How to write firm objectives

Joan Henshaw — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:48:30 +0000

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:

How much / how many?
What’s the quality standard that needs to be achieved?
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.

Ladder Consulting | Practical people management » objectives

How to write firm objectives