How to Become a Digital Marketing Director
In today’s digital age, the role of a marketing director has become more-and-more digital. As technology continues to evolve, so…
Organizational goal-setting is most often done to keep a company competitive and moving forward. But the actions which make expansion possible happen at lower levels throughout the business. And departments are often responsible for setting their own objectives that contribute to the vision of the broader institution.
In this post, you’ll learn what departmental goals are, why they matter, and how you can write them.
Departmental goals are specific targets particular to the work and functionality of your team within the wider context of the company. Departmental goals usually ladder up to objectives which should be met by your division as a whole, but can encompass more individualized intentions for smaller teams or single key contributors.
Departmental goals almost always align with more ambitious enterprise-level objectives. For example, if an organization wants to become the market leader in their industry, marketing might set a goal to increase customer interaction on social media. Similarly, Engineering might set a goal to optimize UX, Customer Support might work to increase call capacity, and Business Operations might endeavor to improve the quality of your company’s product or service. All of these objectives work to support your organization’s competitive edge.
However department leaders should still feel free to create department-specific targets if they are in the interest of overall performance and productivity.
When done correctly, established goals and objectives can be a driving force behind departmental success and achievement. But you need to be careful you are not setting either profoundly unachievable targets, or mediocre objectives which will yield uninspiring results. Here are a few things to keep in mind when setting goals for your team at work.
Here are several brief guidelines which will demonstrate how to write department goals using popular goal-setting strategies.
The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. This method is designed to give you as clear a picture as possible of your objective, as well as why you’re setting this goal and what the benefits are.
Example:
Specific (objective) – Optimize all Customer Support self service platforms including FAQs and chatbots for user friendliness.
Measurable – Customers will be asked to leave a review after engaging all self-service platforms. Percentage of one-on-one CS conversations will also decrease.
Attainable – Our budget is sufficient to bring on contract writers and programmers temporarily to complete all required updates to the CS self-service system.
Relevant – Research demonstrates that our primary customer base prefers to solve problems on their own before reaching out to customer service.
Time-based – Revamp of all self-service portals will be completed at the 6 month marker.
The Management By Objectives strategy sets expectations for departmental performance and can be most effectively used to motivate employees by drawing a clear line between individual accomplishments and departmental, or organizational, success.
Example:
The Objectives and Key Results strategy is designed to outline a goal and then define specific steps you will need to take in order to reach the objective.
Example:
Objective – Improve Customer Support self-service platforms and optimize for user friendliness.
Key result – Rewrite FAQs and problem solving fact-sheets for maximum readability and navigability.
Key Result – Introduce new internal search engine so that users can easily search and find relevant content for their problem.
Key Result – Add contact information to FAQ pages for more complex questions and added accessibility.
An objective-setting template can support departments in clearly defining goals and goal-oriented actions for their team. Engaging any of the above strategies also allows department and organizational leaders to align department objectives with executive targets. Your departmental goals may initially exist as Key Results in an organizational OKR. Following this, it will be your task to create an actionable plan with your team to meet those goals. MBOs, SMART goals and OKRs alike can give you a clear picture of how you can reach your team objectives to the benefit of the wider company.
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