Company goals are only helpful if you can align employees to take the necessary action to achieve them. You can spend countless hours brainstorming short-term and long-term goals for your company, but it’s not going to offer any true benefit unless you can align employees actively working to achieve them.

Aligning employees with professional goals is an all-too-common problem faced by employers today. Thankfully, there are several steps you can take to overcome it, however.

Setting Professional Goals

The first step in the process of aligning employees with your company’s goals is setting the right goals. We talk about this a little bit more in a previous blog post: Setting Business Goals To Pave The Way To Success. Regardless of your company’s niche/industry, you should create a set of both short-term and long-term goals.

An example of a short-term goal is reaching a new sales goals within a given month or fiscal period. This is something that workers can actively work to achieve while seeing the results first-hand (assuming you provide them with sales numbers on a regular basis).

An example of a long-term goal is expanding into a new market, setting up a new store, branding out into a new field, etc. Most long-term goals take a minimum of 1 year to achieve.

Display The Goals

You can’t expect employees to align with your company’s goals unless they have memorized them. So, what’s the best way to familiarize employees with a set of new goals? The answer is simple: display them somewhere in the office where employees will see them each and every time they come to work.

Writing your company’s goals down on a large piece of poster board and hanging it in the break room is an excellent way to educate employees on what you’re company is trying to accomplish; however, something as simple as a printed piece of paper with your goals typed in large font will suffice.

Show Progress

Let your employees know exactly how far the company has come in achieving its goals. When progress is clearly written down and displayed in front of them, employees will work harder and with more focus, knowing they are slowly but surely edging their way to the finish line.

Since progress changes on a regular basis, you may want to display this information on a chalkboard. At the end of the day (or beginning), you can write the progress (eg: sales, leads, etc.) on a chalkboard.