What stops you from Achieving Goals?
subramanian.rama 2015
www.synergita.com

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What stops you from Achieving Goals?
Employee engagement levels and team dynamics plays a vital role in achieving organizational goals.
Sometimes employees come together seamlessly as a team but most often it’s the leadership that
plays a crucial role thoughtfully to design & build a collaborative culture within the organization to
create an effective workplace that supports engagement, satisfaction and performance to ensure
sustainable growth.
Before we move further let’s understand what factors hinders us from achieving goals. It arguably
boils down to these four factors:
 Lack of clarity – What to do, next steps and how much time we have?
 Lack of skill – How to do?
 Limiting behaviour – Motivation, work design, other people.
 Lack of information – Critically affects the ability to see the bigger picture and make
decisions.
A recent report by Deloitte University press indicates 42% of respondents in a survey have reviewed
and updated their performance management process.
The necessity to update the traditional system in place is for the following reasons:
 The conventional system operates on the assumption that setting goal is an effective way to
manage business.
 Traditional systems rely on the assumption that annual reviews are enough to motivate and
retain employees and to correct them where necessary.
 With matrix structures in place employees today work with more than one manager.
 The traditional process assumes employees have to be managed to achieve goals and does
not consider the need for motivation and inspiration.
 Fairness of the process, justifying compensations tied to performance has always been one
of the pain points irrespective of the size of the organization.

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Still Struggling to in-still passion & purpose?
A report by Bersin mentions only 13% of world employees are highly engaged, 63% disengaged and
24% actively disengaged resulting in lost productivity & innovation worth billions of dollars annually.
But more importantly this has caused a serious dent to business competitiveness and opportunities
impacting both top and bottom lines for future years as well. As per Gallup, estimated cost of the
economy for disengaged employees is $350 billion a year! This has forced most organizations to re-
evaluate their performance management process, abandon their rating and ranking based
performance management system & adopt a coaching and development model to realign with the
new generation of workforce. This has imposed a new challenge for taking performance
management systems to a new level.
The emerging business trends require feedback cycles to be ongoing and also real-time to manage
performance. Necessary feedbacks to be offered in an informal way involving managers, peers &
employees which also helps manage relationships better and helps contribute towards organizations
coaching and mentoring initiatives.
The new system should more than ever before address the innate psychological need of
awards/recognition for achievements/quality performance. This empowerment contributes to
satisfaction, encourages participation and higher performance from themselves and also from their
teams. This invariably would drive engagement levels and also help build a positive cultural shift
motivating employees to achieve desired competencies, knowledge and behaviour skills.
Last but not the least, one’s ability to focus is the primary driver of effectiveness. The foremost
requirement therefore is to set clear expectations and define roles to enforce accountability and
follow-up by tracking and monitoring progress of the set goals. This can dramatically improve overall
effectiveness and organizations’ performance.
In this ever changing competitive business landscape the need is to have more frequent one-on-one
interactions with employees to disseminate personalised messages (It has come to observation that
attrition fell by 20-40 % when coaching and mentoring were deemed satisfactory). The one-to-one
interactions for review (if not held monthly) are to be held at least once a quarter to maximise ones’
potential by leveraging their strength, discuss experience & training requirements, career plans for
growth and to align employees with strategic corporate objectives and priorities.
The new system requires combining the focal points of Continuous feedback, Goals tracking,
articulating shared goals and objectives and make performance reviews ongoing and continuous.
Are Goals Achieved through Social Collaboration?
Collaboration is an indicator of passion & trust and is a natural and efficient approach to problem
solving. This in particularly is true in knowledge intensive settings where it can often be noticed
people rely heavily on their network of relationships to find information and solve problem. It is also
common to note in an informal network the employee behaviour is comparatively more reflective
than observed in an aristocratic or bureaucratic setup. It can also be commonly observed that

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collaborative interactions are the key to develop and accelerate the spread of new ideas or opinions
for either creating a climate of innovation or for learning to help meet specific tasks.
With the markets becoming global and the workforce scattered across different time zones, it
demands a process that almost resembles having a conversation rather than capturing records after
the fact, thus creating a growing need for a strong communication tool to keep goals in focus & on
track. The managers should be aware of how his team is tracking against all its goals and at the same
time keep these interactions on a secured network as these are about business.
The proliferation of social and mobile technologies in the last 15 years has revolutionized how we
share and communicate today and has fuelled our ability to stay social 24X7. It is this technology
which has made our lives easier and brought us closer to our family and friends. Having born directly
into a new era of technology, millennials are hardwired and glued to their smart phones and other
devices and the most defining characteristic of them is the fluency and comfort with which they use
this technology. Now that millennials have surpassed Gen X in terms of availability of workforce it
makes it imperative to provide real time workspace for teams to share data and socialize to get
conversations started.
Online social collaboration has become part of workplace culture acting as a key tool for engaging
workers by creating a feeling of inclusivity to the organization and for building a trust environment.
Like Facebook/LinkedIn, the performance management system should enable its users to ask
questions, post comments, make announcements, recognize peers and act as an incident diary of
the employee to initiate constructive discussions by managers and the get the feedbacks.

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Is your performance management data driven?
For decades talent management has revolved around the traditional methods of personal
relationships and experience rather than deep analysis. Details of a survey finding are as given
under.
The importance of talent analytics in the traditional method is that they are data driven and provide
objective information than qualitative findings, which helps in making predictive decisions rather
than reactive. This addresses business issues and not merely HR issues. The key factor differentiating
a high performing organization from the moderate would be the depth of talent analytics available
for building capacity of the existing talents and to plan future workforce initiatives.
The quest for higher performance by companies can be achieved by data mining which enables to
find facts & gain knowledge about trends and effects of decisions or events. However, the common
problem encountered is on leveraging this massive amount of data accumulating from more and
more sources that are available in raw form. The key, however, is to align the data analytics with
corporate strategies and understand how it supports to identify where to focus and what business
objectives are to be derived from the efforts.
Data analytics is a powerful tool to provide insights on the outcome of a decision or trends. This
information becomes the source for bringing intelligence for organizations to plan and trigger
strategic initiatives to improve performance and help speed up changes for competitive advantage.
The statistical methods and measurements of data analytics helps in quantifying and aligning risks,
which when linked with corporate performance helps to understand the inter-relationships between
employees, customers and products. This enables companies to implement strategic initiatives to
improve and optimize efficiency and at the same time enhance the ability to forecast changes in the
market and take proactive measures. It doesn’t go without saying that data analytics supports and
enables faster decision making, helps manage risks and transform business process across a range of
activities.

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Conclusion. The proliferation of technology, the competitive global market and the perception of
the Gen Xers & Millennials, demands an integrated approach to talent management to perform in
the competitive climate of global economy. The need of the hour is to have an agile system which
provides up to date information of performance metrics that motivates and informs teams about
their progress and also one which enables continuous contextual constructive dialogues for coaching
and feedback. The new performance management system should balance and support both work
modes: Individual and Collaborative. At the same time be complimented by data analytics for quick
decision making and implementing improvement plans to see a significant improvement in
performance.