Human resources plays a crucial role in elevating performance and productivity in your workplace. The best HR professionals know how to motivate employees and are constantly striving for ways to better understand the needs of staff.
Effective HR can help create a culture of continuous improvement, too. This is crucial, as high-performing, agile workplaces benefit from a 20 to 30% increase in financial performance thanks to their improved ability to react as new trends emerge.
As an HR professional, you can do your part to improve performance by setting ambitious but realistic goals for your team. If managed correctly, this will translate into increased productivity and enhanced motivation amongst your team.
SMART Goals
Setting goals for your organization is a great way to unify your efforts and help folks understand your wider corporate strategy. However, setting poorly defined, difficult-to-achieve goals will only serve to stress your employees out and cause confusion among your team. Avoid these pitfalls and boost your team’s performance by setting SMART goals for your company. At its core, SMART goals are:
- Specific: What do you want to accomplish? What do you need to achieve your goals? Who else is involved?
- Measurable: How will you quantify your progress? When will you have achieved your goal?
- Achievable: Can your team actually achieve these goals, or are they unreasonable? Can you adjust your targets as you go?
- Relevant: Are your goals supporting your wider corporate strategy? Do they boost profitability? Will they enhance some other crucial facet of your operations?
- Time-Bound: When will you achieve your goal? What deadlines will you set? When will you take stock of your progress?
Answering these questions helps you better understand your company objectives and will build greater buy-in amongst your team. This is crucial if you want to elevate the performance of your team, as highly motivated, performance-oriented coworkers will maximize your efforts as an HR professional.
SMART goals help you create a culture of continuous improvement, too. When your goals are achievable, folks are able to give feedback and let you know if something is delayed or cannot be achieved. This gives you scope to adjust and will ensure that the whole team remains highly motivated throughout the project.
Feedback and Communication
Valuable feedback is like gold dust in the HR world. Employees who are willing to open up and share more about their experience at your company can help you adjust your policies in search of improved performance. This can make a world of difference if you’re trying to make widespread changes and need to hear back from your team.
Effective feedback and communication can improve well-being at work, too. Folks who feel they can talk freely about their struggles experience heightened social wellness and are able to take steps toward professional development. This builds a strong, supportive network in your workplace and helps you address concerns before they spiral out of control.
As an HR professional, you can gather more feedback by giving folks different ways to pitch in their ideas. In addition to individual performance reviews, strive to create an ongoing conversation for folks who want to offer their insights. This will yield more interesting feedback, as employees won’t be on the defensive when suggesting changes or praising the progress of their team.
You should also consider offering anonymous feedback opportunities. This may sound daunting at first, but some employees may be unwilling to share details about their manager or coworkers in a face-to-face conversation due to fears about conflict. Give these folks a chance to share their insights and pay attention to recurring themes about issues that undermine performance.
It’s important to bear in mind that feedback is a two-way street. If you want folks to come forward with effective feedback, you should be able to give effective feedback. This means you should focus on the specifics and move from a place of empathy. This will help folks feel seen and ensure that employees are able to utilize the feedback you give them.
Hiring for Culture
Effective recruitment is at the core of your company’s mission. Bringing in the right people ensures that you are able to create a culture of continuous feedback and can achieve peak productivity. Recruitment doesn’t have to be difficult either. Rather than laboring through calls for applicants, assessments, and interviews, consider working with a recruitment service like American Recruiters.
Recruiters work with multiple clients and have a wider employee network than most businesses. This means that they are able to direct prospective job applicants toward the roles that will suit them best. This can make a world of difference if you’re used to receiving hundreds of applications from folks who simply do not have the necessary qualifications for the role.
Conclusion
Building a culture of continuous feedback starts in the HR department. Get the ball rolling by setting collaborative SMART goals with your team. This will help you understand the challenges that your coworkers face and will ensure that you are able to create effective goals together. Follow up by gathering and giving feedback that is both relevant and easy to implement. This will create a culture of continuous improvement that will help you achieve peak productivity.
Featured image by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash
