Goal Planning

Goals are targets and measures used to set direction and to analyse progress and degree of success. Goal planning can be especially helpful in developing your career and job hunting, or staring your own business, or becoming self-employed or freelance. Thus, it is a powerful performance management process that promotes individual and workgroup accountability.

Purpose of Goals

• To provide the framework for the individuals and groups efforts
• To simplify business needs
• To test the capability of the employees
• To give a sense of accomplishments
• To align group and individual goals to organizational goals

Function of Goal Planning

The functions of goal planning are as follows: ‰

• Rooted in the core organization’s success factors
• Provides a realistic stretch in performance
• Emphasize a few key result areas Promotes continuous improvement.
• Directing attention / effort towards task-relevant behaviours and actions.
• Focusing effort and energy towards relevant behaviours (i.e., setting scope and boundaries for work)
• Encouraging persistence in the face of difficulties or obstacles. ‰

Planning for Setting Goals and Performance Standards

Planning clearly specify what has to be done, when it has to be done, who is going to do it, how it’s going to be done, and where it will be done.

Once a goal is recognized and plans are made, performance standards are created to determine the success of the goal. Good performance standards explains what has to be done when, followed by who, how, and where. If the performance standards aren’t clear, the rest of the process will probably be in-effective which ultimately affect organisation.

• What is the manager’s role in planning?
• What is the staff’s role in planning?
• Poor planning creates what type of challenges? ‰

Guidelines for Effective Goal Planning

Goals should keep you motivated. They should challenge you to step up to that next level of performance. Following are some guidelines to make your planning efforts pay off:

• Set long-term, intermediate, and short-term goals.
• Keep records and evaluate progress.
• Set goals that are difficult yet realistic.
• Devise goals that are specific and measurable.
• Keep goals under your control.
• Be aware of core values in goal setting.
• Be flexible and gracious in goal setting ‰

Key Performance Areas (Kpas) and Key Result Areas (Kras)

Key Performance Areas (KPAs)

When the key results area is large, it is broken into manageable areas for managing/ evaluation. These sub-sections of KRAs are called KPA.

• KPA is the overall scope of activities that an individual on a job role has to perform.
• KPA is not always result focused.
• KPAs can be inclusive of KRAs ‰

In organizations, each role or job has a “Job Description (JD)” which consists of all the responsibilities the person on job has to perform. All the activities listed in JD falls in two categories:

• Category A: List of functions and activities crucial or critical for the job role. These activities form the KRA of the job.
  
  
• Category B: List of functions and activities associated with the job role but not truly critical for the role. These functions are important for overall performance of the team, department or organization as a whole and form the KPA for the job.

Key Result Ares (KRAs)

“Key Result Areas” or KRAs refer to general areas of outcomes for which the department’s role is responsible. A KRA is a list of the most important tasks you do every day to win. It’s a job description on steroids. A good KRA involves the continuous responsibilities of the position, and the purpose and benefits of performing those responsibilities.

Identifying KRAs helps individuals:

• simplify their roles
• develop their roles as a organization’s business or strategic plan
• determine results rather than activities
• communicate their role’s purposes clearly to others
• identify goals and objectives
• prioritize their activities, and therefore improve their time/work management.
• make value-added decisions. ‰

Key result areas (KRAs) capture about 80% of a work role. The remainder of the role is generally devoted to areas of collective responsibility (e.g., helping team members, participating in actions for the good of the organization).

Setting Goals for Functional Competencies

Functional competencies are specific to a specific department or type of job. These describes the knowledge, skill, and/or abilities (KSA) required to fulfil required job tasks, duties or responsibilities. Setting goals promotes employee motivation and should support to the employee KSA which ultimately leads to functional competencies.

The best SMART goals gives guidance to the employees and keep them updated in a changing competitive time. Thus employees focused on their performance throughout the evaluation period.

There are two types of objectives incorporated into goals written to measure performance in functional competencies: