work in customer service need to be measured on the customer service that they provide. Asking customers after their transaction is over how they would rate the person who helped them can provide you with a measurable element for a satisfaction-related goal. These goals should be measured all the time, and then given to your employee on their performance review. Performance review comments examples may include something along the lines of, 10 out of 100 customers gave you three out of five stars, while 30 out of 100 customers gave you four out of five stars.

Types of career goals for sales reps

Setting career goals for sales reps can be challenging. Some sales reps want to continue working in sales, as they may earn a commission. Others may want to advance in their field and work as a supervisor or in upper management. Talk to your employees and find out where they want to take their career and why. Some career goals examples for performance review may include showing an employee exactly what their sales numbers are, what percentage of leads they converted to sales, or what percentage of their sales come back and made multiple purchases.

Free employee goal resources

Having the right resources is important to help your management team help with employee goals. Fortunately, there are many different tools and templates that can be used to help provide your management team with employee goal setting ideas, as well as a place to list those ideas for each employee. We know how important this is, which is why we offer a free employee goals template, as well as other templates that you can use for goal setting with your employees. Here is a little bit more information about the various templates that we offer that may be beneficial to your business and your employees.

Training plan template

Your people are your most valuable asset—and setting them up to do their jobs with excellence will pay enormous dividends for your bottom line. That’s why building a training plan is the most important thing you can do for your business. This training and development plan template gives you the tools to ensure that you’re creating the right goals for employees.

Employee development plan

Another one of the templates that we offer is an employee development plan. On this type of template, we allow you to come up with a list of performance goals and objectives. This can help your employees see where they are starting and where they want to go within your organization. From there, more specific goals can be set to help your employee achieve their final goal. Utilizing a Smart goals template helps you to ensure that the goals are good goals, rather than generic ones.