I'm sick of it'!

That's what a friend of mine yelled at his partner and children when they accused him for the umpteenth time of not giving them enough attention. 'You know what? I'm going to write down everything I do for a week. Then you will see how much attention I give you!' And he kept his promise. For a week he walked around with pen and paper in his pocket and diligently wrote down everything he did. Some insights I won't share here, but one I will. He was indeed giving little attention to his partner and children. He was totally unaware of this. Paying attention to what he was doing for an entire week created awareness. It is awareness that makes you think and form an opinion about something.

Do the experiment yourself. Put a cardboard box on the table and force yourself to look at that box for two minutes every day. At the end of the month you will be able to tell a lot about cardboard boxes: shades, ways of folding, shape relationships, indentations,.... You gave it attention and became aware of what you didn't see at first.

Waste of time and demotivation

At our work, the same thing happens. If you set goals, but then only pay attention to them at the annual review, awareness of those goals is low. Most of the attention then goes to the daily processes. Chances are that at the end of the year you will not have achieved many of your goals. Deloitte also came to that conclusion and completely reworked its performance management. They noticed that 2 million hours a year were being wasted on annual reviews and that it wasn't engaging for employees. Deloitte switched to a totally different approach where performance is monitored regularly.

People love it when you regularly poll them about their work, but they also don't want to talk about it all the time. Employees experience an increasing workload and therefore want to talk about their progress, especially if it is at risk. This is why it is necessary to measure the time you put into a conversation: not too much, not too little.

Get engaged on the goal

What do you need to do to engage on the goal?

• Determine the goals as much as possible together with your employees. This provides a good basis to start from.
• Bring the goals to the attention regularly. Do not hide them in a document that is only looked at once a year. Make the objectives guiding. In your team meetings and one-on-one consultations, start from the objectives. Focus on those objectives where there are problems, share updates, and take time to celebrate the successes.
• Work with your employees to find the best solutions when things threaten to go wrong. Therefore, check regularly with employees or stakeholders to see if they feel everything is on track. Take immediate action together if it is not.
• Allow employees to continue working if they do not identify any bottlenecks or risks.

Do you want to take the step to get more results in an engaged way? It doesn't have to be difficult! Opinime is a simple online tool to keep focus on a goal. Use opinime's statements to regularly bring attention to the goals. Discuss with your employees or stakeholders the goals you say are in jeopardy and follow up with agreed upon initiatives to get back on track in opinime. Try it now or book a demo!

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