SMARTER Goals To Make 2022 Your Best Year
Make 2022 the best year yet with SMARTER goals for you or your team.
Get SMARTER Goals
HR professionals should have an important objective in mind: make 2022 the best year it can be.
It should be simple to do, right? Work teams can meet and brainstorm on various activities for goal setting.
But unfortunately, the amount of effort needed to achieve a goal can be much more than you think. It can feel daunting and even overpowering. Also. teams could instead end up identifying various random objectives. Or worse, with nothing concrete or doable. Or. they may not even be aligned with the company’s vision for the business.
Frankly, to make it your best year possible, it’s not enough to just have a list of any old goals. You need the right objectives, the actions that will get you there, and, most of all, the consistency that forms these actionable steps into habits everyone can follow.
To do all these, you need SMARTER goals.
Why Are SMARTER Goals Important?
SMART, and its more comprehensive variant, SMARTER, are acronyms. You will learn more about what they stand for shortly.
Michael Hyatt, a best-selling author, developed the concept. To what purpose? As a means to make goals a reality by making them into actionable and measurable steps. In other words, a repeatable process. With consistency and practice, you can make these steps into habits.
To understand the importance of SMARTER, you only have to look the number of people who make, but fail to keep New Year’s resolutions. People start off each year brimming with hope and a “can-do” attitude. Here’s the issue, though: by the time February comes around, more than half of them can no longer stick to their list of resolutions and a Franklin Covey survey found only 23% keep their resolutions.
Why?
There are myriad excuses, but they can be summarized into 1 significant reason: They didn’t plan well when it comes to their goals.
In spite of their well-meaning objectives, they set themselves up for failure..
Creating SMARTER Goals
Using the SMARTER definition and approach, here are seven goals that may apply to you. They will certainly play a part in making 2022 your great year.
We also provided some SMARTER goals examples to make each point clearer:
Your Career Success through the S.M.A.R.T.E.R. Project
S.M.A.R.T.E.R is an acronym that stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-Bound
Evaluation
Readjust
Your Career Success with Project S.M.A.R.T.E.R.
Here’s a detailed elaboration of this approach and the 7 steps involved:
1. Specific
Your goal should be specific and crystal clear and identify exactly what you want to achieve. You should be able to know what success looks like here. The more specific you can get, the better. A good tip here is to ask yourself the 5 W questions below:
What do I want to accomplish?
Why is this goal important?
Who is involved?
Where is it located?
Which resources or limits are involved?
2. Measurable
Useful goals you set for yourself or your team should be measurable and let you quantify the result. This is so you can track your progress and performance properly. Being able to see progress is a great motivator – it gets you excited knowing that you are on your way to success. Not only that, this helps your focus. Also you want to ensure you are placing your energy behind goals that result in the best returns. To help clarify a goal that is measurable, here is an example:
BAD: I will clean up our candidate database.
GOOD: I will review all the candidates in the file from A to F all next week and discard any that are over 6 months old.
3. Achievable
A successful goals should be one that is realistic and achievable. A goal with no action is wishful thinking. But lying to yourself and aiming for a goal that is beyond your abilities will only result in failure to reach that goal. That being said – this is not an excuse for you to be complacent here. You should set goals that will stretch your abilities but also remain possible for you to achieve.
Also, you should consider factors that will affect the achievability of the goal, like financial and time constraints. A goal example would be:
BAD: I want to be more consistent with recruiting.
GOOD: Spend two hours every morning calling candidates who applied to our Indeed ad.
4. Relevant and Realistic
Your goal should be relevant. It should matter to you, and in line with your priorities and beliefs. And also be aligned with other company goals and vision. This step keeps you from focusing on the wrong things. Many HR professionals fail to achieve their goals because the goals are not consistent with reality. Most HR personnel don’t have a problem setting big goals. Experts recommend making your goals realistic, putting them in writing, and keeping track of your progress.
5. Time-Bound
Every goal you set should have a specific deadline – this gives you something to work towards. However, aiming to hit a goal in 5 to 7 years is not considered a proper deadline. Sure, it contains a time element – but it’s not specific enough.
Your plan to reach a goal in 5 years will be quite different from your plan to reach a goal within 7 years.
Setting a more specific date for your goals allows you to develop a clearer plan to achieve it. This also prevents you from letting other everyday matters take priority over your goals. If you don’t set a deadline for your goals you won’t be able to measure milestones or how close you are to achieving your goal. Look at these examples:
BAD: I am going to rewrite our company Employee Handbook.
GOOD: I will write an updated draft, edit and finalize our Employee Handbook by June 30th.
6. Evaluate
The only way to be better is to learn from past experiences, mistakes, and successes.. Over time, things happen and goals change. Look over your goals from time to time and evaluate them ; check if they need changing to fit your current situation. Constant evaluation of you goals is essential for you to reach your goals. Be sure to congratulate yourself on the small wins. After all, you accomplished them and that should fuel your motivation.
7. Revise
Upon evaluation, if you find that your goals need readjusting, revise them accordingly.
The most important thing to do is to make revisions to your goals where you see opportunities for growth. This will also help you stay focused.
Even if you are confident with how things are going, there’s always room for improvement. Take this opportunity to analyze your performance or that of your team and make changes where needed!
Finally
Stating your goals in the SMARTER way can make them easy to understand. What is measurable can be improved and compared, and the SMARTER methodology helps HR leaders align their critical decisions to the overall company goal.