Why 2022 Can be Your Best Year for Goal Setting
Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash
For many small to medium enterprises (SMEs), basic goal setting is one of the most critical yet undervalued activities for business planning. Even if you are the business’ only employee, it’s a vital step towards visualising – and then achieving – future growth.
If you have not given much thought to the targets you’d like to hit in the short and long term, a new year is the perfect time to change that. According to Gartner’s Top Five Priorities for HR Leaders in 2022, organisations need to be thinking about:
Building critical skills and competencies
Organisational design and change management
Current and future leadership bench
Future of work
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
It’s vital, however, to consider these points in terms of how they affect your employees – and how your employees affect those goals. Workplace culture has changed enormously in 2021, with increased emphasis on working remotely due to Covid-19.
Using your employees as a focus, do your key themes for creating business goals in 2022 change? For instance, they may now include:
The effect of hybrid workplaces How is your business responding now, and in the future?
Resilience How do you build efficiency and resilience in your business, from the leaders down to the employees? Now we have seen how employment can be disrupted by outside influences such as COVID-19, what measures are you taking to bounce back?
Ensuring diversity Does your workforce represent a sensible cross-section of diverse employees? Despite the recent emphasis placed on this by many businesses, progress has been slow. A wide variety of skills and approaches makes your organisation more creative and fosters fresh approaches to the work. Most workforces and the communities in which they operate now expect greater attention to this.
Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) What do your employees get from your organisation in return for their skills, efforts and successes? Set alongside 2021’s shift towards hybrid workplaces, EVPs became one of the most noticeable focuses for the Human Resources sector, and you may find staff expectations of their employers have shifted. It’s worth considering three factors in particular: improved employee engagement (including an emphasis on social responsibility); expanded career options; and improved wellbeing (including mental-health considerations).
Identifying your goals for 2022 isn’t the end of the process, however; it’s also important to put in place the means to measure your success in achieving them.
An easy way to do this is to follow the SMART method of goal setting. Are your targets:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timely?
By adapting the five Gartner goals for more employee emphasis, you can keep your business on track to hit new heights in the new year. After all, your employees are one of your greatest key investments – and protecting that investment is the best foundation for success.