How to translate company goals into employee goals

Keeping leaders, HR managers & teams aligned and collaborative

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work and lose sight of the big picture of what your organization is trying to achieve. That’s why it’s vital to revisit your company goals are to ensure your employee goals are aligned and everyone’s time and effort is being spent on the tasks that contribute.

So how can you clearly communicate company goals to your team, show them how they can play a part in success, and keep them on track? Let’s explore four ways you can better communicate company goals to translate them into strategic and operational employee goals.

How to translate company goals into employee goals (and then achieve them!)

1. Cascaded employee goals

Cascading goals mean you can set a high level goal with the business owner or CEO, and then “cascade” them down (or across) throughout the whole business for individual employee goal setting – allowing everyone to set complementary goals that contribute to their team’s goals and so on. Now everyone has visibility over what the company goals are every time they view their goals, and more importantly, they can set relevant, measurable goals that actually help work towards the company mission.

2. Goal comments

Once employees have their goals set, goal comments can also be used to check in with staff and ensure they’re fully across what they need to do. The comments sections allow for a two-way conversation between a manager and their direct report, a great opportunity to ask questions or communicate about how a goal is progressing.

This is particularly beneficial if managers notice a goal is falling behind or has not been started by an appropriate time. Use this as an opportunity to touch base and see if you might need to provide any support or further training around what is required.

3. Continuous feedback

Consider incorporating a check-in on employee goals to your continuous feedback process. This could be as simple as adding a multiple choice question regarding the current company goals for employees to respond to. This is a really easy way to get visibility over who has a good understanding of company goals and who might need a refresh.

If you use intelliHR, just head into your form data analytics and you’ll be able to see what answers were submitted across the whole business. You may even observe trends in a certain cohort or team that has a particularly low or high knowledge of your company goals. In this case, you can take learnings from the sections of the business who are across company goals and apply them to the rest of the business to improve performance and help get everyone on the same page.

To take this a step further, you could add another question asking people to share their progress on their own goals contributing to these. Following these check-ins, monthly one-on-ones are then a great opportunity for managers to revisit company goals again with each of their direct reports and clarify any confusion around them.

4. Performance summaries

Using intelliHR, all of the progress on these employee goals, as well as inputs from continuous feedback can be drawn into a performance summary for formal reviews. In order to fully ensure company goals for employees are communicated clearly (and actually prioritised by everyone) they need to be prioritised in the review process as well. More importantly, your company’s core goals, and each employee’s subsequent contributing goals, are what their performance should be evaluated on first and foremost. If not, this sends a message that the company goals aren’t actually a priority, and they risk being abandoned.

Now you know how to effectively communicate your company goals across the business (and hold everyone accountable), what will you change in your processes?