Employees that know what to strive for will stay focused and perform better, but only if goals are set and managed properly, the Entrepreneur.com article “7 Ways to Pump Up Employee Engagement In Your Office” explains. This time of year, people have a lot on their mind, so it’s a good time to take a look at what you’re doing to keep your employees performing their best. Especially when you’re dealing with salespeople, employee performance has a direct impact on your bottom line. Use these tips from Entrepreneur.com contributor Dave Lavinsky to set and manage goals the right way:

1. Have employees set their own goals and review them. Workers will be far more motivated if they’re allowed to set their own goals. Even if you have to modify their targets, their participation in the process is empowering.
2. Make sure goals are within your employees’ control. Don’t set goals that are outside of the employee’s control. Goals for salespeople are easy to track, but sales numbers won’t motivate somebody who doesn’t do the selling. Make sure that the behind-the-scenes workers have clear goals for productions too.
3. Make sure goals are timely and measurable. Goals should be reevaluated on a monthly basis at minimum. Short-term goals are easy to focus on and they may need to be adjusted frequently to remain achievable yet challenging. And, of course, a goal is worthless if you can’t accurately gauge the results.
4. Set both big and underlying goals. Look at the big picture, then break down what it will take to get there. If you want an employee to have X dollars in sales for the year, how much do they need to sell each month, week and year, depending on season and other factors? Also how much sales in particular segments (memberships, sessions, products, etc.) do they need to reach the total?
5. Leverage team accountability. Monthly team meetings will keep everyone accountable to each other. In front of the entire team, have everyone state their goals for the past month, how they performed, and their goals for the next month. Nobody wants to stand up month after month and announce that they’ve failed.
6. Enable employees to see results in real-time. Maintain a dashboard where everyone can see individual and team metrics move in real-time (or close to it). This reinforces accountability and ensures that workers know when they need to make changes and what they need to do to achieve monthly goals.
7. Creatively set goals when needed. As mentioned above, goals for some employees aren’t as easy to set as they are for salespeople. To keep their goals directly under their control, you may need to get a little more creative. Some goals for store managers might involve different aspects like wait times, customer satisfaction metrics, or hiring success.

Click here to read the Entrepreneur.com article.