Understand a Company’s Business Goals

Business goals are an essential part of creating priorities and setting your company up for success over a fixed time span. Taking the time to set goals for your business and establish individual objectives to help you achieve each goal can greatly increase your ability to reach those goals. Here, we explore a company’s goals and provide tips as well as examples of short- and long-term business goals.

You can establish business goals for your company in general as well as for selective departments, employees, managers and customers. Goals commonly represent a company’s larger purpose and work to establish an end-goal for employees to work towards. Business goals do not have to be precise or have clearly defined actions. Instead, are broad outcomes that the company desires to achieve.

Understanding Business Goals

Understanding business goals are important for various reasons, including that they:

• Furnish a way to measure success.
• Keep all employees in accordance as to what the goals of the company are.
• Give employees a clear idea of how decision-making helps reach a company’s business goals.
• Ensure the company is moving in the right direction.

Short-Term Business Goals

Short-term business goals are goals that you want your company to achieve in a period of weeks or months. The following steps can be taken when setting short-term business goals:

• Identify your company’s short-term business goals for a set time span.
• Divide each goal into actionable business objectives.
• Ensure your objectives are assessable.
• Allocate goal-related tasks to employees.
• Measure progress routinely.

Examples of Short-Term Business Goals

• Raise product prices over the next few months.
• Appoint new marketing employees.
• Raise traffic on your company’s blog.
• Execute monthly giveaways for customers on social media.
• Start an “Employee of the Month” award program.
• Select a charity to begin sponsoring.
• Create a profile on a new social media channel.
• Increase social media posting to three times a week.

Long-Term Business Goals

In addition to the steps mentioned on how to set short-term goals, you should also include these steps when creating long-term business goals:

• Establish the goals you want to achieve.
• Focus on your long-term business goals.
• Break down each long-term goal into short-term goals.
• Record your company’s long-term goals regularly.

Examples of Long-Term Business Goals

• Increase the total earnings of your company.
• Lower production expenses.
• Increase overall brand awareness.
• Increase your company’s share in its market.
• Hire new employees.
• Develop and launch new products.

Setting Effective Goals for Your Employees and Your Company

To be effective, goals must serve both the needs of your company and those of your workers. For your company, goals must furnish directly to your short- and long-term business strategies. Goals must be clear, objective and understandable for your employees, or they will quickly become disconnected.

Goal Clarity and Alignment

To achieve a company’s business goals, you must first clearly impart strategic business objectives across your entire company. Goal clarity among departments can also help speed the process of alignment. By allowing managers to access the goals of other departments, your organization can greatly reduce goal overload and conflicts throughout your organization. Many employee objectives are not entirely under the control of one person. Enabling that individuals assign goals to some more people increases engagement and shared liability throughout the organization. Goal sharing also helps departmental heads find ways to better support each other, as well as recognize areas where they may be casually working against each other.

Managerial Responsibilities

Once a company’s business goals have been established, managers can then set  for their individual departments which clearly uphold your overall business strategies. Managers must communicate to employees not only what is expected of them, but how each task is to be completed.

Business Performance and Strategy

To survive in today’s marketplace, businesses like yours must find ways to be smarter, more productive, and more united than their competitors. Studies show an extreme increase in both worker and business performance when an organization effectively sets and closely binds individual employee goals to the company’s overall strategy.