Employee Goal Setting Template [Free Download]

Setting goals for the new year? A lot of people do. However, according to the New York Times, over 50% of new year’s resolutions fade throughout the year, and a third of all resolutions are discarded by the end of January.

If your team member has big ambitions for this year, don’t encourage them to rely on sheer motivation alone to achieve them (spoiler alert: this never works). Instead, work with your employee to create a solid plan for success by using this goal-setting template.

To keep track of what’s been discussed in meetings and ensure alignment with goals, consider using our meeting minutes template to document key points and action items.

What is this employee goals template for?

To achieve our goals, we need to work smarter, not harder. This goal-setting template is designed using scientifically-backed goal-setting strategies. At the beginning of the year, sit down with your employee and work through this sheet to help them pave the way forward. Setting goals should be a collaborative process, and our template can help you and your employees start the year off on the right foot.

Get this downloadable template for free now.

Goal to action plan example

If you’re developing goals with your employees, then setting things out in a structured goal-to-action plan can help break things up into manageable steps. Here are some examples of common goals and how they can be worked towards.

Goal	Motivation	First Steps	Routine	Measurement	Celebrate Milestone
Improve time management	Reduce daily stress and more efficiently meet timelines	Track current time usage for one week	Use a daily planner to assign time blocks to each task	Weekly check-ins on task completion rate	Take half-day off after two weeks of success
Increase sales by 15%	Qualify for quarterly bonus and grow professionally	Review current pipeline and lead sources	Make 5 outreach calls/emails every morning	CRM progress tracked weekly	Team lunch once milestone is hit
Provide more team feedback	Support team development and leadership growth	Schedule recurring feedback sessions	Weekly 1:1s and monthly performance check-ins	Feedback completion log	Shoutout team progress in all-hands meeting
Develop public speaking skills	Improve confidence and communication during meetings	Identify areas of expertise	Prepare notes for weekly/regular meetings	Track how many meetings the employee has successfully contributed to	Employee of the month award for increased activity within meetings

How do you set goals with your employees?

Setting goals should be a collaborative process between manager and employee. You both need to have equal buy-in and full transparency over what the goals are, and why. If you have a great understanding of what your employee is trying to accomplish from the beginning, it will make it much easier to assist them as they work towards success.

It’s not just the goals themselves that you can work together on. You can also work together to create a plan or identify a framework or routine that will help them keep moving forward.

Any process should be kick-started by sitting down together and filling out this goal-setting template. This template provides ample opportunity for reflection, professional development identification, business goals alignment and even motivating factors to make getting started extra exciting. After completing our goal-setting template, you, and your team members, will be ready and raring to go.

Why is having a goal-setting process important?

Ever heard the term; if you fail to plan, you plan to fail?

Having a process where you and your team members can properly and solidly put goals in place means they will be much more likely to stay on track in their pursuit of success.

What are the key elements of a goal-setting process?

In our goal setting template, you’ll see there are a few key elements that can help you and your team members define goals.

Reflection

Before you jump into your new year’s goals, it’s important to take a minute to recognise what you achieved last year.

What was achieved that needs to be celebrated? Why is your team member proud of their success, and what was the impact on the greater business? You need to enjoy the afterglow of the wins before you get started down a new road.

Now for the less fun part: what didn’t work?  Which goals were set last year that could not be achieved? What were the main roadblocks that stood in the way of your team member achieving them and how can these roadblocks be removed or reduced as we look towards new performance goals?

It can be tempting to jump straight in, but if you do, you might find yourself repeating the same process all over again.

Ambition

Now’s the time for blue-sky thinking.

Where does your team member see themselves in one, five and ten years from now? Are they looking to take on a management or leadership role, or would they like to pursue a new skill or speciality? Aligning any future goals with their ambitions can help them think about their long-term career with your company, which is fantastic for employee retention.

These conversations can also lead to greater learning and development opportunities. If you’d like to go deeper into these career discussions, download our Professional Development Plan template.

Defining

Now it’s time to note down each goal in detail.

We’ll get more into SMART goals later in this article, but this part of the process is your opportunity to be specific.

If you and your employee note down vague suggestions like, ‘make positive progress in my overall call numbers’ or ‘improve my management skills’, they’re not going to get very far. But if you swapped these for statements like, “increase my weekly call numbers by 20%” or “complete management training and pick up three management responsibilities”, you’re going to have a much better idea of what you’re actually aiming for.

We like to take a 360 degree approach to defining goals at this point in the process by identifying;

• The motivation behind the goal
• Why the goal is realistic
• Who the employee will share the goal with to stay accountable
• Their first three steps that they can get started on right away to achieving this goal
• Routines that they can establish to make reaching their goal easier
• How they will celebrate their goal, should they achieve it

It can feel like an overwhelming amount of information at first, but working through these points together can give an employee a clear road map.

These detailed plans are essential in projecting us towards success. As we mentioned in our scientifically-proven methods to reach your goals article, a 2015 study from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania found that creating a plan for a goal was critical to achieving it.

Researchers spoke to a group of people who had intentions to vote in an election. With half the group, they simply asked if they were going to vote. With the other half, they asked when, where and how they would vote. As you might expect, the group that talked through their plan to vote were twice as likely to actually do it.

Measuring

It’s the least exciting but possibly most crucial part of any goal setting process; deciding how tracking progress will work when it comes to your employee’s goals. It’s time to think about measuring; the all important ‘M’ in any SMART goal.

Most goals will be able to be quantified in some way, so dig a little deeper if it doesn’t appear possible at first. Not everything has to be tied to a monetary value, there’s plenty of other metrics that you could use.

Just a few examples include;

• Amount of time spent on completing a task
• A number of calls made or emails sent to customers
• A number of products produced
• A number of services completed
• A number of customer service tickets completed
• Ratings of your product or service, or ratings of your customer service (compiled as an average number)

Not every single goal will be able to be quantified, and that’s ok. Just remember that whatever you lose in measurability, make up for it in specificity. That way, you can let the data tell the real story. 

Creating employee action plans with SMART goals

Now it’s time for everyone’s favourite goal setting acronym – SMART!

SMART goals were invented in 1981 by George T. Doran, a consultant and former Director of Corporate Planning for the Washington Water Power Company. In his paper, ‘There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives’ he writes about establishing a simple and easy framework that could cut through the masses of information for leaders around goal setting.

“How do you write meaningful objectives?’- that is, frame a statement of results to be achieved. Managers are confused by all the verbal from seminars, books, magazines, consultants, and so on. Let me suggest therefore, that when it comes to writing effective objectives, corporate officers, managers, and supervisors just have to think of the acronym SMART.”

For the uninitiated, SMART stands for;

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable (the word Assignable is also sometimes used)
• Realistic
• Timely (the term Time-Related or Time-Bound is also sometimes used)

We’ve already spoken a little bit about the importance of creating specific goals and measurable goals; but what about those three other letters?

Attainable goals

An attainable goal means that the goal-setter has the necessary resources available to complete this task. Assessing attainability might include identifying whether the person has;

• The right equipment, tools and products to complete their tasks
• The right support available from their manager, the rest of their team or freelance/contract workers
• The right skills to complete their tasks

If a missing piece is identified when evaluating attainability, this doesn’t mean that the goal isn’t worth pursuing. Rather, the attainability factors will need to be addressed in the first steps taken to achieve the goal.

Realistic goals

What about realistic goals? And how are they different from attainable goals? Well, you might have everything you need to complete a goal, but your target could be completely unachievable. This is one of the most common mistakes when it comes to setting goals.

So, for example, if you’re a social media manager you might have the objective of growing your Instagram followership. Say the last quarter you were able to increase your followership by 5%, it’s probably unreasonable to think that this quarter you could increase your followership by 50%. You’d need a viral post every other day to make numbers like that work!

When we set unrealistic goals (which we will inevitably never reach), it’s incredibly demotivating. We feel like we’ve failed when we never really gave ourselves the opportunity to succeed.

Taking a look at previous performance and making modest estimates about the impacts of new initiatives can help you manage expectations and create goals that are within reach.

Timely goals

Finally, let’s talk about time-bound goals. It’s important to set a deadline for your goals, otherwise, there’s not a lot of incentive to start working towards them.

If you create goals at the beginning of the year, you’re probably thinking about goals that span 12 months. If that suits your goal, that’s great! Other common time frames include;

• Year quarters; Q1 (January 1 – March 31), Q2 (April 1 – June 3), Q3 (July 1 – September 30) and Q4 (October 1 – December 31)
• Year halves; January – June, July – December

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is another great framework that incorporates SMART principles. Learn more about this powerful goal setting strategy

How can you align employee goals with company OKRs?

Ultimately, your employee’s goals need to align with the company’s OKRs. This can be somewhat difficult if the company is keeping their strategy close to their chest and not sharing it with the wider workforce. First, the company needs to set clear OKRs that everyone in leadership can agree on.

To set OKRs, you should:

• Define the objectives for the upcoming six months/a year (depending on your company’s calendar)
• Set specific, measurable and achievable metrics to track how your company is progressing towards those objectives
• Set regular check-ins to assess how your company is doing in relation to those OKRs
• Schedule quarterly/bi-annual reviews to analyse OKR progress over the preceding period and make any changes as needed

To align employee goals with company OKRs, HR and/or leadership should be brought into the goal-setting process. By providing transparency around the company’s plans for the short, medium and long-term future, employees can understand what’s needed from them and how they fit into the wider picture. This encourages accountability from your entire workforce, as they can see that everyone is working towards the same mission.

How should goal progress be tracked and reported?

There are a range of ways that you can track and report goal progress, provided they’ve been set using the SMART method.

Depending on what technology your company uses, you can track goal progress using:

• Excel tracking tools
• Employee performance management software like Employment Hero
• Project management (eg. Asana, Monday) tools
• Regular reports that summarise key results and goal completion over time

Understanding how your company usually reports on key metrics will help inform how you decide to document goal progress. It’s important to measure goal progress along the way, so you can keep everyone involved in the process accountable, while also providing extra support if needed.

What psychological factors support goal achievement?

There are a few psychological factors that you can employ to help your employees meet their goals. 

These include:

• Habit stacking — a technique used to link new habits to existing routines (e.g. ‘After doing [thing] I currently do, I’ll do [new thing]’)
• Self-efficacy — Fostering an employee’s belief that they can achieve their goals
• Aligning goals with personal values — Link objectives to things the employee holds dear, such as professional development, career growth or a desire to support others.

It’s also important to help your employees establish a routine around their goals. This may look like:

• Daily or weekly updates on progress towards their goals
• Reminders of key milestones so they can work towards them periodically
• Weekly or fortnightly check-ins to discuss goal progress
  

Goals don’t get achieved without oversight. By showing you’re invested in your employee’s progress, they’re more likely to put the time and effort in to achieve their goals..

Mistakes to avoid when setting goals with employees

It can be easy to take control of the goal-setting process and assume you know what’s best for the employee. However, there are a few common mistakes that can pop up when you’re setting goals with your employees.

These include:

• Setting too many goals, including goals that compete with each other
• Ignoring how achievable the goals you’re setting are
• Skipping regular goal-setting and goal review sessions, so employees aren’t held accountable
  

Using the SMART principle we outlined earlier, you can set goals that are easily tracked and acted upon in a timeframe that makes sense for both the employee and the business. Goal-setting and review sessions should be incorporated into your performance management process, so everyone involved in the process understands the progress. 

It can be easy to set goals and forget about them. However, regularly reviewing the goals you’ve set with your employees can help improve productivity, while making sure everyone feels invested in achieving their goals.

Who should be involved in setting employee goals?

There are a few different people who should be involved in the goal-setting process. These people include:

• The employee, who should be self-assessing their performance and where they’d like to improve
• The manager, as they should be working alongside the employee to set their goals
• HR and leadership, to advise on overall company direction and to check the goals align with the strategy
  

Ultimately, any goals you’re setting should be developed with the employee’s buy-in. Setting goals for them without their input won’t see the same level of performance when compared to goals they’ve set for themselves. 

Finding a happy middle ground can help everyone involved in the process achieve the outcomes they’re looking for, while keeping the focus on the employee’s growth.

Other performance management resources

Looking for more assistance with performance management? Here’s a handpicked selection of helpful resources.

Performance review template

We’ve created these performance review templates for managers, to help guide conversations with your direct reports. Our comprehensive performance review guide might also help.

Performance improvement plan template

Motivate employees to get back on track if their performance takes a turn for the worse with this performance improvement plan template.

Employee coaching plan template

Receiving coaching at work can help employees tackle unique challenges, spark new ideas, build confidence, and keep their skills relevant. Use this employee coaching plan template to guide you through this process.

How can Employment Hero help

Setting goals can help you turn your employees into star performers. We’ve designed our goal-setting template to help you create attainable, measurable objectives that help your employees get to where they want to be in their career. To download the template, register using the form on this page.