Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

October 2019

Setting business goals: the ultimate guide

Goals are crucial for team performance and satisfaction at work. They’re also the building blocks for your business’ vision, and help your team translate that vision into reality. But setting the right goals is a fine art, and if you’re not careful it can cause more harm than good. To help you get it right, here’s a curated list of goal setting resources.

How TV dashboards can help your team achieve goals

You and your team want to make the company vision a reality. To do this, you of course need a well-defined strategy. But you also need to make that strategy crystal clear for the whole company. And your team needs to feel excited by it, pull in the same direction, and have the power to take consistent action. While most companies already aspire to work like this, it’s hard to achieve in practice. Here are some of the challenges you may be up against.

How to stop micromanaging and give your team autonomy

To stop micromanaging, and give your team more autonomy, you could just follow the advice of William McKnight, the founder and one-time president of 3M: “Hire good people and leave them alone.” Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy in practice, so in this article we’ll cover...

What is a key performance indicator (KPI)?

A KPI is a numeric measure of performance for any activity that’s important to your business. Sometimes known as a ‘performance measure,’ the term KPI is often used interchangeably with ‘metric.’ The only real difference between the two is the word ‘key.’ KPIs are important metrics that you really care about, but a metric is any number that you track.

How to set meaningful and effective KPIs

Aside from an office dog, KPIs might just be the best thing you introduce to your company. After all, they give you the power to measure performance and ultimately improve. But, like an office dog, KPIs should be chosen carefully. Otherwise they can distract teams, damage morale, and generally cause chaos. To help you avoid the pitfalls and get the most from KPIs, here are some tips for setting them.

Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation: which is best for your team?

Motivation is obviously essential for your team’s performance and happiness. And if your company needs any kind of creativity to survive then a certain type of motivation is more effective (spoiler: it’s the intrinsic one). For this reason, most forward-thinking companies are moving away from traditional, extrinsic forms of motivation. But does this mean that "carrot and stick" is officially dead? Not quite.