This article maps out an in-depth framework with examples to help companies define and set meaningful employee performance goals. Setting better performance goals will help everyone on your team focus, align, and thrive.
Did you know:- People are 42% more likely to achieve goals when those goals are physically recorded.
- Teams that set goals achieve 20–25% improved work performance, have more self-confidence, and are happier, less stressed, and more productive at work.
- Employee performance increases by up to 22% when a team member's goals are aligned with organizational priorities while also helping them meet changing needs, collaborate with peers, and hold themselves accountable.
Forget those traditional do-it-yourself methods for establishing employee performance goals, like tracking them on spreadsheets. Get the entire process done better with Ninety. You can create a measurable way to access employee goals that are agreed upon by everyone.
What Are Performance Goals?
Performance goals are clear, measurable objectives that help employees focus their efforts, improve effectiveness, and provide meaningful contributions to the company. These goals serve as a road map for daily work, professional development, and long-term progress.
Performance goals serve several key functions. They help to:
- Clarify expectations for each role.
- Align employee efforts with company objectives.
- Increase motivation and accountability.
- Provide a clear basis for feedback and growth.
Performance goals can range from quantitative targets, such as improving client retention or streamlining a process, to qualitative targets, such as strengthening leadership or collaboration across teams.
At Ninety, performance goals are tied to the Seat a team member holds, which is a role defined by responsibilities, outcomes, and purpose. Each Seat is supported by our CCC framework:
- Competency - Having the skills to do the work.
- Commitment - Being motivated and dependable.
- Capacity - Having the time and mental space to succeed.
Why Are Performance Goals Important?
Performance goals play a significant role in employee and business success. It's about more than meeting targets. When employees have clear goals and objectives, it boosts morale, motivation, and focus.
According to Forbes, regularly setting quarterly goals with employees can lead to a 31% increase in returns.
Here's why performance goals are important:
- They drive clarity: Clear performance goals remove ambiguity and provide direction for everyday work.
- They boost motivation and engagement: Employees are more likely to feel energized and connected when they're working toward meaningful and achievable goals.
- They make feedback more actionable: Goals provide a benchmark for recognition and coaching. Leaders can point to real progress and not just general impressions.
- They support growth and development: Over time, performance goals help team members find their strengths, build new competencies, and shape their career paths.
- They align team members with company priorities: When goals are tied to strategic outcomes, people know the importance of their work and how it drives success at every level.
Types of Performance Goals
Not all performance goals serve the same purpose. To build strong, high-performing teams, it’s important to set a variety of goals that support productivity, individual growth, collaboration, leadership, and strategic initiatives. Having a mix ensures your team members are growing in ways that align with both their professional development and your company's long-term success.
Productivity Goals
Productivity goals focus on efficiency, output, and measurable results. They ensure that employees know exactly what is expected of them on a day-to-day basis. These goals often tie directly to key performance indicators (KPIs) and help teams stay aligned with broader business targets. Setting clear productivity goals can drive momentum, improve time management, and create a culture of accountability.
Examples:
- Complete 20 client onboarding calls per week with a 90% satisfaction score.
- Submit weekly project status updates by Friday at 3 p.m.
- Achieve a 15% increase in case resolution speed within the next quarter.
Professional Development Goals
Professional development goals are designed to help employees grow their skills, expand their capabilities, and build a foundation for future career advancement. These goals keep people engaged and show that the company is invested in their long-term success. A strong development plan often leads to improved retention and stronger internal leadership pipelines.
Examples:
- Complete a certification course in project management by the end of the quarter.
- Attend two industry webinars each month to stay updated on trends.
- Develop proficiency in a new software tool used by the team.
Teamwork and Collaboration Goals
Teamwork and collaboration goals aim to strengthen communication, trust, and synergy across teams. In today’s fast-moving workplaces, the ability to collaborate effectively is just as critical as individual performance. Setting goals around teamwork encourages knowledge sharing, smoother workflows, and a stronger team culture.
Examples:
- Lead a cross-departmental project and host three team check-ins.
- Implement a peer feedback process within the team by the next quarter.
- Participate in at least one collaborative brainstorming session per month.
Leadership Goals
Leadership goals focus on developing the ability to influence, motivate, and guide others — even for employees who may not be formal managers yet. These goals are key for succession planning and creating a leadership mindset across the organization. Encouraging leadership at every level drives better decision-making and strengthens company culture.
Examples:
- Mentor a junior team member and schedule biweekly coaching sessions.
- Lead a team meeting at least once a month to build presentation skills.
- Propose and drive one process improvement initiative this quarter.
Strategic Goals
Strategic initiative goals align individual contributions with larger company-wide priorities. They help employees understand how their efforts fit into the big picture and directly impact business outcomes. By setting goals that link to initiatives like product launches, market expansion, or customer experience improvements, you create stronger ownership and engagement.
Examples:
- Support the Q2 product launch by delivering all required assets two weeks before deadline.
- Contribute three ideas to the company's new market expansion strategy by end of quarter.
- Lead a customer satisfaction survey rollout to collect 500+ responses by the end of the month.
10 Employee Performance Goal Examples
Both leaders and teams benefit from reviewing sample goals for employees. They can get an idea of what a goal could involve based on what makes sense for a team member’s development and overall company priorities. Here are ten examples of different types of goals you can set.
1. Self-Leadership Goals
Self-leadership goals improve personal abilities on your own for the betterment of yourself, your team, and your company. Skills to improve include adaptability, productivity, accountability, decision-making, focus, time management, and more.
2. Collaboration Goals
Collaboration goals, which support your colleagues in achieving their goals, will directly influence personal motivation, productivity, and performance. This, in turn, affects the resilience of the entire team.
3. Creativity Goals
Creativity goals encourage innovative thinking to improve the implementation of assigned duties and tasks, contributing to personal development, improved productivity, and company growth.
4. Soft Skills Goals
Soft skills goals develop core skills, common skills, or people skills that are generally not taught in school but create a better workplace with more engaged team members. Soft skills include problem-solving, critical thinking, professional writing, leadership, public speaking, a strong work ethic, perceptiveness, awareness, compassion, adaptability, a growth mindset, and more.
5. Decision-Making Goals
Decision-making goals are about thinking objectively to make choices based on available information, time sensitivity, and relevant performance priorities. Learning to make quick, thoughtful decisions can help bond a team and strengthen the company’s position in the industry.
6. Leadership Goals
Leadership goals help you become a better team player, use communication skills to motivate others, prepare others for success, and align with different departments to strengthen the operation of the entire company.
7. Emotional Intelligence Goals
Emotional intelligence goals help people keep their emotions in check, no matter what kind of day they're having. Staying cool, calm, and collected and empathizing with others to defuse a toxic work environment — or avoid one completely — will help improve productivity, especially under stressful circumstances.
8. Negotiating Goals
Negotiating goals allow you to create a healthy dialogue between parties, reach common ground with others, and help resolve conflicts in the workplace quickly. This affects productivity, morale, and job satisfaction.
9. Professional Development Goals
Professional development goals increase personal abilities, expertise, or experience so you can stay relevant in a competitive job market. This improves employee retention and engagement while reducing turnover.
10. Virtual Communication Goals
Virtual communication goals help team members learn to adapt to an evolving work environment by strengthening communication skills. This includes elevating skills with technologically advanced communication channels, collaborative spaces, remote and hybrid workplaces, and working from anywhere.
Performance Goals vs. Development Goals
Performance goals focus on delivering results within an employee's current role, while development goals support long-term personal growth and future responsibilities.
Performance Goals
These goals focus on an employee’s daily priorities for accomplishing specific duties, deadlines, or key performance indicators while supporting overall company goals.
A sample performance goal for employees would be to implement a new process for the team, such as video conferencing. The team member would choose the product, determine the steps required to make the conferencing process ready for use, and set a deadline for launch.
Development Goals
Development goals focus on an employee’s aspirations for personal growth. These goals help employees build new skills, move into future roles, and explore leadership potential.
A sample development goal for employees would be to improve a skill, such as public speaking. The team member would participate in skill-based training, such as public speaking lessons. They would determine a timeline and a way to measure performance, such as getting feedback on their speeches after each class for six months.
How to Better Set, Align, and Discuss Meaningful Goals
Setting 90-day goals (we call them Rocks) is an effective tool for breaking down annual goals into employee performance goals, which focus on the priorities for each quarter.
Ninety's Rocks tool enables you to:
- Assign the right 90-day goal or priority to the right person so it’s easily completed.
- Break Rocks down into milestones, which are the different tasks that need to be completed before checking off the goal. Milestones can be assigned to anyone in the company as To-Dos within Ninety, which encourages collaboration among different teams to get things done.
- Create a system of clear and visible accountability for all so every team member understands what their role is in accomplishing each plan.
- Discuss measurable performance for 90-day goals and To-Dos in Weekly Team Meetings, a consistent reminder of their existence and the accountable progress made.
- Achieve your company’s long-term strategy through actionable business plans.
What are SMART Performance Goals?
The SMART model is a well-known and effective approach for writing employee performance goals. The SMART goals acronym is shorthand for the criteria used to write them: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
SMART Employee Goal-Setting Tips
Leaders have used SMART goal-setting for the last 40 years as a way to develop clearly defined performance goals that empower their team members to work smarter, not harder.
Tip 1: Write SMART goals to describe:
- What a team member works to achieve every day given their job responsibilities
- The important results they are working to accomplish
- Agreed-upon performance levels for each team member and how performance is measured
- The specific time frame for achievement
- What professional development might look like for each person
Tip 2: Set realistic SMART goals together with your employees. Working one-on-one with each team member, make goals SMART to get these benefits:
- The answer to who is responsible for setting performance goals
- A straightforward way to get realistic goal details defined
- Easier understanding for both you and your team members
- Better engagement for employees because they can focus their attention and resources on what’s most important for achievement
- Improved motivation because your people will be more likely to accomplish priorities on their own and accelerate the company vision
How to Set Effective Performance Goals
Setting performance goals shouldn't feel overwhelming. The best goals are developed collaboratively between leaders and team members, ensuring clarity, alignment, and ownership. Using the SMART framework provides a proven, straightforward structure for writing goals that drive real results.
Here’s how to set performance goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound:
1. Specific
A goal should clearly state what is to be accomplished and how it will be achieved. Specific goals remove ambiguity and give employees a clear focus for their efforts. Without this clarity, it becomes difficult for individuals to prioritize work and understand expectations. When writing goals, aim to answer the who, what, where, when, and why.
2. Measurable
Goals must include clear criteria for measuring progress and success. A measurable goal defines what success looks like and provides a way to track improvement over time. Measurement creates motivation, accountability, and a sense of achievement as team members see tangible progress. Without a measurable outcome, it's difficult to evaluate effectiveness or adjust efforts along the way.
3. Achievable
An effective goal should challenge the employee while still being realistically attainable given their skills, experience, and resources. Setting a goal too high can be demotivating; setting it too low can limit growth. 
Break large goals into manageable milestones to help employees maintain momentum without feeling overwhelmed. Always consider available time, training needs, and workload when deciding if a goal is truly achievable.
Make sure your team member has the necessary skills and resources to achieve the goal, such as experience, training, and time in their schedule. Incorporate any limitations by including a developmental aspect to the goal.
4. Relevant
Relevance ensures the goal matters within the context of the employee’s role and aligns with broader team or company objectives. Employees are more committed when they understand how their individual work supports the organization's success. Relevant goals help people prioritize tasks that drive meaningful outcomes rather than just keeping them busy. If a goal doesn’t tie back to a bigger objective, it’s worth rethinking.
5. Time-Bound
Every goal needs a deadline or target date to create a sense of urgency and commitment. Without a time-bound component, goals risk slipping down the priority list and losing momentum. The timeline should be realistic yet motivating — whether it's one week, one quarter, or one year. Deadlines also provide natural checkpoints for evaluating progress and adjusting as needed.3 Examples of SMART Employee Performance Goals
Here are three examples of employee performance goals that follow the SMART framework:
1. Increase daily sales calls by 20% by the end of the month.
- Specific: Daily sales calls
- Measurable: 20% increase
- Achievable: Based on call volume, time frame, team goals, and employee’s level of experience
- Relevant: Increased calls can improve the opportunity for a sale, contributing to individual and team success.
- Time-bound: End of the month
2. Lead the charge for producing a social media strategy for the next quarter.
- Specific: Taking ownership of specific tasks for specific deliverables
- Measurable: Delivering one documented strategy for social media
- Achievable: Based on the time frame and employee’s level of experience
- Relevant: Being accountable for the social media strategy means other team members can focus on their area of expertise.
- Time-bound: End of next quarter
3. Extend professional network by attending a conference this year.
- Specific: Broadening network of professional contacts
- Measurable: Registering to attend at least one conference
- Achievable: Realistic time frame for attending events that don’t happen frequently
- Relevant: Staying up to date with industry trends and meeting new contacts will improve professional influence.
- Time-bound: End of this year
Reward Employees Who Achieve Their Goals
When companies recognize and reward employees for achieving (or exceeding) their performance goals, research shows that 69% will work harder because they know their work is valued and appreciated, and 83% of them will be happier in their Seats.
When a team member falls short of attaining a SMART performance goal, work closely with them to determine what went wrong. Rework the goal and encourage them to try again.
How to Keep Your Company Better Aligned and On Track
Setting clear employee performance goals that align with company objectives is a better way to keep your organization working together and heading in the same direction.
Whether you’re leading an in-person, remote, or hybrid team, connecting employee goals to business goals and using effective tools for measuring them will help you tackle these six common challenges you might face:
1. Maintaining Good Communication
Understanding how to communicate well with your employees is integral for working together to set employee performance goals.
Tech tools like video conferencing software, work communication platforms like Slack, and cloud-based services are helping leaders and teams stay connected and productive.
Ninety’s Meetings tool helps leaders run well-organized, efficient agendas that focus on priorities. This allows team members to stay on task and be accountable for solutions that create value.
2. Scheduling 1-on-1 Meetings
The purpose of a 1-on-1 meeting is to help employees feel valued and connected with you and the company. Scheduling regular meetings with each of your team members is important because it’s an opportunity to connect on performance goals and give valuable two-way feedback.
A 1-on-1 meeting is one of the ways the Ninety platform can help you facilitate feedback sessions easily. You can integrate your conversations and priorities into a team member’s 90-day goals, roles, and key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as the company vision.
3. Forecasting Goals
KPIs and other company metrics provide data to use in employee performance goals. You want to forecast goals weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. Technology can make this easier and less time-consuming.
Ninety’s Goal Forecasting tool lets you forecast goals for an entire year at any interval: weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. With the Scorecard, you can calculate weekly metrics in real-time to show changes month over month and quarter over quarter.
4. Keeping Track of Performance
You need to keep track of the work that’s accomplished and the deadlines met while clarifying agreements and giving people room to grow. Tracking projects and tasks is much easier when using digital tools.
Ninety's Scorecard, Goals, To-Dos, and Issues tools are digital features that help you efficiently organize projects, evaluate roadblocks, visualize improvements, and keep track of individual performance goals.
5. Incorporating Company Culture into Goals
When company culture is shaped intentionally, it will make a difference in how employees achieve their goals while focusing on the bigger picture.
The Vision tool in Ninety enables you to have a shared vision of the future that’s clear and easy to get buy-in company-wide. Employees can keep detailed 1-year and 3-year goals in mind while keeping track of immediate tasks and priorities. Teams can use the Vision archive for inspiration in developing new shared visions, or you can keep team-specific Visions private.
6. Building Trust
Trust among leaders and teams is essential for effectively writing, setting, and achieving performance goals. You build trust by being transparent about elements of a good work environment such as working hours, performance expectations, compensation, the status of projects, keeping people accountable, and more.
The Org Chart helps you create a clear way for your team members to see the details of each Seat's roles, accountabilities, and responsibilities and understand how their performance is measured. This can help everyone communicate effectively, collaborate harmoniously, and build trust.
Create Your Employee Performance Goals on Ninety
Now that you’ve reviewed sample goals for employees and learned about setting goals for better performance, it’s time to put your knowledge into practice.
Create your employee performance goals on Ninety now.
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