Accountability in the Workplace Tip #4 – Goals and Expectations

Setting SMART Goals and Clear Expectations are an essential part of the process of achieving higher levels of accountability with your peers and employees. Goals must be determined before expectations can be set and Expectations have to be set before someone can be held accountable for meeting them. Often we use the terms Goals and Expectations interchangeably. This happens most often when expectations are implied during the goal setting process. For example, when setting the goal to reduce errors in a process by 25% there is an implied expectation: you make 25% less mistakes. However, there are significant differences between goals and expectations. A Goal is something to strive for; a target to reach but it is not an obligation other than the obligation to try. An Expectation on the other hand
is an obligation considered reasonable, due and necessary. In performance management terms, the expectation is the minimum acceptable performance level and a goal is some point beyond the expectation that the manager and employee have agreed to target. Going forward from here, I will talk setting goals and expectation and the process for both are nearly the same as long as you keep in mind the differences: Targets vs. Obligations.

The goal and expectation setting process is not a complicated one. It can be difficult to pick the absolute right point to place as a goal or expectation, but in most cases it is less critical to be absolutely correct than it is to get a goal set and get commitments to striving to those goals. If you follow the guidelines for setting SMART goals, you should be fine. Many books, papers and websites give great detail to setting SMART goals but I’ll run through the basics. First the acronym:

S – Specific

    M – Measurable

    A – Attainable

    R – Relevant

    T – Time bound

Specific:

Both Goals and Expectations should be very clear, unambiguous and specific. There is no place for vagrancies when setting goals because a specific objective has a much greater chance of being accomplished. Specificity also facilitates measuring progress towards achievement. In the context of developing goals, Specific means that an observable and quantifiable action, behavior or result is described which is also linked to a measure of some type such as a rate, number, or percentage. Using the previous error rate goal as an example it is not enough to say our goal is to reduce errors. The goal should be quantified more specifically. To do so, you and the employee(s) need to answer and agree to six “W” questions:

Who: Who is involved?

What: What do we want to accomplish?

Where: Identify a location.

When: Establish a time frame.

Which: Identify requirements and constraints.

Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal

Measurable:

The old adage is that if you don’t measure it, you can’t control it. What good is a goal that you cannot tell if any progress is being made on it? So to be effective you must create a tracking system to measure progress on reaching the goal that provides feedback in a timely basis. Let’s use a real life example that nearly all companies want to improve upon – Customer Satisfaction. Everyone wants to improve on customer satisfaction. But how do you measure customer satisfaction in a way that is measurable in real time so that feedback can be given to the people that are trying to improve? Typical measurements are surveys that can take weeks to get back therefore delaying feedback for periods much too long to effect any real change. When facing this challenge, break the overall goal down into more manageable buckets. What are the controllable components of customer satisfaction that your employees directly control that can be measured? If you in a call center environment it could be things like:

• Time to call resolution
• Number of call escalations
• Number customer calls per issue

One note of caution goes back to a previous post: select the right measurement or you may get the wrong result.

Attainable:

Both Goals and Expectations should be achievable. Since expectations are obligatory, they have to be doable. That does not mean that they have to be easy but you must put people in a position to be successful or you are dooming them, and you, to failure. Goals, on the other, should stretch people more than expectations. They still should be achievable, even if it takes what for the individual is a herculean effort. Beyond this, the goal becomes ridiculous and it actually becomes a demotivator and a source of dissension in your organization.

Relevant:

Goals and expectations should be relevant to both the individual and the organization. A goal for which an employee has no influence upon is again worse than irrelevant, it is a distraction and a demotivator. Setting a goal or expectation to increase sales on a production line worker is not only irrelevant it is not attainable.

Time Bound:

Both goals and expectations need to have distinct starting and ending points. If the goal has a significant duration (this will vary by what the goal is) then a series of milestones should be defined. This increases the sense of urgency for accomplishing the objectives. Human nature being what it is, most people wait until the last moment to get things done. By setting a series of short interval milestones, then you can help the employee be successful by ensuring that they are taking incremental steps in achieving the overall goal or expectation.

When Goals are not needed:

There are also many times when goals are not needed in order to set expectations. Would you really go through a goal setting exercise in order to set the expectation that someone is to come to work on time? No. Nor should you. Some things in the workplace are not or nor should they be negotiable. Honesty, integrity, reliability, loyalty are all attributes that should be simple expectations in any organization that are framed in goals. These are pure obligations that come with employment or membership in the organization. A job description is another example of expectations that are not necessarily tied to goals. A job description states the minimum expectation of someone filling a certain role.

Tip # 5 will pick back up where Tip #3 left off in the process of improving workplace accountability.