3 tips for impactful HR goals
It’s the most wonderful time of the year
Ah, the New Year … that time to reflect on and create new resolutions. I love this time of the year. Everyone seems to start fresh again. The gym is crowded. The grocery store is sold out of organic foods. Each of us is focused on making this year the best ever—and work is no exception. With all of the year-end stuff completed, it is time to focus on what you will get done in the coming year.
I don’t know about you, but I spent much of my professional life dreading goal setting. I probably wasn’t alone, right? Even though most of us already have full plates with our day-to-day jobs, we still have to come up with a big overarching thing to accomplish during the year. It seems an impossible task. But, over time, I developed tips to help me think about my role in the context of the organization’s purpose. This, in turn, helped me create goals that had a true impact on the organization.
So, this is your year to do the same. Sound hard? Well, it can be, but having impactful goals also makes your work more engaging and meaningful. That’s why I want to share three simple tips that hopefully make this process easier for you.
Post-holiday refresher
Before I dig into this, let’s go back to why setting impactful goals this is important. In my previous blog post “A new role for HR”, I suggest HR should evolve to be the advocate of an organization’s purpose and protector of its values. Remember, life expectancy of Fortune 500 organizations has reduced from 75 years in 1955 to 15 years today. Ensuring a sustainable organization requires a long-term focus on advancing purpose. You play a role in this by creating meaningful goals that advance your organization’s purpose.
Tip #1 – Connect your role to the organization’s purpose. Would you set a goal of losing weight without a reason why? You might tie losing weight to a bigger purpose in life—to look or feel better, have more energy, reduce your blood sugar, etc. The same is true when you set goals at work. They become meaningful when you connect your goal to the larger purpose in the organization. That’s why I recommend you start by connecting your role to the organization’s overall purpose.
Let’s be real: you are likely going to struggle with this connection. Many organizations have lofty purposes, which are difficult to connect to daily work. But, we’re all working at an organization to help it solve a specific problem. For example, if you work in talent management, your role is to develop the workforce skills that the organization needs to impact the lives of the people it serves. You (along with talent acquisition), as the talent supply chain, identify how you will develop the skills needed to advance the purpose. This can be anything from growing existing skills, identifying adjacent skills that can convert into future skills, and determining the skills you will need to find externally.
Once you understand how your role is connected to the organization’s purpose, you can take a step back to understand what the organization is trying to accomplish in a given year. What are the one to two big things that you hear about at town hall meetings, when talking to your leaders, or during investor calls? This could be anything from entering a new market, launching a new product, increasing market share, etc. When you know how your role advances the organization’s purpose and you understand the big-ticket item(s) for the year, you have the context to figure out how you can create an impact.
Tip #2 – Identify meaningful activities to help advance the organization’s goals. So, now that you have the context to create an impact, how do you come up with meaningful ways to make a difference? Well, let’s say the big-ticket item this year is for your organization to penetrate the South African market. What can you do to help with this?
For example, you can create an overall people strategy and approach for how the organization will enter the new market—in other words, you develop a deep understanding of the market from a talent perspective. You evaluate South African labor regulations and educate your leaders on the key implications to the organization. You also determine the type of labor you will need, assess the existing labor pools, develop a plan to recruit and mobilize talent leveraging the local culture and recruitment norms; or, even move existing employees from another country because maybe there is no local talent. From there, you develop and execute a plan to ensure your market entry is successful.
Being proactive about identifying how you can play a role in your organization’s goals is one way to find meaning in your work. It can pay huge dividends, and if done right, leaders will view you as making a valuable impact on the organization.
Tip #3 – Be accountable. If you set a goal to lose ten pounds, but at the end of the year you only lose two pounds, have you met your goal? You may have worked hard throughout the year by improving your eating habits and going to the gym a few more times, but the bottom line is you did not accomplish your goal.
Many of us have a tendency to stop short of fully measuring whether we actually achieved our goals. For example, let’s say the organization’s goal is to have a fully functional team of 100 employees in South Africa and break-even financial performance. The only way you can measure the success of your goal is to have the same metrics as the overall organization. If you develop and execute a people strategy that only yields a team of 50 when the organization has committed to 100, as hard as you tried, the goal was not accomplished. Impactful goals means taking accountability for what happens. While it can be nerve-racking when you don’t achieve goals, you learn from every experience (and more so from your failures). You will emerge stronger from these experiences and knock it out of the park the next time.
Let’s do this!
So remember:
#1 – Connect your role to the larger purpose of the organization;
#2 – Identify meaningful activities to impact the big-ticket item(s) your organization is trying to achieve;
#3 – Hold yourself accountable to the same results as the organization.
This is your year to set and achieve impactful goals.
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