Objectives are pretty vital to the Management System. With objectives you can measure how the company is doing against a benchmark set by the company itself. Of course the company can do much better or worse. But, setting clear objectives is crucial in creating this benchmark. In line with the objectives are of course the KPI’s which you should setup and track.
How to come up with objectives
Most of you have probably been on this trajectory. Goals come back every year and you try to rephrase them every time to make them look new. Especially for companies with low environmental impact, limited risks to employees, or excellent customer satisfaction, creating new objectives can be hard. Where do you find new inspiration?
Look at other companies/competitors for objectives. A lot of companies place some management system related documents open on the web as part of their CSR program. You can find quite some potential KPI’s in these documents.
Look closely at your organization and try to pinpoint the crucial mistakes that are made. Set goals to goals these parts of the organization.
Last but not least, don’t make it too hard on yourself. Often you think too hard and too deep and you just can’t think of anything at all. The longer you have to think about an objective, the more you will get stuck. Just answer a simple question: what do you want to achieve at the end of the year(s)?
SMART
Make sure your objectives are described SMART in order to manage them.
- Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
- Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
- Assignable – specify who will do it.
- Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
- Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.
A clear description of the objectives is important in order to manage each objective. Also the assignability part is very important. When multiple people are responsible for an action, it can end up where nobody takes responsibility to complete the task and start to point towards each other.
Managing objectives
Try to not make the objectives an annual exercise. More often than not the data is just gathered at the end of the year and benchmarked against the goals. Please don’t apply this type of strategy. In order to really take advantage of goals you should manage them properly. This can be done by checking progress on a regular basis, every month for example. In order to set a good interval you should check the impact and the volatility of the data. For example, profits and revenues are measured on a monthly basis so calculating indicators based on this data on a daily basis isn’t very helpful.
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