Personal objectives

Personal objectives refer to the job-specific goals of each individual employee. They are important because they communicate to employees what is important and what is expected of them.

Managers usually set between five and seven goals per employee using a mix of those that are activity-based such as number of sales calls per week and/or outcome-based measures such as closed sales in dollar amounts. When completed at the individual level, managers may add more objectives specifically designed to maximize team efforts. The goal is to achieve quantity and quality of effort between individuals and the team.

More about personal objectives

A multitude of measurable categories may be selected: hard vs. soft goals; financial vs. non-financial; shareholder, client, community, team; etc.

Here is an example of a set of weekly objectives for an individual employee. In this case, they are for a financial planner selling a wide range of investment products to consumers. The objective is to motivate existing clients to transfer new money currently held at other investment houses to the planner’s firm. The high-impact activity is face-to-face appointments and the driving process is a financial planning exercise.