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A list of example smart goals for a wide range of professions, industries and business functions. Measurement: completion of training and at least 4 presentations by Q4. Information Technology Management Retire the legacy billing system by moving remaining functionality to the new system to reduce annual license and maintenance costs. This form of therapy is designed to systematically and comprehensively treat issues in order of severity. Because DBT was initially intended for people with suicidal tendencies and extreme emotional issues, treatment happens in stages. WATCH THE FOLLOWING VIDEOS: SMART Goals. SMART is a well-established tool that you can use to plan and achieve your goals. While there are a number of interpretations of the acronym's meaning, the most common one is that goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. When you use SMART, you can create clear, attainable and meaningful goals, and develop the motivation, action plan, and support.

In this article, you’ll find the latest tips and examples to help you create and execute on SMART goals. We’ve also provided a free, downloadable SMART goals template to get you started.

Included on this page, you’ll find examples of SMART goals, a customizable SMART goals worksheet, and the best project management tool to use to put your plan in action.

What Are SMART Goals?

SMART goals are a relatively new idea. In 1981, George T. Doran, a consultant and former director of corporate planning for Washington Water Power Company, published a paper called, “There’s a SMART Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives.” In the document, he introduces SMART goals as a tool to create criteria to help improve the chances of succeeding in accomplishing a goal.

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What Does the SMART Acronym Stand For?

The acronym stands for:

S – Specific

When setting a goal, be specific about what you want to accomplish. Think about this as the mission statement for your goal. This isn’t a detailed list of how you’re going to meet a goal, but it should include an answer to the popular ‘w’ questions:

• Who – Consider who needs to be involved to achieve the goal (this is especially important when you’re working on a group project).
• What – Think about exactly what you are trying to accomplish and don’t be afraid to get very detailed.
• When – You’ll get more specific about this question under the “time-bound” section of defining SMART goals, but you should at least set a time frame.
• Where – This question may not always apply, especially if you’re setting personal goals, but if there’s a location or relevant event, identify it here.
• Which – Determine any related obstacles or requirements. This question can be beneficial in deciding if your goal is realistic. For example, if the goal is to open a baking business, but you’ve never baked anything before, that might be an issue. As a result, you may refine the specifics of the goal to be “Learn how to bake in order to open a baking business.'
• Why – What is the reason for the goal? When it comes to using this method for employees, the answer will likely be along the lines of company advancement or career development.

M – Measurable

What metrics are you going to use to determine if you meet the goal? This makes a goal more tangible because it provides a way to measure progress. If it’s a project that’s going to take a few months to complete, then set some milestones by considering specific tasks to accomplish.

A – Achievable

This focuses on how important a goal is to you and what you can do to make it attainable and may require developing new skills and changing attitudes. The goal is meant to inspire motivation, not discouragement. Think about how to accomplish the goal and if you have the tools/skills needed. If you don’t currently possess those tools/skills, consider what it would take to attain them.

R – Relevant

Relevance refers focusing on something that makes sense with the broader business goals. For example, if the goal is to launch a new product, it should be something that’s in alignment with the overall business objectives. Your team may be able to launch a new consumer product, but if your company is a B2B that is not expanding into the consumer market, then the goal wouldn’t be relevant.

T – Time-Bound

Anyone can set goals, but if it lacks realistic timing, chances are you’re not going to succeed. Providing a target date for deliverables is imperative. Ask specific questions about the goal deadline and what can be accomplished within that time period. If the goal will take three months to complete, it’s useful to define what should be achieved half-way through the process. Providing time constraints also creates a sense of urgency.

The Easiest Way to Write SMART Goals

When it comes to writing SMART goals, be prepared to ask yourself and other team members a lot of questions. The answers will help fine-tune your strategy, ensuring the goals are something that’s actually attainable. While you should be as realistic as possible, it’s important to approach writing SMART goals with a positive attitude. After all, this is something that you want to achieve.

This doesn’t have to be a daunting experience; in fact, it should be quite illuminating. Later in the article, we demonstrate how to write SMART goals for two typical business scenarios: completing a project and improving personal performance. Below, we’ve included an easy-to-use SMART goals template in Word, along with a template to help you plan and manage your goals in Smartsheet.

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Once you’ve defined your SMART goals, it’s essential to put a plan in place to achieve them. To help with execution, you need a tool that enables you to plan, track, manage, automate, and report on your goals in real-time.

One such tool is Smartsheet, a work execution platform that enables enterprises and teams to get from idea to impact - fast. With a collaborative, real-time objectives tracker in Smartsheet, you can increase transparency and improve accountability across your initiatives.

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Examples of SMART Goals

Here are two examples of initial goals we'll use to walk through this process:

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1. I want to complete a project
2. I want to improve my performance

This is a typical approach to creating goals, but both of these are very vague. With the current wording, the goals probably aren’t going to be attainable. The statements lack specifics, timelines, motivation, and a reality check.

Now, let’s use the SMART goals formula to clarify both and create new and improved goals.

Goal 1: I want to complete a project

• Specific: Many people are accessing our current site from their mobile devices. Since it’s not a responsive site, it provides a poor experience for customers. I want to launch a mobile app for my company website by the end of Q2, which requires involvement from software development, design, and marketing.
• Measurable: Creating a mobile app for our company site will require a lot of resources. To make it worthwhile, I’d like to have 50,000 installs of the site within six months of launch. I’d also like to show a 5% conversion rate from customers using the mobile site.
• Achievable: The departments that will be involved have signed-off on creating a mobile app. I’ll need to manage the project and set milestones to keep everyone motivated and on target.
• Relevant: Improving the customer experience on mobile devices is a core initiative for my company this year.
• Time-Bound: In order to achieve 50,000 mobile app installs and a 5% conversion rate by the end of the fiscal year, the app will need to be launched by Q2 with a robust marketing campaign that should continue through the end of the year.

Goal 2: I want to improve my performance

• Specific: I received low marks on my ability to use PowerPoint at my last performance review. Improving my skills requires that I learn how to use PowerPoint efficiently and practice using it by creating various presentations. I’d like to be more proficient using PowerPoint in time for my next review in six months.
• Measurable: By the time of my next review, I should be able to create presentations that incorporate graphs, images, and other media in a couple of hours. I should also be able to efficiently use and create templates in PowerPoint that my coworkers can also use.
• Achievable: Improving my PowerPoint skills is instrumental in moving forward in my career and receiving a better performance review. I can set time aside every week to watch PowerPoint tutorials and even enroll in an online class that can teach me new skills. I can also ask coworkers and my manager for PowerPoint tips.
• Relevant: Working with PowerPoint is currently 25% of my job. As I move up in the company, I’ll need to spend 50% of my time creating PowerPoint presentations. I enjoy my career and want to continue to grow within this company.
• Time-Bound: In six months, I should be proficient in PowerPoint ensuring it only occupies 25% of my workload instead of the nearly 40% of the time it occupies now.

Once you go through and write your goals according to each SMART characteristic, you can then combine and consolidate all the work you’ve done into one SMART goal.

SMART goal: I want to complete a project

• Description: Improving the customer experience on mobile devices is a core initiative for my company this year, so we are going to create a mobile app. By the end of the fiscal year, there should be 50,000 installs of the mobile app we develop, and it should produce a 5% conversion rate. We’ll build the mobile app in-house and launch it by the end of Q2 with an app-related marketing campaign that will continue to the end of the year.
• Milestone: Mobile app launches end of Q2.
• Deadline: End of the fiscal year.

SMART goal: I want to improve my performance

• Description: To grow in my career, I need to improve my PowerPoint skills. By taking online classes and reviewing tutorials, I’ll improve my PowerPoint skills so that it only requires 25% of my work time.
• Milestone: Complete an online PowerPoint course in three months.
• Deadline: Next employee review in six months.

Related:

Discover more project management tips, template, and best practices in our comprehensive Project Management Guide.

Establishing Clarity Around Success and Failure of Goals

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Writing SMART Goals for Employees (With Examples)

A colleague once told me “I have a really important goal in life…I want to climb Mt. Everest, someday.”

While he was absolutely serious in his demeanor and spoke at length about why he wanted to do it, the short conversation revealed he had never done any climbing before. Further, he had hardly done research into what it actually took to climb the world’s tallest peak. And while I was intrigued by his personal ambition, his lack of research and even a basic plan indicated to me that he was not really on a path to achieving his goal.

Setting goals – whether they be for mountain climbing, your retirement plans, or for your employees – is a valuable exercise for any endeavor. Performance goals establish targets to measure both progress and success. Additionally, they also align priorities and drive focus on a central set of objectives.

Unfortunately, when setting goals for their organizations, many managers make the same mistake my colleague made as he spoke at length about climbing Everest. When goals are poorly defined, unreasonable and lack a strategy for achievement, we set our employees (and our teams) up to fail.

To improve how we set goals for our teams, we’re going to dig into the SMART goal-setting method, as well as provide some good examples of SMART goals for employees.

Why Set Performance Goals for Employees?

Whether or not your organization has a formal performance management system, it’s always a good idea to set goals for your staff each year. Employee goal setting has three distinct advantages.

First, by establishing goals for employees, you are defining expectations for output. For example, if you set a goal for your employee to generate one market intelligence report every month, your employee knows that at the end of the year he or she will be on the hook for twelve reports.

Second, setting employee goals drives focus. When done correctly, the employee’s goals should align his or her work to the broader business strategy and initiatives.

If your company wants to grow sales by 10%, for example, your sales team members should have goals that tie directly to that 10% of growth in some manner (such as, growing sales in each of their territories by 10%). If you set goals that have no connection to the business objectives, your employee will struggle to see how his or her efforts support the organization’s mission.

This worksheet serves as a template for writing SMART goals for employees, and includes examples. A simple framework and series of questions will help managers and employees develop goals that are specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and timed.

Free MRH Download: SMART Goal Development Worksheet

This MRH worksheet serves as a template for writing SMART goals for you and your employees. A simple framework and series of easy questions will help managers and employees develop goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed.
You can find all of our free templates on our TOOLS AND TEMPLATES PAGE.

Third, setting performance measures that challenge the employee gives him or her a chance to learn and develop their skills during the process. Be creative when assigning individual objectives for each employee, and tie goals to their specific developmental needs, where possible.

It is worth noting that performance goals are not simply about meeting metrics or driving employees to work hard. Rather, you should also include goals that go beyond an employee’s day-to-day activities and that will drive the overall enhancement to your organization.

Writing performance goals that include things like developing a new process, reducing product cost, or filling some gap that exists in your firm pushes the employee beyond just doing their job and asks that they contribute to the strategic needs of the organization.

In short, performance goals should drive employee behavior, challenge your staff personally, and ultimately help the business improve.

Employee Performance Goals Should:

1. Set expectations for the upcoming year.
2. Tie employee’s activity to the overall business goals and vision.
3. Drive behavior and activity.
4. Challenge the employee as a means of developing skills.
5. Drive towards an enhanced state of the business.

The S.M.A.R.T. Framework for Goal Setting

Now that we’ve explained their importance, how do I write employee performance goals that drive behavior? The answer is easier than you might think.

The best way to write good goals for employees is to make them S.M.A.R.T.: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based. The S.M.A.R.T. goal concept is used widely by businesses and organizations to define performance targets for individuals as well as the organization as a whole.

Unlike “climbing Mt. Everest someday,” by using the S.M.A.R.T. concept you will ensure the goals you set for employees are detailed and reasonable. Additionally, this framework for setting employee goals makes it easier to clearly identify whether or not a goal was achieved at the end of the year.

To illustrate how this model works, let’s explore each component of S.M.A.R.T. a little further.

Specific

When setting goals for your staff, you must first be specific in what you want them to achieve. Ensure that the targets you set are clear and easily understood.

If your goals are vague and extremely broad, not only will your employee struggle to perform them, but you will have a hard time assessing the employee’s success when it comes to writing your performance evaluation at the end of the year.

Here is an example of a performance goal for a property manager, that illustrates the difference between a specific and non-specific goal:

• Non-Specific: “Ensure property is secure.”
• Specific: “Verify that all unoccupied properties are locked and secured once per month. Confirm all public gates and entry points are functioning properly once per week.”

Here is another performance goal example for a product developer or engineer:

• Non-Specific: “Improve product performance.”
• Specific: “Enhance the Enviro-Lite bulb design by year end, in order to increase product life by 1000 hours.”

When goals are specific and detailed, it drives accountability and clearly establishes what the employee needs to achieve without the ambiguity.

Measurable

The most common mistake we make as managers when setting employee goals is defining targets that we cannot measure. Further, it’s not just that the goals are vague or non-specific, but we sometimes choose targets we can’t even quantify.

Writing good performance goals should signal to the employee what they need to do. Properly written goals should also make it easy for a manager to say if the employee did or did not achieve their objective.

A common example of a goal we might see reads like this: “Support the Sales team.” How do you measure support? How can you clearly say the employee did or did not support the Sales team? Was their support enough?

You can improve goals by including performance targets that can be measured in a straightforward way. This means that goals should be quantitative and descriptive in nature.

Here is an example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal for a business development representative, illustrating the difference between being measurable and not:

• Non-measurable: “Develop new business proposals.”
• Measurable: “Pursue, write and submit 5 new business proposals to customers by the end of the year.”

Goals can also be written to describe a degree of progress that is to be achieved. Here is an example of a performance goal for a project manager that illustrates this idea:

• Non-measurable: “Meet project milestones.”
• Measurable: “Complete all phase two Aurora project milestones by August. Complete 50% of phase three Aurora project milestones by year end.”

The best way to write measurable performance goals is to think numbers.

Attainable

The goals you set for your employees must be achievable, at least within the context you set around the goal. It doesn’t mean the goals should be easy – by contrast, effective goals should stretch the employee and challenge them.

Still, performance goals should not be impossible for the employee to satisfy, either based on the targets set or by the nature of the goal itself.

For example, your human resources employees should not have goals to develop new software products. It’s not what HR does. Further, writing attainable employee performance goals should result in measures that are feasible and practical.

For an HR generalist, the following examples compare the difference between an attainable and unattainable measure:

• Unattainable: “Complete all new on boarding procedures for new hires within 24 hours of their start date.”
• Attainable: “Complete all new on-boarding procedure for new hires within 30 days of their start date.”

In short, writing employee goals that are attainable means the measures should be achievable under normal circumstances and given the necessary resources.

Realistic

When setting goals for employees, make sure the targets you establish are realistic. By realistic, it means your goal should reflect something that is practical, when compared to historical achievements.

For example, your Sales team should not have a goal to double sales in the first quarter if you’ve never had more than a 5% growth in a single quarter before.

Further, to make goals realistic, they should consider things like resources, financials, available skill set and other objectives.

Returning to my colleague who dreamed of being a mountain climber, in order to reach to the top of Mount Everest – while a lofty challenge – he would need years of training and tremendous financial backing to achieve his goal. Until he actually began to take steps in this direction, his goal was not very feasible.

Time-Based

The last piece of the S.M.A.R.T. goal writing framework has to do with the timeframe for completion.

Another one of the most common mistakes we make when setting goals for employees is not specifying a time by which they need to achieve the goal (“climbing Everest…someday”).

To make your goals S.M.A.R.T., they need to have a timeframe established. The timeframe can be a specific date, a time of year, a quarter, a month, etc. Timing can also be quantified in terms of a frequency for recurring activities (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly).

To illustrate this, consider the following example of a performance goal for a healthcare worker:

• Not Time-Based: “Attend professional development training.”
• Time-Based: “Attend at least one health-related professional development seminar per quarter, or 4 by year-end.”

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For a manufacturing supervisor, time-based goals may be something like this:

• Not Time-Based: “Conduct process audits.”
• Time-Based: “Conduct at least two process audits per week. At least 75% of processes must be reviewed by the end of each quarter.”

Including both the time-phasing of various pieces of goals as well as defining and end date helps outline steps and sequences by which the goal is to be achieved.

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• A simple written document that provides structure to the actual conversation.
  
• A web-based platform that is easy to use for me and my employees.
  
• A sophisticated software program that can link and track all the details.
  
• None.
  
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Examples of SMART Goals for Employees

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Now that we’ve explored the details of the framework, here is a list of examples of SMART goals for employees. In the examples below, we illustrate the difference between poorly written goals and SMART goals that are specific and measurable at the end of the performance cycle.

Writing Performance Goals for Employees

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Performance goals are an essential management vehicle for driving focus and setting expectations among employees. By using the S.M.A.R.T framework, managers can establish clear objectives that make it easy to measure performance at the end of the year.

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