Continuously driving increased productivity, quality and safety across your firm are of the utmost importance, helping to keep projects on time and budget, workers safe and clients happy.
This isn’t going to happen overnight, but goal setting is a great way to move the needle on those critical metrics. In order to do so successfully, it’s crucial first to have benchmarks to judge your progress on, as well as a plan for helping your entire team work towards improvement across the board.
The benefits of setting goals as a team
The concept of goal setting and incentives should come from the top, as leadership buy-in is essential to making this process effective. Have your leadership team work together to create a framework for goal setting.
Using the framework established by company leadership, get the entire team involved in setting goals. Encourage the team to bring ideas for goals and growth forward.
There are many benefits your company will see as a result. Most notably:
- Everyone is equally invested in making results happen.
- Increased productivity benefits the bottom line.
- Attention is focused on key performance indicators (KPIs) like quality and safety.
- Setting goals as a team encourages better teamwork and collaboration to ensure milestones are met.
What goes into great team goals?
There should be some company-wide metrics established at the corporate level that all crews should have to meet or strive toward. As a best practice, your company goals should be tied to business outcomes.
There are a few key metrics you should incorporate in all your team goals to help drive better crew performance and an increased bottom line. These key metrics include:
- Productivity
- Efficiency
- Safety
- Quality
- Schedule reliability
Within those higher level metrics, individual crews and their leaders should work to set smaller goals to achieve them. Break down the big metrics into bite-sized chunks, either in terms of timeframe or what’s reasonable to achieve.
For example, a big goal “improving safety” won’t be achieved overnight, so frontline leaders should work with their crews to develop milestones to get there bit by bit, and then hold them accountable. Positive incentives, competition and negative reinforcement are all ways of holding a crew accountable. Figure out what works best for your team here.
How to get started
Goal setting is a very actionable strategy you can get started with almost right away. Here’s how:
- Gather stakeholders to set goals for the company. Look at previous metrics to determine benchmarks for success. Try not to set unrealistic goals that your team will never be able to meet. This will only be discouraging.
- Roll those goals out to each crew and frontline leader. Those leaders should each set specific goals for their team that are measurable and attainable, with input from crew members and help from management. Ensure the entire staff is on board with the goals you’ve set and that expectations and roles are clearly defined.
- Develop or use a system to track each of your pre-determined KPIs. This could be a simple spreadsheet or a program like Trestles Labor Management System.
- Take it one step further and incorporate friendly competition. Add an element of fun to your job site by implementing friendly competition among crew workers. Learn more about implementing friendly competition within this checklist.
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