A lot of business owners set targets for their employees to achieve. After all, how else are you meant to assess your company’s performance? However, numerical targets can come with unintended consequences when you don’t consider the full picture.
By Team Savant
While your workforce may achieve the targets you have set in place, they may have cut some corners in order to get there. After all, if your targets are not attainable via the correct working practices, what option do you give your workers? What’s more important: doing the job correctly or reaching a numerical goal?
Let’s take a look at an example to give you a better understanding. The government set GPs in a health organization a target, which was to see all patients within 48 hours of them making an appointment. Once this target was implemented, a large number of GPs met it very quickly. On the surface, this seems like a resounding success. But, was it really? How did the GPs manage to reach this objective when they weren’t before? They did this by limiting patient bookings to a 48-hour window. This meant that when all of the appointments were booked up, patients were simply unable to get one. Therefore, GPs simply manipulated the target they were set in order to achieve it. This is an example that can easily be applied to any other industry and business.
So, how can you keep your team focused on work while achieving more? It’s all about envisioning what your business should be like. Create a picture of what your business operates like when you are more successful than you are now. Share this vision with your employees, and ask them to make it a reality. Show them the steps to get there; don’t merely tell them the results they need to achieve.
Image: Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
By doing this, you can also help to understand different steps that need to be taken in order to make the process more efficient. For example, it could be that your employees would be able to achieve your desired objectives if they were to have better software or help in terms of virtual office services so that they are not spending time on elements of the business that are not necessary. You can head to https://www.physicaladdress.com/ for more information about this and the different sort of options that are available.
To conclude, while it may seem like a good idea to set numerical targets for your business. You need to also understand that this can end up having unintended consequences. Therefore, you need to carefully consider how you go about getting the best out of your business and whether or not setting these sorts of targets makes sense for your workforce. In some cases, it may be that numerical targets make perfect sense. However, in other situations, this may not be the case and another approach may be recommended.