How to set individual performance goals for your employees, with examples

In a dynamic and competitive business environment, an organization’s success does not depend only on well-defined corporate goals, but also on the alignment and motivation of each employee.

That is why setting individual goals is a necessary practice that connects employees’ personal objectives with the company’s strategic objectives, creating a sense of purpose and engagement that drives performance and productivity.

When each employee has clear, specific individual goals, they know exactly what is expected of them and how their contributions affect the organization’s overall success.

However, defining individual goals takes a careful, strategic approach to make sure the goals make sense for both the professional and the company.

So in this post we help you understand how to set performance goals for your employees, and how to connect them directly to the company’s objectives!

Now see tips on how to create individual goals for employees, with examples.

Also read: Learn how to choose the best goal tracking system for your company

What are individual goals?

Individual goals in an organization are specific objectives set for each employee within a company. These goals are designed to align an employee’s activities and responsibilities with the organization’s strategic objectives, making sure each person knows exactly what is expected of them and how their work contributes to the company’s overall success.

Let’s look at an example from the industrial sector to show how a strategic objective can be turned into individual goals.

Take a company strategic objective such as “Reduce operating costs by 15% next year.” An individual goal could be “Reduce maintenance costs by 20% by implementing a preventive and predictive maintenance program, cutting unplanned downtime by 30% over the next 12 months,” for example.

What is the difference between individual and collective goals?

As mentioned, individual goals are objectives defined for a single employee, focusing on their specific responsibilities and professional development.

These goals are customized to each employee’s skills and role, creating a sense of personal responsibility for reaching them.

Clear expectations of individual performance can increase motivation, because employees see a direct link between their efforts and the rewards they may receive.

Collective goals, on the other hand, are set for a team or group within the organization and aim to promote collaboration and joint work. The success of these goals depends on cooperation among team members, and responsibilities are shared by everyone.

Collective goals encourage a culture of teamwork and collaboration, leading to more creative and effective solutions thanks to the diversity of perspectives and skills involved. They also increase employee engagement, since people feel part of a bigger, meaningful objective.

Examples of collective goals include improving customer satisfaction by a certain percentage, reducing production cycle time or launching a new product in the market within a specific deadline.

How does Policy Deployment (GPD) relate to individual goals?

GPD (Gerenciamento Pelas Diretrizes, or policy deployment) is a strategic approach that focuses on the continuous improvement of employee performance and on optimizing organizational results. When applied to individual goal planning, GPD offers a systematic, guided structure to make sure each employee has clear, achievable goals aligned with the company’s strategic objectives.

In this way, GPD starts by defining clear, specific goals that are directly aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives. This makes sure each employee knows exactly what is expected of them and how their work contributes to the company’s larger objectives.

With GPD, individual goals also come with well-defined performance criteria. This includes performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that help monitor progress against the goals.

Finally, GPD incorporates the Individual Development Planopens in a new tab (IDP), an essential tool for employees’ professional growth. The IDP helps identify the skills and abilities needed to reach the established goals and defines an action plan to develop them.

How to set individual performance goals, with examples

Want to define your employees’ individual goals? Then check out this step-by-step guide to help you:

1- Define “when” and “how”

Understanding the difference between a goal and a good idea is essential.

Say you need to build a marketing strategic planopens in a new tab for the launch of a new product. You could start your goal-setting process from that task by writing “Create a marketing plan to promote product XPTO.”

There is only one problem: something set this way is not really a goal. It is just a good idea.

Creating a marketing plan would be a good idea, but how does that translate into a real objective? Easy! Effective individual goals must include the description of “how” and “when.”

Because it is an incomplete sentence, the good idea does not have enough information to be a goal on its own. So you need to add a measure of time and instructions to make it achievable in practice.

Written as a goal, that same good idea can get much better.

Read our post explaining the difference between Objectives and Goals and how to reach them, click here.opens in a new tab

See this example of an individual performance goal based on that idea:

“Produce, by Friday, the first version of the marketing plan for product XPTO, with 3 to 5 pages, dedicating about 30 minutes of work per day.”

In other words, besides giving an idea of where you want to go, the goal must propose practical activities to get there.

Do you know the difference between goals and objectives? Then watch this video (in Portuguese) from our YouTube channel:

Learn more: The 9 best tips to reach business goals that you need to implement now

2- Align employees’ goals with the company’s overall objectives

Managers do not exist only to help employees reach their own professional objectives. Ideally, those objectives are aligned with the organization’s individual and overall goals.

However, this alignment can be harder if you do not understand your team’s strengths, shortcomings and what motivates them.

Create ways to increase communication, especially during large projects, and track each employee’s progress to identify weaknesses and areas to improve.

When employees understand, through indicators, how their roles and individual responsibilities contribute to overall growth, they tend to be more focused on reaching objectives that benefit both themselves and the company.

So consistently communicating your business’s strategic goals (emphasizing and reinforcing the values and the management culture) can help create a self-managed team.

If you want to know more about tracking employees’ individual indicators and how to measure them strategically, get to know Stratws.

3- Involve your team in goal setting

It is not enough to set individual performance goals and give examples. According to a Gallup survey, only about half of employees understand what is expected of them.

And what is even more worrying: according to the same survey, a large share of managers also cannot satisfactorily define the purpose of their own work!

This is, in fact, a shocking finding. If it is not clear to professionals what they should accomplish with their work, then they are just taking up space in the company.

To fight this state of affairs, you must include your employees in the goal-setting process. Each person should know their individual goals and how they connect to the company’s strategy.

If they are aware of their strengths and weaknesses, they will be able to constantly evaluate their own performance and set intentions and commitments, considering the overall business context.

That way, you increase the chances of setting achievable individual goals together.

Also read: How to hold people to goals and motivate the team at the same time: 8 tips you need to know

4- Set achievable individual goals

Setting achievable goals is fundamental to guiding individual goals within a company. Realistic, well-defined goals not only help employees clearly understand what is expected of them, but also increase motivation and engagement, leading to better overall performance.

When goals are achievable, they give employees a clear direction. This removes ambiguity about what needs to be done, letting each employee know exactly what their responsibilities are and how their activities contribute to the company’s larger objectives.

In addition, achievable individual goals allow a fair, objective performance reviewopens in a new tab. With clear, measurable criteria, managers can monitor progress and give constructive feedback, helping employees identify areas for improvement and develop their skills.

5- Talk about careers regularly with employees

Bringing employees’ individual goals in line with the overall context of your business is key to raising the productivity of the work done.

In fact, clear expectations are one of the most basic professional needs, besides being vital to collective results. Take that idea one step further by holding career discussions.

When you review and discuss individual performance goals with an employee, find out whether they are satisfied with their current role and whether they want to advance in their profession. Keeping employees looking to the future will make their efforts more meaningful.

Also, it is important for any manager to understand that work is one area of a professional’s life. That is why time for rest and leisure is essential to personal and professional growth.

6- Recognize goal achievement

Recognizing goal achievement is a motivating factor that should not be neglected, because reaping the fruits of developing professional skills can take considerable time.

A good idea is to offer rewards for each objective reached. These rewards can come as a bonus or gratuity, a pay raise, an extra day of vacation, and so on; the possibilities are almost endless. At the very least, you should set aside time to personally congratulate your team on its success, whether in meetings or in front of the whole company or department.

Calculate your employees’ variable compensation with our automated goal book spreadsheet! Download it hereopens in a new tab (in Portuguese).

7- Review the goals you set frequently

The final step of goal setting is to closely follow what you created. Review your goals often. For big objectives, once a month may be adequate. For short-term goals, make sure the review happens periodically.

You need to understand which goals are short, medium and long term. That makes it easier to define how to track the indicators for each goal.

Mapping deadlines on a calendar, creating updatable task lists and keeping records are excellent ways to stay on track.

In addition, constantly reviewing your goals helps keep them up to date and your employees motivated, and keeps you from skipping important steps of the process. Setting individual goals, dedicating time and effort to them, will reward you by unlocking the full potential of your business.

Examples of individual goals

1- Increase sales: achieve a 20% increase in monthly sales over the next six months.

2- Professional development: complete a certification course relevant to the area of work by the end of the year.

3- Productivity: improve personal productivity by 15% by reducing time spent on administrative tasks through process automation.

4- Quality of work: reduce errors in monthly reports by 50% over the next three months.

5- Customer relationships: increase customer satisfaction by 10% through more efficient, personalized service.

6- Projects: complete the current project ahead of the established deadline, making sure all deliverables meet the defined quality standards.

7- Technical skills: learn to use a new software or tool that is essential for the job, completing a course and demonstrating competence by next quarter.

8- Delivery deadlines: improve punctuality in delivering tasks and projects, making sure at least 95% of deliveries are made within the agreed deadlines.

9- Innovation: develop and implement a new strategy or process that increases the department’s efficiency by 10%.

10- Leadership: take the lead on a small project or team and reach the project’s objectives on time and within budget.

Do you know what PLR and PPR are?

Among the various ways to reward your employees for results, two are defined by Brazilian law: PLR and PPR.

PLR stands for Programa de Participação nos Lucros e Resultados (profit and results sharing program), while PPR stands for Programa de Participação nos Resultados (results sharing program).

The first must be set up through mediation by the labor union of the category, by means of a collective bargaining agreement.

The PPR, on the other hand, is defined by the company in the form of individual goals that employees must reach. They then receive a share of the profits based on their performance.

Also read: How to define goals for PLR in your company?

Examples of goals for PPR

The most common examples of goals for PPR relate to the company’s revenue or to sales, but that is not a rule.

On the contrary, defining goals related to each person’s individual performance can even be better, so see some examples of goals for PPR:

• Win 10% new customers;
• Reduce the number of complaints in customer serviceopens in a new tab (in Portuguese) by 25%;
• Reduce the average receivables collection time to 15 days.

With these examples of individual goals for employees, you can even create different goals for different departments. That way, you will reward the performance of the people who help the company reach goals that matter for its sustainable growth.

So a good example of an individual goals plan should contain this type of objective: those that let the company reach strategic results to outperform the competition!

Next steps

Know that with Stratwsopens in a new tab, corporate performance management software, you can track individual and collective performance, helping you develop a high-performance team.

With it, you can track your performance, detect which characteristics need to be worked on in each employee, and adopt a meritocracy system based on real, objective results.

See more advantages of Stratws, the software that has already won over more than a thousand companies and 160 thousand users:

• Integrate people, operations and strategy;
• Find improvement opportunities;
• Handle meeting management and project portfolio management;
• Increase productivity;
• Share KPIs quickly and transparently;
• Manage risks and analyze scenarios;
• Make information exchange and communication between departments easier;
• Focus on the pursuit of the results your company wants to achieve.

Revolutionize your company’s management with Stratws