Does your practice drift along, or do you have specific targets and goals to achieve? Goal setting can help you transform your business and make the most of it. Here are five quick ideas about how to set realistic and achievable goals and motivate your staff. You could try thinking about one idea each lunch break, and refresh your goal setting for your practice within a week.
- Does your practice have an aim? This could be an overarching mission statement, but may well be backed up with financial goals and targets for growth.
- Brush up your knowledge of what a SMART goal is: just to remind you, it stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. Look at the overall aim for your practice: can it be broken down into a series of SMART goals? Think what is a reasonable number of goals to work towards.
- Once you have goals, identify which goals are relevant to which members of staff. Those who work on the shop floor may be clearly responsible for sales, but can the optometrist also play a role in this by making recommendations in the testing room? It is much easier and more effective to have a team approach for specific goals than leave everyone responsible for achieving all of them.
- Take some time to think about what motivates you and your staff to achieve your goals. You could have targets related to staff wellbeing: it’s easy to see why staff would work on those. Do they, however, have a sense of ownership for financial goals, or customer satisfaction? Consider which incentives would motivate your team.
- Evaluate and feed back. When you have your goals, your teams to achieve them, motivated and incentivised, you also need to consider how often to assess progress towards each goal. Some will benefit from frequent measurement, others from monthly or quarterly reports. How will you feed back on progress and consolidate behaviour leading to improvements? Plan this right from the start and you will have a truly effective system of goals for your business.
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