Every business should be working towards some type of goal. Goals help motivate your team and help you measure and monitor success on different initiatives in your practice. But, it's also something that's easy to push to the wayside when you're all busy managing a practice and taking care of patients day in and day out.
Today we want to share with you some of the reasons you should prioritize setting goals before the new year and then share a quick way for you to narrow down goals for yourself, your practice, or your team.
A New Way to Look at Goal Setting in Your Eyecare Practice
Why You Should Set Team Goals First
Setting team goals in your eyecare practice will have a lot of benefits. Team goals help unite your staff in working towards the same outcomes. It can decrease competition, while increasing collaboration. For example if you have individual sales goals for your opticians, it could cause them to steal patients from each other or hurt their level of customer service if they are out to beat one another. But, if you give them a goal to work towards together, they will likely provide better customer service overall and find ways to work together to give patients a good experience in your dispensary.
Once you have team goals established you can work with individual staff members to set personal goals that will contribute to each of the team goals. Building alignment of individual goals with company goals can help hold all of your team accountable for their own contributions. Rewards can be given as team goals are hit, and separate rewards if the individual goals contributing to that team goal were hit.
A Quick Way to Define New Goals
Reading through a Hubspot article, we saw some good, and different, advice on goal setting. We have talked before about use the SMART method to determine and define goals. Let's review the method:
Smart
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timely
While this is a tried and true method for defining goals, this new article gave some insight into some of the more psychological pieces of goal setting, and the feelings we tend to feel when we miss a goal - failure and disappointment. These feelings are something that can be avoided if we set the right goals for ourselves and our teams from the start. Hubspot lists a four step process that can help eliminate frustrations and challenges that can get in the way of processing and reaching your goals.
- On a sheet of paper create a column for "needs" and "wants". From here, you'll list the goals you need to accomplish and the goals you want to accomplish. Take a look at which column is longer.
- If the "want" list is longer, see if those things are goals you have been putting off while taking care of other tasks in your practice. If so, create a separate list of goals titled "Benchmarks". Benchmarks will be a list of things you aspire to do and can be accomplished in any amount of time you see fit.
- Give your benchmarks different time frames - 30 days, 90 days, six months, or a full year and break them up in order of priority to create a timeline for a realistic approach.
- Go back to your "need" column and decide if those goals will get you closer to desired results. Organize them to determine priority of what needs to be done first, and what can be delayed.
This method should help you better organize and prioritize the most important needs of your business. Once you have these goals determined you can share and allocate with your team to come up with a plan of hitting your long term goals.
We have a goal tracking sheet and more actionable tips in our 5 Year Plan for ODs ebook.
Originally published in October 2016