Performance goals are a common buzzword in the business world and are vitally important for remote workers to set for themselves. After all, you’re in charge of your destiny and can create work-from-home performance goals that make sense for you. But how do you create performance goals for remote workers that fit into a time management concept? Thankfully, it is possible to measure performance working from home and improve your routine for working from home by following these steps.
What is a Great Work From Home Performance Goal?
Learning to set goals as a remote worker, including performance goals, can help you gauge how well you’re working, show your manager or boss your progress, and make it easier to adjust your work routine. A few home performance goals that you might want to set as a remote worker include tracking your:
- Overall Productivity: Are you as effective at home as at the office? Set a goal to achieve or supersede that level!
- Adaptability: Can you react to changes in your work environment effectively? Set a goal for achieving higher adaptability to improve your performance!
- Workflow: Do you have a robust workflow that helps make you more productive? Set a performance goal to test your flow and improve it!
Setting performance guidelines like these can also ensure that you hit your goals for time management and improve your work satisfaction. Let’s break down eight of the best work-from-home performance goals you can focus on as a remote worker!
8 Work From Home Performance Goals
Before discussing these work from home goals, we want to highlight the concept of SMART goal-making. SMART stands for making Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound goals. For example, saying you want to improve your productivity isn’t enough: instead, you need to choose how much you want to improve your productivity, how you’ll measure it, and make sure your goals and relevant within your time frame.
Instead, say you want to improve your sales success in the 65+-year market by 10% in the next quarter. This sets an attainable goal you can easily measure and creates a time frame to achieve it. Most of today’s work-from-home concepts use SMART goals in some manner.
1. Enhancing Work Efficiency to Minimize Working Hours
Working excessive hours from home can make you lazy by creating excessive fatigue. As a result, set a SMART goal to reduce your overtime hours by half over the next month. Focus on improving your efficiency, such as installing better internet connections. Track your efficiency using online apps that gauge how many work hours you use to complete your day’s tasks.
When setting this goal, brainstorm how many hours you feel you can cut from your workday. Focus on using time management techniques to ensure that you stay on task. For example, the Pomodoro Technique breaks your day into 25-minute work and five-minute break blocks. Try methods like these to stay efficient.
Follow painter Michaelangelo’s advice when setting your goals: “The great danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” When creating performance goals, keep this in mind but make sure you also avoid the danger of creating a goal that you cannot achieve.
2. Streamlining Communication Lines
As a remote worker, feeling disconnected from your office colleagues is easy. As a result, set work-from-home performance goals to improve your overall communication. Set goals like increasing answered emails by 10% each week to enhance your communication skills slowly.
Improving communication helps create better connections between you and your co-workers and avoids work inefficiencies. It may also help improve your home and work balance by letting you finish more tasks on time so that you can quit working early on some days and hang out with your friends and family.
3. Improving Teamwork Remotely
Working remotely can make teamwork excessively challenging, as many companies discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, you can set performance goals to enhance your teamwork and make your team more effective. There are a few different goals that you can set here.
For example, you can increase your meeting times, add more people to specific Slack channels, and attempt to spend specific hours every day talking with your team. These goals can be measured by how much time you spend talking versus how much work you do together as a team remotely.
4. Improving Goal Achievement
Focus on achieving your goals by streamlining your work operation and knowing what tasks to do when reaching this goal. For instance, improving efficiency may require focusing on important and urgent tasks and then on non-important and non-urgent tasks later. Knowing this time management matrix can help you stay on task and reach your goals. In this way, improving goal effectiveness can be a goal in and of itself!
Staying stubborn and consistently working towards your goal requires determination and grit. On this topic, legendary football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant (perhaps the best college coach ever) once said: “Never quit. It is the easiest cop-out in the world. Set a goal, and don’t quit until you attain it. When you attain it, set another goal, and don’t quit until you reach it. Never quit.”
5. Preventing Distractions
Some of the most important performance goals for remote workers is eliminating distractions. Social media and television can rob you of hours of productivity every week and make you work longer than necessary. Try to set social work-from-home performance goals that work for you.
For example, you may limit yourself to one Facebook visit every two hours for one week and then aim for no visits during your work period by the end of the month. You can do the same for television breaks and other needless distractions. Also, install apps on your phone that tracks how much time you spend on it.
6. Avoiding Work Conflicts
Work conflicts can be challenging in a remote environment because they may affect your emotions and cause “peace-making” meetings that may take hours to work out. It can also affect morale heavily, so try to work on managing your temper and avoiding impatience and conflicts at work.
You can also set performance goals focused on learning coping mechanisms, such as mastering yoga or other relaxing techniques. Decide how many hours you want to practice this art every week and track your well-being throughout the week to decide if you are more productive by avoiding conflict. Think of conflicts like obstacles and think about what manufacturer Henry Ford said: “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.”
7. Increasing the Tasks, You Do Weekly
Try to focus on increasing how many tasks you do weekly: this goal can help improve your productivity and ensure that you stay on task. Measure this performance by gauging how many you currently do, averaging that to the number of daily tasks, and then identifying ways to get more done without overworking yourself.
For example, you can easily group tasks, such as collecting data from specific work colleagues during a single meeting. You can also focus on quality and efficiency rather than speed. Try to minimize your distractions to ensure you stay focused.
8. Increasing Customer Satisfaction
Working remotely with multiple customers may include setting some work-from-home performance goals. For example, improve your customer feedback ratings by a half-star (or a similar metric for your job) over a month to create an obtainable and easy-to-measure guideline.
Try also to set guidelines that focus on achievable goals, such as increasing customer comfort on the phone, customer satisfaction, how many customers give reviews, the amount of time spent on each call, and the number of times you go off-script on the phone by a specific percentage. Practicing these skills can help you provide better overall customer support.
Conclusion
Several work-from-home performance goals should help you gauge your success in your career! Do you have any insights you’d like to share about performance goals for remote workers or a method you use to measure performance working from home? Let us know! We always love hearing from our readers.
