The 5 best employee goal-setting frameworks for managers
Helping your team members set goals is a key part of driving employee engagement, boosting team performance, and helping your employees reach their full potential. But how to do that can feel like a question mark. What’s the most efficient process for employee goal setting? What’s the best goal-setting framework? How do you monitor employees’ progress and ensure they hit their targets?
These simple, straightforward, and researched employee goal-setting frameworks will set you and your employees up for success during the entire process.
Try these employee goal-setting frameworks
- What is a goal-setting framework and why should you use it?
- The best employee goal-setting frameworks
- Best practices to follow when setting goals with employees
- Use goal setting to empower your employees
A goal-setting framework is a scheme that helps you put in place goals and guides you to reach them successfully. In a professional context, goal-setting frameworks allow employees, managers, and the broader organization to row in the same direction toward common business goals.
Employee goal setting is a must for a number of reasons:
- It improves team alignment. When you work with your employees to set individual goals that feed into your team’s objectives, it gets everyone moving along the same path.
- It creates a vision for the future. A goal-setting framework provides a clear vision of where they’re headed and the autonomy to figure out how to get there boosts employees’ sense of purpose.
- It strengthens employee engagement. Having a career goal to work toward that feels meaningful keeps employees engaged and productive in accomplishing their work.
- It boosts employee retention. When you’re invested in their professional growth, employees have the opportunities and support that keep them around.
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to goal-setting frameworks. Each of the theories listed below has its benefits and drawbacks, and you may find it useful to use concepts from each in your goal-planning process.
If you’re not sure where to start, try the one that speaks the most to you first, and take it from there.
The objectives and key results goal-setting framework, or OKRs for short, stemmed from Peter Drucker’s famous Management by Objectives ideology. In the 1970s, the then-CEO at Intel, Andy Grove, expanded on the concept by adding a key results component to it. The idea was that tying objectives to measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) kept employees accountable for keeping track of and reaching their goals.
Did you know? OKRs completely transformed Google when the framework was introduced to the company in the late 1990s. With just a dozen employees at the time, setting measurable goals spurred rapid business growth and innovation, and ultimately contributed to Google’s world-renown culture.
OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of ‘organizing the world’s information’ perhaps even achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most.
Co-founder of Google and CEO of Alphabet
OKRs are still all the rage, even 50 years later, because they offer a simple, yet a global way of looking at goal setting. With this framework, it’s not just about the end objective, but also about the smaller steps — or measurable and trackable key results — you need to get there.
How to write OKRs (with an example)
As the name suggests, writing an OKR starts with identifying your primary objective followed by the key results you will use to measure your success.
A simple template to follow is: “I will [objective] as measured by [key result].”
Example: I will improve our product’s social proof next quarter, as measured by 8 new client success stories, 5 new testimonials on our website, and a 4+ star rating on G2.
Did you know? OKRs completely transformed Google when the framework was introduced to the company in the late 1990s. With just a dozen employees at the time, setting measurable goals spurred rapid business growth and innovation, and ultimately contributed to Google’s world-renown culture.
