Why are we here? This must be the first question which should come into our minds when we think about our role in any organization, this question can only be answered if first we realize the mission and strategy of that organization, and the answer to that question is to achieve a goal which helps the organization achieve what it is striving for, and that goal defines exactly how important our role is for that organization.

Goals management is one of the key aspects in the life span of any organization and its workers, as it revolves around both these entities and takes them to the level where they need to be.  The key point to note on the goal management is that goals don’t define our success or achievements, they are but the measurement of above two factors, hence the most important part is to define the right goals to use them as a scale of our performance and efficiency.

My philosophy about defining a goal is very simple and straight forward; it starts from realizing your own vision, realizing the vision and goals of your organization and aligning them both to make sure that both are being fed properly.

Goals should be S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely); these five factors define how good our goals are and how good we are in defining them.

• Specific- goals should be defined in precise terms with no confusion
• Measureable- goals should be discretely measureable to judge our progress
• Achievable- goals should not be set too high to achieve to minimize the fear of failure at the back on your head
• Realistic- goals should be challenging but must be achievable in the given time frame
• Timely- goals should always be defined with a specific and realistic time line to achieve

How do we define SMART goals,  for that I suggest a few factors to keep in mind while defining our goals, which include but not limited to clarity of goals, our priorities in personal and professional life, our relationships and how they affect our career, personal or professional and our habits, which define our success. Goals are not a source of motivation but if our goals are not inspiring or motivating for us, that means we failed to define the right goals no matter how SMART they are.

Defining our goals is not achieving it, to achieve our goals we need to be focused towards our goals, keep track of our progress, have a weekly progress review based on the timeline of the goal, improvise the goal if and when necessary and be prepared for the celebration upon their achievement.

Do your employees care about what place they’re working in and if they belong there? Do they think they are being valued?

If they do, they are emotionally involved with their work and organization. Though, being emotionally involved is not a practical thing in a professional world. However, people who are warmly connected with their workplace also believe in their team and the work they do. They are more loyal and go out of the way when it’s about the growth of their company. In simple words, they are more engaged.

Inspiring organizations always engage their employees to enhance their creativity and productivity. For this they figure out where their employee rate on the scale of engagement and the main drivers of engaging employees.

Organizations must know about the main areas which they can use to make their employees more engaged. Though, there are different drivers for different types of jobs, still, there are some basic factors which help employees keep engaged. Here are some of them:

1.      Opportunities

According to a research, top most drivers to engage employees are career opportunities provided to the employees. When employees do not see a clear path in an organization they are working for, they feel disconnected which ultimately leads to disengagement and low productivity.

2.      People

By people I mean every person directly or indirectly linked to a workplace. Whether it is a leader, a colleague, a peer or a manager; everybody influences each other’s work. Creative and leading people around you motivate you to perform better.

Leaders can help employees by spending some time with them and focusing on their strengths. They can also engage employees by involving them in overall company processes or identifying a problem and engage in the discussions to find a solution.

No one is perfect but being authentic is something which helps you to maintain good relations with peers and managers. Having honest people around you keeps you out of all the skepticism and prejudice.

3.      Clear Feedback

Have you ever considered feedback as a tool? If not yet, use it now. People want to know whether or not they are doing well. A few words of sincere feedback can give a boost to their morale.

Feedback is not always about praising the work. They are human and they can mess things badly. Feedback is all about being honest. If it’s about fixing a mess, fix it. People learn more from their mistakes. You simply need to guide them in a better way.

4.      Reward and Recognition

This is a Eureka moment for your employee, what do you do? Does it really happen to be a memorable day for him/her?

Recognition is important because it has everything to do with employee engagement and actually inspire employees to do more in future to hold on the earned respect.

When studying about the organizational behavior of the employees, business ethics cannot be ignored. Business ethics (if positive) help you to cling with the community with a favorable impression. If a company has strong ethical code observed, it could lead to high employee productivity and employee retention.

Some of the unethical behaviors that people commit in organization could be the following.

Acting Good or Being Good….

In a work environment, you can either be good or act good. To act good is when you actually care for yourself interests, but you want others to see you acting good (while being selfish) because you want to leave a positive impression. To be attracted to things of self-interest is human nature.  Often, our main source of motivation is concerned with our own interest and welfare.

Some common examples of being unethical in regard to acting self-centered are:

• Taking things of your interest without owner’s consent
• Entering false data in reports to give wrong information and trying to justify it
• Padding a business expense with personal activities

However, to be good is just being good even if no one notices you. While being good you are not being self-centered. People around you soon notice the difference of acting good and being good so chose the right thing for yourself.

Deceiving others….

Some people tend to use other people to get to climb the ladder. Getting credit of what you have not done is another example of unethical behavior. Deliberately deviating from truth deceiving others to get your work done is obviously not a good practice. Common examples of such a behavior are:

• Counter-mining the work of your peers
• Taking credit to the work you did not do.
• Failing to honor mutual expectations

Disregarding others conscience….

If someone is forcing you to do something wrong or being an employer, you assign an unrealistic goal to your employee and threaten him to achieve it, otherwise he can lose his job, are examples of unethical behavior. Being an authoritative figure, you do not have a right to disregard other person’s conscience. Common examples include:

• Giving an unachievable figure to a sales people
• Asking your employee to lie about the product to customers
• Having little or no respect for colleagues

Employees, who are generally disrespectful and contemptuous, commit immoral acts for their social rapport and for their own small benefits. This kind of unethical behavior only gives satisfaction for a little while, but subconsciously it leads to remorse caused by feeling responsible for some offense.

To maintain healthy organizational culture, strong ethical codes need to be followed. Every individual has to play his own role. Apart from creating a healthy culture it also helps to avoid employee lawsuits against the employer.

Here are some tips to avoid unethical behavior in your organization:

• Make people realize that every individual has some interests. Rather than working for own interests everyone should work together for mutual benefits, which would lead to both individual success and organizational success.
• Provide them reason to behave in an ethical manner.  Attach some reward for those who follow code of ethics and some punishment for those who do not.
• Moral development does not stop at particular age. Managers should conduct workshops tailored to teach norms of ethical behavior among groups.

Get your facts!

We have added a new section of Advanced options. In this section

• You can assign a metric (a parametric quantity that determines performance) against which you can measure the specific goal, e.g. number of sales.
• If you chose to assign metric, you must assign some target, e.g. 30 sales before the deadline.

Keep in the sunlight!

You can keep on measuring an on-going goal based on the metric you defined while setting the goal. This would help to control Goal’s progress by both parties, manager as well as the employee.

Note: This option will appear only if a metric is defined while creating a new goal.

Let your employees know they are going strong!

To back up employees all the way through achieving a goal, motivate them by real time recognition. This would help them to know how they are performing and are moving in the right direction.

Kudos can also be displayed in Company News Feed if you choose to publicize your employees’ achievements.

Show approval and appreciation!

No doubt, recognition always helps to encourage and motivate employees. With WorkforceGrowth, let your employees know they have done a great job in achieving the assigned goal.

Along with the final rating of a goal, you have the option to give kudos to the goal performer.

Readily apparent to the mind!

For your ease, we have divided the goals’ detail page into sections:

• Goals progress section, which would draw out its details from the targets and the metrics in advanced settings.
• All the documents attached along with the goal, will be shown in a separate section.
• All the kudos received for the goal will also be shown in a separate section on one side.

Stick a note along with the template!

Now the HR manager can add a note regarding a template while sharing it with an employee to communicate any message. WorkforceGrowth has added this feature to create an ease for the HR manager, letting them not to miss any important note in regard to that template.

Want to write in your own language?

We are excited to inform you that WorkforceGrowth now supports characters from all the languages. Add characters from any other language in any of the free fields in your WorkforceGrowth account to make it more personalized.

It doesn’t matter if you want to write your name in Hindi, Polish or any other language. WorkforceGrowth gives you complete flexibility to use the alphabets of your own language and enjoy the system at its best.

Recently, I was going through an article which mentioned top 50 diverse companies in the world. Almost all of them are making profits and have been booming businesses. When it comes to diversity, I immediately think of a diverse workforce-people with different languages, perspectives, experiences and even level of compassion and gentleness.

Is it really a trouble-free and effortless task to manage people with a number of differences, make them work and become a member of top 50 diverse companies with successful operations? A huge workforce with so many cultural, behavioral and professional differences, cumulated in one office, working together joyfully-sounds like an imaginary world, isn’t it?

How does the whole system work? When companies start diversifying, the first thing managers need to do is, to study the behavior of their employees. To make a diverse workplace work to get productivity, managers should have all the information about their employees’ behavior, performance and personality traits.

To study the behavior, you cannot merely rely on one source of information. This is the point when 360 degree feedback can do the best job for you. It could be used as a tool to study behavior and professional competence of an employee.

Raters in a 360 degree process provide social feedback for the learner. They provide direct attributions which are communicated through the form of written or oral communication, praise, reprimand, or recognition.  360 degree feedback may include all of these. (Leonard, Beauvais, Scholl, 1995)

It can be used as a diagnostic tool to dig out the problems an employee goes through that hinder his performance. It collects employee information from all the sources around the employee. The information you get is more reliable because:

• It gives you more than one source of information.
• It gives you more than one observer each with a different perspective.
• It provides self assessment which shows how the employee perceives himself.
• The result is always unbiased (if the data are interpreted efficiently).

Most of the companies avoid having 360 degree feedback because of its complexity. No doubt, the moment company implements 360 degree feedback; complications set in. To avoid mistakes, managers must have a clear purpose of implementing the process and the person who analyzes the results must be experienced enough to interpret feedback accurately. Other than that the analyzer must keep in mind the system in which behavior takes place because everyone responds differently in different situation.

How 360 degree feedback helps your Organization:

On an individual level:

• Create a comparison: what you perceive about yourself and what others perceive about you. Employees who are keen in knowing what others think about them can get a fruitful response.
• Varied feedback from all peers, manager, subordinates. This can give more honest and unbiased feedback.
• Receive clearer feedback that can help to focus on personal and professional development. It can make people accept the criticism.
• Sometimes a peer can identify a strength that a manager or subordinate can miss. 360 degree feedback can call attention to important dimensions that otherwise could have been neglected.
• Self-assessment of 360 degrees feedback can aid employees in taking responsibility for their own learning.

On Team Level:

• Build a better understanding of all team members for each other.
• Managers can work on bringing behavioral change of their teams.
• Involve all team members in assessments, which bring more accountability to the performance reviews.

On Organizational Level:

• It helps to figure out where the employees lack the knowledge of the organization’s strategies and how they should be directed.
• If everyone in the organization takes feedback seriously, it can lead to constructive growth and engagement.
• Helps to dilute the halo effect in the organization. Large number of responses helps to interpret things more accurately.

To bring increased self-awareness in your employees and to improve their performance and skills, you first need to figure out where they lack. 360 degrees feedback can assist you in improving your work force’s attitude towards work.

If you have been working alone for a while, hiring a member of staff is not only exciting, it’s a sign that your business is heading in the right direction. But as with all things in business there is a right way and many not-so-great ways to go about hiring staff; especially for the first time. Get the first step right, and you and your new employee may well be together for many happy years to come; get it wrong and your once busy but satisfying working life may become a nightmare. Here are a few simple pre-hiring steps you can easily apply to help you in taking that first big step as you consider hiring your first employee!

Assess How Much Help Your Really Need

Before you jump straight into the world of being not just your own boss but somebody else’s too consider one very simple fact. Do you need full time, part time, seasonal or permanent assistance? This determination will help you budget, not only for hiring, but also for salary or wages. By aligning the message in your advertising, interview and any actual job offer, you are setting expectations for prospective candidates in terms of job permanence and salary. It’s easy to say“you’re hired”, it’s harder to say “I’m sorry but we won’t be taking your application any further at this time”, but it is excruciatingly difficult to say I’m going to have to let you go.”

There are two simple alternatives if you find that your employment requirements are only short term or are for basic tasks. Working with an agency to cover busy periods can be an ideal way to get extra staff on a short term basis. In addition to avoiding having to recruit, interview and choose for yourself, simple functions like payroll can be dealt with by the agency.

Know What Skills You Need to Hire

It’s not necessarily a peak in consumer demand or seasonal activity that will prompt you to look for staff. You may have tenaciously and unrelentingly fought the good fight and come to the conclusion that you simply don’t have certain skills pertaining to the success of your business. You have the option of filling that skills gap by outsourcing to an agency or other service provider, by trying to learn the skill yourself, or by hiring an employee. Often it makes sense to employ someone who can effectively and efficiently complete a job freeing you to focus on your critical few growth or management tasks. Hiring an employee has other benefits assuming you get it right; they will learn your market, your customers, your business and your goals, and they may be able to help you in other areas if you are willing to compensate them accordingly – profit share is one way – but incentivizing the hiring process is for another post. It can be more expensive to add to your head-count of one than to outsource to an agency, and the benefits and concerns need to be carefully weighed. The final alternative is to consider investing in training yourself. Deciding whether the training fees and lost earning time warrant this extension to your own skill set is a difficult one. We all want to improve our own knowledge and abilities, but there are only 24 hours in every day, and as small business owners it is essential that our time be used as productively and efficiently as possible doing the things that we know how to do – not the things we have to do.

Consider the Hidden Costs

Employees are costly. You need to consider that you’re not only obliged to provide regular pay-cheques, but that – depending on your contract of employment and your province – you are liable and responsible for providing paid holiday leave, bereavement leave, maternity leave, paternity leave and so forth. Of course there will be additional service fees (water, electricity etc), plus equipment needs and possibly additional office space. Get it right and make it an ergonomic space for them not only to save yourself any future potential legal hassles, but most importantly because a happy employee is a more productive employee, and you’ve invested in your business long-term. There are three major stakeholders in any organization, and for many it works like this – the employees work to sell by providing customers to buy resulting in shareholder profitability. If you are going to hire an employee – then invest in them, treat them well and help them grow in other areas of the business as you both prepare for the next hire.

Remember Both the Captain and the Number 1

Regardless of who you hire, or what position you fill, you are the boss – the captain. You need to be ready for the challenges and opportunities that position of responsibility will provide. It requires additional accountability – but you may be able to take Saturdays off; it requires the ability to delegate without losing sleep at night; it means you’re accepting that your business is an entity that needs more than you alone can give it to help it thrive – and that can be an emotional quagmire.

Whatever you choose to do in terms of hiring, be comfortable with the choices you make. You don’t have to hire someone you think will become a bosom buddy, but you do need to hire someone you believe you can rely on, trust, train and grow – you need a Number 1, maybe more than one in different areas as you grow. Always remember It is very hard to be ‘the boss’ and to be everyone’s friend, but it is necessary to be a leader and a mentor regardless of who you hired or what position they filled. To lead you need respect, to get respect you need to be a leader.

About the author
Carlo Pandian is a business graduate and freelance writer. He blogs about HR, personal development and technology covering everything from user manuals on payroll software to iPhone apps. Aside from his daily job, he loves reading great entrepreneurs biographies and organising social media workshops for NGOs.

Image credits: Lawrence Manning

“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.” So said Seneca, a Roman statesman, and we all know how important it is to have some plans to keep ourselves focused in the right direction to achieve the wanted purpose. If we are uncertain of where we are moving, we’ll definitely end up in a pandemonium.

So what could be the purpose to refer Seneca? That isn’t to take you on a voyage although it’s nice to go out for one. It’s actually a simple way to understand the significance of being prepared beforehand for anything you do or you incline to do. You need to have a disciplined approach to sail to the right port.

The best way to stay tracked is to set your goals. By knowing what you want to achieve you can precisely direct your energies to it without any distractions. While setting your goals:

• Try to be diverse. This means, try to utilize all your different skills.

• Do not merely depend on the goals assigned by your seniors. Give out yourself some goals which you think will make you professionally efficient as well as work for your personal improvement.

• Spend a while to plan; because a goal without planning could only remain a discouraging aspiration.

• Keep your attitude positive. This will bring you confidence.

So, to start with this strategy you need to take out some time and decide what are the aims you want to achieve. If you are setting your professional goals, do not overlook the vision of your organization. To achieve success you need to align your goals with your organization’s vision. Enlist your goal as soon as you are assigned. The better option is to keep them where you can easily see them. That might be your personal document or you can use online systems which are easily available nowadays.

Once you are done with all the planning, put your schedule into action. If it works you will hardly get lost on your way. Your defined goals will act as a guide and a reference point for you and make you concentrate on what you must do. You may or may not follow the SMART formula but your goals should be;

• Realistic and not merely a part of your fascination and

• Quantifiable; to easily measure and control your own performance

Perhaps, one of the most cheerful effect you will notice is, when you are actually able to achieve what you decided, that relates to a sense of achievement. Apart from this, setting goals can bring you:

• Clear vision of your dreams and goals which ultimately keeps on inspiring you in achieving what you want. Secondly, when you have a vision you are able to predict and calculate what forthcoming events or results could be.

• Accountability of your performance and other related concerns which can make you take better decisions. You are able to figure out clearly where do you stand and what are the factors hindering your progress.

So, are you ready to take a voyage with a plan to sail the right port? Or you want to let things move on haphazardly? Well if you are still going to opt for the hit-and-miss, that strikes me as a slipshod spread of all your energies.

The point to draw from all this is, that everybody needs a life without complexities. We are the ones who can make our life stress-free. And I am fully confident those who employ this idea can avoid a number of failures in their personal and professional life.

Embrace your employees by making them feel they belong to the same home

Your Logo is the face of your company. It reflects who you are and what you do! Let’s make your employees feel a sense of belonging to their company by uploading a company logo to Workfrocegrowth where your employees interact.

Communicate goals more effectively

Incorporate the mother lode of all skills in your workforce – Communication and voila! You have yourself a more productive team. You’re curious now, aren’t you?! WorkforceGrowth adds another helpful feature to its collection. Now you can make your workforce understand objectives in their styles. No matter what their approach to understanding things is, you can facilitate them with additional information like an image, some high-volume text document or a graph that would help them better understand and facilitate in achieving their goals. You can upload text, doc, PPT, CSV, JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF files to your goals section.

Once you make your employees understand your objective with additional information, they can develop multiple ways to achieve it and enhance the quality of results which ultimately brings more productivity into the organization.

Reminder for everything that’s important to you

Are you and your employees finding it hard to remember the goals’ deadlines? Do not get panic! We are here to bring you way out of this mess.

To help you improve your goal management, you will be alerted 7 days before any deadline. Another reminder will be directed 3 days prior to any deadline and the last reminder would be sent on the last day. Last but not least an overdue notification is also sent after the goal has passed its deadline so that you never miss any task that makes you and your employees more valuable.

While you are busy in your daily tasks, WorkforceGrowth is committed to design different ways to simplify your job and making it easier for you. Here we are with some additional features.

They’re all just one click away

You know how your mom or wife keeps a stack of all the bills and receipts from even buying a pack of gum?! (None? I guess it’s just my mom then ) Anyway the good thing about keeping that stack is you never lose track of your hard earned money. Wait…my mind reading senses are telling me that you lost interest after “Stack” but hold on, guess what the good people of  WorkforceGrowth are providing you: Your very own online stack of bills or as they’re called Invoice. WorkforceGrowth maintains history of your all previous invoices and you can access them by just one click.

Another easy way to assign goals

Got something you are trying to save while reviewing your employee and want to motivate him/her to commit to it? That must be goals part of the review section. No need to rewrite them in the goals section. Because now you have a new and simple way to assign goals to your employees while reviewing them!

With the updated version of WorkforceGrowth, goals you assign to your employees while reviewing them are directly moved to goals section. Saving your time and energy to reword them or transfer them manually to goals section!

It takes no time to dig out that you actually need

You must have heard that “Clutter around you creates clutter in your brain”. You might have to mingle with all of the information when it is required. What about the idea to have right information at the right time without creating any mess in your mind?

That’s where we come in. Now you never have to worry about creating or dealing with a mess when it comes to all the reviews assigned to you or have been completed by you.

Simply visit your review page and see for yourself all the labels organizing your data in clean simple way!

WorkforceGrowth now features another time saving gem for you

To bring your employees information into line in an easy way, here is another expeditious feature. Export complete employee information and peer nomination list at once to any other location from WorkforceGrowth account for any other routine work at your organization.

You’ll find an export icon in your relevant section, just one click and save the required information in your preferred format at any place.

Keep your counter clear

Imagine a life without archives! All the stuff jumbling in front of you day by day. Horrifying, isn’t it? HR managers now have an option to Store old review nominations. Neat, isn’t it! Want to dig down in the past for some reason? Sure, Click view archived nominations at the end of peer nomination page and they’re there.

In 2012, Major Performance Management trends have more to do with customization than anything. And this season, we have nailed just that!

While Weightage-based reviews and Custom Rating scales are the highlights of our latest release, enhancements have also been added  to existing modules like the Newsfeed, Goals Management and Manager Reviews.

Weightage-Based Review System

Our new Weightage Based Review system now lets HR assign a weightage to a review. The weightage can be Question-specific (individual weightage for each question) or Respondent Role-Based ( different weightage to managers/self/peer reviews). What does it achieve? Simply put, a much more Fair Review system!

However, we can not [ and do not wish to ] enforce this on anybody, so you have the option to disable this new feature from the configurations panel.

Template Sharing

If it’s the employees and managers who are going to be the end users of your review templates, how can the HR alone be deciding what competencies to include in one. Imagine this! You create a template for a department but you’re not sure if it has too many or too little competencies, whether they target the technical aspect or not; And a thousand other questions that confuse the HR while preparing an appraisal form. So we have provided the HR with the facility to share a template with a manager, an employee or  an entire department to consider their opinion and tailor it according to their response.

Custom Rating Scales

The ratings of your reviews are now presentable in two formats. A numerical mode that lets you give your own range of scale . ( i.e 1-5 , 2-10 , 20-100 etc) and a descriptive mode that lets you add a text instead of number as a rating. You may fill in the five rating fields with literally any text….Well practically speaking, anything that makes your appraisal forms look good.

Manager Review Edit Facility

To err is human, to be able to fix it is WorkforceGrowth. Whether used for the purpose of correction, or for giving the employee another chance to improve, the Review Edit facility lets a manager re-open a submitted review to make changes to it and re submit. This is available only to an employee’s manager and only once.

Company Newsfeed

While we strongly believe our Company Newsfeed is like a mini-facebook for your company (one that does not require any proxies!), you can now control which levels of your organizational hierarchy have access to it. And if it just doesn’t fit your company policy, you can wipe it out completely from the the configurations panel.

Goals Management

When an executive assigns a goal to an employee, the direct supervisor is automatically added in the loop. All three parties in the loop remain updated with any discussions or status changes regarding the goal’s progress.

So this year, make sure you get the best out of WorkforceGrowth, and it will guarantee the best out of your workforce.

Happy Reviewing!