Why your Team should Set Team Goals

The business strategies of a company are known to very few employees and even fewer can claim to understand them completely. This may not be such a good thing after all as having a good understanding of the company’s strategy is what helps employees to know what they can do to achieve their organisation’s goal.

Whether at the team or individual level, one cannot underestimate the importance of setting goals at work. Employees need to understand that by setting no goals or ‘do your best goals’, they are not exactly pushing themselves to reach higher levels of performance.

While it helps to have individuals that are good at setting goals and achieving them when it comes to working, the goal should be such that it binds many employees together, the more the merrier. They keep everyone aligned and help them to work towards the same purpose. It also grants them a certain degree of autonomy over their work.

Failure to set effective team goals which are in line with the wider goals of the organisation can be detrimental to the overall productivity of the employees. When an employee is given a task they should know why they are being the task and it should be clear to them where it fits in the larger vision.

In the absence of this clarity, they will have lower motivation to do the job.

Benefits of Setting Team Goals

Following are some benefits of setting team goals:

• Transparency: If you want to ensure that everyone is on the same page and wish to keep things open then setting team goals is the right way to go about it. The basic purpose of setting team goals is to make sure that each person is not just aware of what their responsibility is but also what the rest of the team is upto. The feeling that the entire team is working as a force should relieve them of the feeling of being burdened by the company’s objective.
• Motivation: People understand the wider purpose of what they are doing when they are kept in the loop about the wider organisational goals. They also begin to appreciate the efforts that others are putting in and the role that they are playing in the completion of that goal. It serves as a great motivational boost to the employees and also encourages them to achieve more by pushing them beyond their limits.
• Collaboration: The feeling that one person’s success is everyone’s success and that how successful your task depends on how successfully others complete their task creates a sense of camaraderie. By wrapping the goals of every individual into everyone’s goal, it is more likely that employees will actively help their peers with any issues that they may have related to their task. Collaboration is likely to serve better than a ruthless competitive mindset.
• Examples of Team Goals: A marketing team cannot have the same goal that the technical team does. Therefore, when we speak about setting team goals following are the types of goals that we are basically talking about.
• Meet deadlines: Finishing work on time is a crucial requirement for a company in order for it to succeed at what it does. Every team can set a collective goal that they will finish their respective projects before they are due. Procrastination is a common factor that affects the performance of most teams around the globe. By setting the goal to finish your work in time, you are basically ensuring that teammates are less inclined to procrastinate their duty. You will feel the difference that setting such a goal brings about, not just in the result but also the process that was followed in order to achieve the particular goal.
• Relationship Strengthening: Imagine how strong a company can become if every team decides to get closer? By arranging team building activities, leaders can learn more on corporate days out about their team members than they can ever know inside the walls of an office. It will also help them to break the tension that has developed between team members and make them comfortable in being around each other outside the office setting. This will promote greater harmony between different team members and also get you acquainted with the weaknesses and strengths of your team members. By setting team goals the whole company can have a feeling of being one and this will certainly push them to work harder.