Best Practices - How to Write SMART Employee Review Goals

A SMART goal is an acronym that stands for goals that are: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Using these parameters to write goals in your employee's evaluations helps make the goals fair and achievable for your team. Let's review each piece of the SMART goals acronym:  

Specific

Professional goals should have clearly defined output expectations. This can be in terms of what is to be delivered, how much is to be delivered, and the standards for the deliverables to be measured. Let’s take the example of a goal:

"Update an existing report on emerging trends in e-commerce."

This goal lacks specificity since there is no clear definition of what is meant by “update.” A better way to write the goal is:

“Update the report on emerging trends in e-commerce with at least two new trends that aren’t listed in the current report.” 

You can take it a step further by identifying a trend as something that has a tangible outcome on your business objectives, for instance, trends that impact the way shopping habits are changing. The goal now has performance metrics that make it more objective.

Measurable

The performance goal should also include how the completion of the goal will be measured. Two common ways to measure a business output are quality and cost-effectiveness.

Quality

Accuracy of new information and effectiveness of new information can determine the quality of the work produced.

Cost-effectiveness

The efficiency of a task measures its cost-effectiveness. For instance, the cost-effectiveness of the goal in the previous example can be measured by calculating the number of hours taken when updating the report. Thus, the revised goal could read, “Update the report on emerging trends in e-commerce with at least two new trends that aren’t listed in the report, and try to come up with new research methods to save time.”

Achievable

The outcome of a performance goal should be under employees’ control. External factors should not play a role in whether a goal is considered successfully achieved. For instance, in our example of report update as a goal, it will be unfair not to consider the unavailability of critical data to evaluate trends. A fair performance goal would be "Update the report on emerging trends in e-commerce with at least two new trends that aren’t listed in the report, and try to come up with new research methods to save time. If statistically significant data is not found for compiling trends, give sources referenced for research. Sources should be reputable.”

Relevant

For performance goals to be beneficial for employees and the organization, they should be relevant to employees’ job responsibilities, thus leading to their professional development and relevant to their short- or long-term goals.

As an example, giving the responsibility of updating an existing report to a content writer in your organization makes sense. It is aligned with the work that the employee is already doing, which is primarily research-based. The goal makes even more sense if your organization has a projection of increasing its sales. By identifying new trends, you can develop new marketing strategies or entirely new products to attract more customers.

Timely

This is to ensure that a goal is met promptly. Our example performance goal can thus be updated in the following manner: “Update the report on emerging trends in e-commerce with at least two new trends that aren’t listed in the report and try to develop new research methods to save time. If statistically significant data is not found for compiling trends, give sources referenced for research. Sources should be reputable. The first draft of the report is to be sent to Manager A by June 15.”

Other Examples of SMART Performance Goals

Example 1

Vague goal: “Learn and implement new social media tactics.”

SMART goal: “Learn four new social media tactics (specific) and implement them on Facebook and Twitter (specific) by the end of this month (timely). Document the effectiveness of the tactics in terms of users reached, users, engaged, and new users engaged (measurable).”

The goal is assumed to be achievable since the employee has access to the required resources, including an Internet connection and relevant books on the topic.

Example 2

Vague goal: “Increase employee productivity.”

SMART goal: “Train the team such that at least 85 percent of department objectives (specific and measurable) for this fiscal year are met (timely).”

Again, it is assumed that the manager has access to all necessary resources, including finances, to hold regular educational seminars and approvals from relevant authorities.

Example 3

Slightly vague goal: “Create 100 new blog posts in the next four months.”

This goal is not measurable in terms of effectiveness, making it less relevant.

SMART goal: “Create 100 new blog posts in the next four months. At least 50 blog posts should be related to current trends in the industry to increase chances of engagement.”

In the last example, it is possible to make the goal unattainable by linking measurement to the amount of traffic that the blog posts fetch. Unless the employee is responsible for content marketing, the reach of content is outside the factors that the employee has control over.

Implementing SMART goals across the organization, departments, and individual team members creates alignment, boosts job performance, and improves annual reviews. It’s proven to be the most effective goal-setting approach for organizations and industries.