How to set goals at work

The nature of your company’s business model and current needs will determine which goals are appropriate. To ensure your work efforts focus on tasks which take your company forward it is important to proactively articulate goals to work towards. For the best result, a goal should be unambiguous and ambitious to ensure everyone is motivated to achieve it, and all goals should ideally have one or more milestones/deliverables connected with it so that it is measurable and allows you to track your progress. A goal should also be limited in time in order to establish a healthy sense of urgency. Taken together, these aspects will create a desire to achieve the goal, enable you to adequately assess the outcome of your work and determine why (or why not) the desired result was achieved.


When goals and milestones are formulated in a collaborative, “bottom up” manner involving those who are responsible for carrying out the work and relevant additional senior stakeholders, the goal setting process becomes a very powerful alignment tool among team members. Such a collaborative approach contrasts to the traditional structure where a company’s goals are decided unilaterally by management and communicated “top down”.


The nature of the goals you want to set for work will vary according to your company’s business model and current needs. Examples may include the following:

• Goal: Increase profitability. Key Result: Secure $1 million new client sales per month by the end of Q1 2021.
• Goal: Increase customer retention. Key Result: Reach monthly recurring revenue of $5 million by 30 June 2020.
• Goal: Grow market share. Key Result: Generate 100 potential client leads by 30 September 2020.
• Goal: Increase profit margin. Key Result: Reduce annual software license costs by $900,000.

Check out Pembio for a ready-to-use tool that helps you and your team implement a structured goal setting process.