Setting Obtainable Company Goals for the New Year

With the New Year approaching, we are at a time when many people begin forming goals for themselves, both personally and professionally. It is also a time when many company leaders begin to discuss where their company should be going next. It’s a great time to assess how a company performed this past year and what it could do better in the coming year.

Avionté Staffing Software was established in 2005 and has experienced tremendous growth over the years. Much of this success has come from the support of clients and employees. But another big factor of our success is based on the mentality the founders of Avionté used to build the company into what it is today.

Avionté’s founding partners took their passions and dreams and created a better staffing software company and product. They turned those dreams into reality by forming a plan, and setting step-by-step goals to see that plan through. What were the founder’s main goals? They were to consistently move towards a better and more innovative staffing software product, while maintaining a strong focus on customer and employee satisfaction.

Avionté’s efforts to follow this vision and our goal-setting processes have worked, and we have seen them work for others, too. However, a survey by Staples found that more than 80% of small business owners didn’t track their business goals in 2013 and 77% of companies have not yet achieved their original vision for their company.

But countless studies indicate that creating company visions and goals is one of the best things a new and growing company can do to establish a foundation for measuring the success of its efforts over time. Why, then, are so many companies not doing so?

Is your company like one of the 80% in the Staples survey? Or one of the 77%? Has your company made an effort to set competitive and measurable goals for the next year, and how do you plan to measure success? If you are struggling to answer these questions, you are not alone. But luckily, there is still plenty of time to create your plan for the new year.

This month, Avionté is redefining its company goals. Here are the two key things we’re doing to ensure we do it right:

1. Creating measurable goals. This month at Avionté, each department manager has been hard at work putting together a set of measurable goals, based on Avionté’s drive to be more innovative and purposeful in 2014 and beyond. The team has established company-wide and department-specific goals that are challenging (yet obtainable), easily measurable and based on performance.

2. Establishing ways to determine success. Each department or team will have its own set of metrics in place to measure goal achievement. Each goal set will be evaluated on a quarterly basis, with rewards and incentives given to employees for reaching those goals. For some, these goals are broken down even further and involve step-by-step processes, or activity-based task management. And these department goals all line up with our broader, company-wide goals.

There is no one good way to set company goals. Avionté’s goal-setting process is just the way we feel will work best for our company. There are many ways to build a better process for goal-setting, and how your company sets its own goals should be dependent on your unique company vision. So once you have established what that company vision is, strive to set specific and measurable goals for your employees to work towards.