SMART Goal Setting with PerformYard

Set and achieve your SMART goals through PerformYard’s “smart” goal-setting software.

Our suite of goal-setting and performance management tools will empower your workforce to create and accomplish actionable goals throughout the performance review cycle.

Align Your Workforce with SMART Goals in PerformYard

What good are goals if you can’t measure them? That is one of the biggest pitfalls of goal-setting: ensuring that goals are measurable. Organizations need to be able to measure employee progress, track this progress against benchmarks, and understand the rate at which an employee is developing. 

Using SMART goals solves this problem. SMART goals are goals that are: 

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-based 
  

With a SMART goal system, you couldn’t simply create a goal that says, “boost my sales numbers.” That’s not specific or time-based, though it is measurable and relevant. 

Instead, you’d come up with a goal that might say, “increase my ad sales by 30% in the next six months.” Now, we have a goal that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Our employee has six months (time based) to increase ad sales (specific, relevant) by 30% (measurable, attainable). 

This is an excellent SMART goal. Progress on this excellent SMART goal needs to be tracked, so that the employee and the manager know if the employee is on track to meet this goal, or if they need to make some changes to achieve the goal in six months. 

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That’s where a robust SMART goal software like PerformYard comes into play. PerformYard empowers employees to set goals, track, and achieve their goals. Managers can see employee progress, check in with employees to redirect efforts, and integrate employee goal data into the review cycle. 

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Let’s take a look into how PerformYard can empower your workforce to set and achieve their SMART goals. 

Key Features of SMART Goal Software in PerformYard

PerformYard’s goal software lets you fully customize the SMART goal setting process for your organization. You can also integrate goals with the rest of your performance management strategy. No matter if you use quarterly reviews, annual reviews, 360 reviews, or continuous feedback, PerformYard has the tools to help you set, track, and achieve your SMART goals. 

Set Individual goals, Track Individual Progress

Every member of your team can set their goals, building them out as specifically and incrementally as they wish. Goals can be placed under multiple categories, be given due dates, and even have checklists that employees can complete as they make progress on their goals. 

Within each goal, there’s space for employees and managers to leave comments and feedback, enabling clear communication throughout the review cycle. As an employee logs progress on their goal, their goal percentage will rise, providing an easy way for management to see how their workforce is progressing on their SMART goals.

Tie Goals into Performance Reviews

Come review time, PerformYard makes it easy to tie goals into the performance review process. When a manager is completing a review (be it a quarterly review, annual review, project reviews or any other type), they see every goal that their direct hire has been working on -- right in the review portal. Managers can, without leaving the review, see their employees’ progress, see where they achieved their SMART goals, and see where they may have fallen a little short. SMART goal performance can then be easily factored into the review itself. 

Performance Insights

Managers and Executive teams can easily get a bird’s eye view of how teams and individual employees are progressing on their views. Through PerformYard’s data visualizations and metrics reports, it’s easy to see where resources may need to be deployed and where others are exceeding expectations. 

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Plus, PerformYard allows you to examine any employee or team’s performance relative to their historical performance. Now, you can see that Samantha has completed 3 more goals this year than she did last year. Nice going, Samantha! 

Additional Features

PerformYard makes setting SMART goals easy and effective. Here are some other great features that our clients love. 

• Weight Goals

• Make certain goals worth more for an employee’s overall performance score

• Cascading Goals 

• Have subgoals to support individual goals, or have individual goals that support organizational goals. 

• Goal Check-ins

• Schedule monthly or weekly goal check-ins to guarantee that employees are on the right track, or adjust goals if they are no longer feasible. 
  

Excited to see how PerformYard can get you on track to set and achieve those SMART goals? We definitely are! Click here to see how we can work together!

What is SMART Goal Software?

SMART goal software like PerformYard helps organizations track goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Based. Users can assign goals to team members, track progress, and review data to make performance management more efficient.

Benefits of Using PerformYard for SMART Goal Tracking

The SMART goal system helps you focus on what is important for your employee and your organization to achieve. 

By being specific, you focus on an objective that you can clearly achieve or fail to achieve. 

By being measurable, managers and employees can track progress and see when an employee met the goal or by how much an employee exceeded the goal. 

By being attainable, you create a practical goal that an employee will be driven to complete. 

By being relevant, you ensure that each employee’s goals supports the company’s greater vision. 

By being time-based, you instill a sense of purpose and urgency, leading to a higher goal completion rate. 

SMART goals are measurable and actionable -- goals that employees can achieve, and whose achievement can be used to form the basis of performance reviews. 

PerformYard is the ideal software for combining goal management and performance review. PerformYard keeps your goals centrally located, provides updates and analysis automatically, and integrates your goals automatically into your performance management process.

This integration streamlines and improves your performance review cycle. Now, managers can see how their direct hires have met and exceeded their defined objectives during the review period -- all without leaving the performance review platform. Everything is integrated! Everything is simple. 

But don’t just take our word for it. Have a look at how PerformYard has helped some of our clients improve their performance management process. 

“PerformYard has streamlined our quarterly review process and has made feedback and goal setting so much easier!” - Vanessa from CFGI

“PerformYard has exceeded our expectations and the entire team has been an outstanding partner to us. We were able to implement an automated performance review process (goal setting, reviews, and feedback tools) in a short period of time.” - Jaymie for Dermira, Inc.

We’re really excited about how PerformYard can streamline and automate your performance management process -- from SMART goal setting to performance reviews. 

Get in touch to see how PerformYard can help you set and achieve your SMART goals!

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Resources Related to SMART Goal Setting

How to Write SMART Goals (University of California)

Why SMART Goals are Important

The Anatomy of an Effective Goal

Your Smart Goals Aren’t Smart Enough (SHRM Community)

Frequently Asked Questions

What are SMART goals examples?

SMART goals turn vague goals into concrete goals by making them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. For example, “I want to enhance customer service” becomes, “By next year, I want my customer service feedback score to be 20% higher.”

How do you set SMART goals in 2021?

Ask questions of everyone on your team about what they want to accomplish this year and where they would like to see improvement. Remember: focus on big-picture results and make each goal Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. Using a template as you make your SMART goal can help you iron out the nitty-gritty of goal setting, like what milestones you will use to measure their progress with. Once your goals are underway, you can track their progress with software like PerformYard.

What are the criteria for SMART goals?

SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based so that employees have concrete, practical steps they can take to complete each task, and managers have clear data they can use to grade employee performance.

What are the pros and cons of SMART goals?

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based goals encourage teams to create goals that are achievable and measurable. This is great when it comes to measuring employee growth and performance. However, because of the focus on achievability, SMART goals can cause people to set their goals artificially low so that they aren’t penalized if they don’t achieve a difficult goal. Teams can preempt this issue by having frank conversations about balancing achievability and ambition.