Goal-Setting Software Will Change Your Life

As a leader, you wouldn’t start the year without setting business goals, would you? The same should be said for every team and individual contributor, too. While that might seem like a daunting task, the key is simple: Setting goals allows managers to organize, set, track, and achieve their most important priorities company-wide. A good goal-setting software solution helps organizations achieve its goals at all levels, transparently. From your overall corporate strategy and goals, to team-based initiatives, down to more granular individual goals, your solution should highlight any issues that are blocking the realization of any of them. So what are the key features you should look for in goal-setting software?

Made for the Individual, Led by the Organization

The only way an organization can meet its goals is to get everyone on board, but many organizations are concerned that the leadership-skills gap is a significant challenge when it comes to preparing for future needs. Leadership should clearly communicate goals, but how can managers effectively help team members understand how their personal goals contribute to the overall business strategy? Goal-setting software makes it easy to create tailor-made goals based on individual strengths, motivations, and learning preferences, while aligning these goals to the strategy as laid out at the executive level. We are excited to share that the latest release of the Inspire platform, which makes it simple and intuitive to connect individual goals to the corresponding business strategy and track personal contributions to the greater organizational directives — across all levels of the company — while still allowing employees to select goals that are meaningful to them. Research has shown that selecting one’s own goals is the most effective way to achieving them, so implementing an agile yet structured goal-setting software is a simple way to ensure goals are being achieved.

Facilitates Better Conversations

96% of employees say that regular feedback is preferred to infrequent, formally-structured reviews. Sitting down only once or twice a year to discuss goals, behavior, or career advancements isn’t effective for developing and engaging employees, nor is it beneficial to either the manager or the employee. Instead, establishing a regular performance and feedback process has proven to be better at keeping employees engaged and building productive, thriving teams. Inspire’s latest release also provides leadership language to aid managers in the development of employees by facilitating conversations that tap into an individual’s ability and optimizes their energy and motivation in a one-to-one leadership context. Managers can help their employees set individual goals that they’ll be able to reach by varying the approach on a person-to-person basis and addressing every employee’s specific skills and motivation levels. Additionally, Inspire embeds leadership language right into the daily functionality in order to steer conversations in a way that helps individuals take ownership of their own development while also hitting all the important roadblocks, issues, or concerns an individual may need to address in real-time. The ability to learn new leadership skills and then apply them right in the flow of work is what really sets Inspire apart.

Transparency & Collaboration

32% of employees believe their employers to be untrustworthy; hard to believe but true. Goal-setting software can help combat that notion. Setting goals across all levels of the organization so they can be seen, contributed to, tracked, and updated, helps gain individual buy-in to organizational goals. Not only can individuals see how their personal goals fit into the bigger picture, they can also see the business strategy laid out before them — no secrets. When individuals and teams can contribute to and update goals, make comments on what they’re working on, where they’re roadblocked, and see how others contribute, there’s a greater opportunity for collaboration and teamwork. Two people working on the same goal can see how each other are progressing and how they can work together to get more done, quicker. This approach breaks down silos, creates transparency, and leads to better communication. The result is greater organizational trust.

As an added bonus, the more teams and employees work together, the more engaged with the company they become. Transparency leads to collaboration, which leads to engagement, and ultimately, a stronger, more robust culture where individuals want to say and thrive. We want to help you create a culture where people are invested in their goals and the goals of others — and how those contribute to the greater business strategy. Whether you are focused on OKRs, SMART goals, or just getting started with structured goal-setting, Inspire can really help.

We’d love to show you more about the new ways Inspire Software can influence your culture by organizing your goal structure, facilitating simple goal management, conversations, and organizational transparency.