Should Your Organization Have High-Level Goals?

I’m always a bit surprised when I hear about organizations that don’t have high-level goals, or who have them but don’t use them as a starting point for creating employee goals. Or when organizations confuse having individual goals for senior management with having true, overarching organizational goals.

I think sometimes in business, we assume that our employees know what our mission or purpose is, and that they’ll automatically work towards it. The truth is they typically don’t. They usually do their job and work on meeting or exceeding their manager’s expectations.

There is some research that claims that you can get away without having formal organizational goals in a small company (less than 120 employees) if you have strong, open communications and close working relationships. But would you really want to take the chance? In larger organizations, it’s really common to find that employees don’t even know their company’s mission statement, let alone its goals for the year. And if they do know their company’s mission and goals, they often can’t translate that down to their day-to-day work. So what are they working on, and whose success are they contributing to?

Establishing and clearly communicating organizational goals, then making sure that everyone is contributing to them with linked employee goals is one of the most effective ways to ensure organizational success. It’s a key way to make sure all your resources are working towards helping your organization achieve its goals.

There are numerous other benefits to having organizational goals; things like improved employee effectiveness and satisfaction, better cooperation between groups/departments, increased performance, etc.

If you’d like to read more the subject, we have a great reference article called Should Your Organization Have High-Level Goals?

Is your company successfully aligning its workforce with effective goal management?