A. Agree on Goals and Key Results
Align Goals to Create a Shared Purpose
After your remote workers are done identifying their goals, it is time that you assess them. Think about how their goals fit the larger picture and how they link with expected contributions and results as a member of your team. Both the organizational and professional aspirations must be accounted for. You can also check whether they cover all the elements of the SMART rubric, especially Measurable and Realistic.
Individual, Team and Company
Each individual or team should set goals that support the company’s objectives. If this is done, every person working in your company can focus their energy on work that matters the most and benefits the company.
Do not assume that your remote workers already understand the goals of your team and of the organization, so take time to discuss them in detail. More than the goals themselves, the reason behind these goals is more important. Working toward these goals become more meaningful if they know why they are toiling to meet them.
You can now review your remote workers’ goals list. Try to identify which of their goals should be prioritised. If a goal does not align with the team’s or the company’s goals, try to revise it to better serve the team or the company. Otherwise, you can discard it altogether.
You can also suggest other goals that might be missing from their list, especially if it is important from an organizational perspective.
Personal Aspirations and Work Responsibilities
Personal aspirations should always be factored in when setting goals. Your remote workers may be part of your organization; they may also share your objectives, but they are also individuals with aspirations of their own. The best approach is to always integrate your remote workers’ professional or career goals into the company’s. Here are some ways to help align your employees personal goals with the goals of the company:
- Relate your company’s goals to your remote workers.
Employees need to understand what they contribute to the company goals for them to be fully engaged in their work. They should understand that they make a difference, and have a sense of how each specific company objective relates back to their day-to-day work, in both the short-term and long-term.Team members who believe that the company goals do not apply to them have a reduced investment in the organization’s performance. To prevent this, the business’s goals must be clear, actionable, and understood by even the newest members of the team. It also means that goals should be shared between departments. No individual employee or group should work in a silo, or feel as if they are disconnected from the organization as a whole. - Provide opportunities for personal development.
Whether it be new job responsibilities, leadership training or additional skill-building opportunities, the business should offer employees new resources and ways to achieve their personal goals. These development opportunities do not have to be one-size-fits-all. Instead, you can allow your employees to alter each method to their own needs. They can also be made part of an employee’s daily work responsibilities. - Allow your remote workers to set their own goals.
It’s important to allow employees to determine their own personal objectives. These goals should not simply be increasing the number of hours worked, but challenging and rewarding personal endeavors that benefit both the business and the staff. However, management should also take part in the development of these goals. Employees should feel comfortable sharing their personal visions, and supported by management. Furthermore, an employee’s personal goals should be relevant to the business in some way, including skill development or career progression. These goals should also be something that it is possible to do and something that the company is capable of supporting. Vague plans are harder for employees to envision and achieve. Like company-wide objectives, personal achievement should be specific and easy to understand. Even personal goals should be measurable, or they may be too subjective to actually attain. If an employee would like to become a better coder, the manager and employee may think of multiple ways to make that personal development vision more specific and thus something the team member can measure. - Ask your remote workers what their goals are, and help them create actionable plans.
The most important way to align company-wide goals with personal development is to ask each employee what they want to achieve. If you wish to keep an engaged team, you should understand what motivates each team member, and take their interests seriously. This means listening to what employees would like to attain in their careers with the company. It also means helping uncertain employees define clearer visions of their own goals and craft a specific plan of action. When personal development shifts from a hope or vision to a step-by-step list of achievements, employees have an attainable way to work on their personal goals. However, you should not create these plans alone, nor should your employees. You and your employees must create the goal plan together in order to give them a sense of ownership over their own achievements, while still feeling supported by the organization.
Clarify Priorities and Focus
Prioritizing work involves making difficult decisions about the importance of your remote workers’ ongoing tasks. Follow these seven steps to learn how to prioritize work effectively:
- Let your remote workers identify their goals.
To help your remote workers prioritise their work properly, you first need to help them establish their goals so that they have a big picture view of what they’re working toward. Let them set long-term goals that clearly demonstrate what they hope to accomplish in their work and personal life. You can also guide them in setting short-term goals that they would like to accomplish that help propel them toward their long-term goals. Once their goals are written down, suggest that they keep them close at hand so they can easily refer to them, revisit, and revise them whenever they need to. - Have your remote workers create a list of tasks needed to achieve a goal.
The next step in prioritizing work is identifying all the tasks ahead of you. Instruct your remote workers to create a master list that includes all their current and future tasks. Once they have captured all their jobs on a master list, have them break them down into monthly, weekly, and daily tasks. They can start creating a monthly list from the master list that identifies everything they hope to accomplish for the month. It can include personal priorities in addition to work obligations. From their monthly list, they can pull the tasks they can finish each week into a weekly list and from there create their daily to-do lists. - Teach your remote workers how to assess the importance and urgency of each task.
Now that they have a grasp of all the tasks ahead of them, it’s time to identify how important and how urgent each task is. Urgent tasks are those that need to be completed quickly. They might not be important, though; in fact many urgent tasks aren’t important. Important tasks are those that bring you closer to your long-term goals and mission. They’re typically more time consuming and may not have a clear deadline for completion. It’s a good idea to take care of the urgent tasks on your list as soon as you can. Then, you’ll be able to schedule longer periods of time in your calendar to focus on important work. - Your remote workers must measure the value of each task.
When your remote workers have a list of your urgent tasks and they need to decide which to give priority to, it can help to assess the value of each task. - They have to order similar tasks by the amount of effort needed to accomplish them.
If they still have tasks that seem to tie for priority, they must make an estimate of how much time each task will take to help them prioritise. They might feel more motivated and energized if they first tackle the tasks of equal priority that take the shortest amount of time to complete. - Train your remote workers to be open and resilient to changes.
It’s important to understand that priorities aren’t static; they can change throughout the week or in the middle of the day. Just be sure your remote workers can stay focused on the big picture and reorder their priorities when necessary to quickly get back on track. - Your remote workers must know what tasks to let go.
Your remote workers only have so much time in the day and they will not always be able to get to everything at once. When they have set their top priorities and scheduled them in for the day, they can cut the remaining tasks and focus on them another day, especially when they become a higher priority. Then, focus on the day’s projects and get to work tackling their priorities.
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