I’ve written in the past about how to write behavioural, or ‘soft’, performance objectives. Of course, it’s also important to be able to write what I call ‘firm’ objectives. Firm because they relate to the tangible elements of the job that can be measured in terms of quantity, quality or time.

Here’s a quick and easy way to approach writing firm objectives.

Looking at each of the tangible elements of the job, ask the most relevant of the following questions:

1. How much / how many?
2. What’s the quality standard that needs to be achieved?
3. By when?

The key here is to describe specifically what you need the staff member to achieve.

So, for question one, rather than ‘improve sales’ you would write ‘improve sales by £2k per quarter’.

Question two may be about following procedure or guidelines, or related to some contract. So rather than ‘follow procedure’ you would have ‘follow the procedure for processing client requests as described in the client contract’.

For question three, this is about having a clear deadline. For example, ‘by 30th June’ or, if it’s an ongoing task, ‘within 3 days of receipt’.

Here are some more examples:

• To achieve a sales target of £25k each quarter
• To reduce error rates by 2% by 31st March
• To process claims with 100% accuracy
• To follow the data reporting procedure as laid down in the staff handbook
• To process customer requests within 3 days of receipt
• To complete the budget reports within 4 days of the month end

As ever, it’s all about achieving clarity. The clarity that motivates your staff to high performance.