Goal Attainment & Evaluation Template
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This Goal Attainment and Evaluation template enables you to track and evaluate an individual's progress in attaining their annual goals.
Every manager that has a team under their watch knows that goal setting is paramount to success. Without goals, the team will wander aimlessly and nothing will be accomplished. Goals help to keeps minds focused, and efforts united towards a common end. However, measuring the accomplishment of those goals is sometimes tricky and often forgotten about. Measuring success is almost as important as setting the goal in the first place. If you don't take the time to evaluate your teams' success of each goal that is set, they will quickly stop paying attention to the goals after they realize that no one is tracking the results.
In order to track goal achievement on a regular basis, you need to set good goals as the manager of the team. Consider the following two options for goal setting -
"Improve the process by which we train our manufacturing employees over the next three months."
"Reduce manufacturing time by 5% over the next three months through the improved training of our manufacturing staff."
Both of those goals could be given to a team that has been tasked with helping to streamline manufacturing processes and cut costs. However, one of them is easily measurable while the other is ambiguous in nature. The first goal provides no firm measure against which you can deem success of failure. What does improve the process mean? It could mean many different things to different people, and therefore the team might believe they have succeeded in that goal while you might not agree.
On the other hand, the second goal is a perfect example of measurable goals that can be evaluated on a periodic basis. The goal includes a time line (three months) and an exact measure of achievement (reduce time by 5%). At the end of three months, the manufacturing time can be analyzed and compared to the times recorded before the project was undertaken. If efficiency has been improved by 5%, the team was successful in their task. If not, questions will need to be answered as to why the goal was not achieved.
Not only will this kind of goal setting make measurement easier, it will also help the team to be more productive along the way. The human brain has an easier time attaching itself to defined goals and staying focused on making them a reality. That 5% mark will be burned into the memories of each team member, and they will focus all of their efforts during that three months on getting the results they are looking for. Team members can keep each other accountable by using the goal as a motivator, and should be able to self-evaluate during the process to see how close they are to the goal.
One more benefit of specific and quantifiable goal setting is the ease with which the results can be relayed to upper management officials. As a team manager within an organization, you likely have higher level managers whom you answer to on a periodic basis. They aren't going to be satisfied with you simply saying that your team is meeting its goal - they will want hard proof. When you show them the goals that you have been setting for them periodically, and how they have been accomplishing them, you will be demonstrating your worth as a manager. If you want to move up through the organization over time, showing just how productive your teams have been is a great way to make that happen.
In reality, the key to successful evaluation of team goals can be found in the setting of the goal itself. If you set smart goals that have a timeframe and a quantifiable evaluation, you won't have any trouble deeming if the goal has been achieved or not. Carefully think your goal setting through before passing them on to your team. The effort you put in up front will be paid back when you have no trouble telling the team if they have succeeded or failed in the task they were given.
