Establishing a Target for Overall Job Satisfaction

One of the key goals of any action plan should be to increase overall job satisfaction, since the impact of higher job satisfaction extends beyond employee attitudes to affect such factors as lower employee turnover, greater operational efficiency, higher customer satisfaction and even improved financial performance.

Projecting the impact of your Action Plan(s) on overall job satisfaction needs careful consideration. Setting too low a target may diminish the potential returns, while an unrealistically high goal can lack credibility and affect confidence in the survey process. Based on Insightlink's experience, overall job satisfaction increases an average of 7 percentage points between surveys. This result can be used as the basis for establishing your own anticipated increase.

Goal Setting Prioritization

Each goal set should be analyzed via S.M.A.R.T. before it can be incorporated into an Action Plan:

SPECIFIC - For each goal you set, you need to answer: Who? What? Where? When? Which? Why?

MEASURABLE - You must set concrete criteria for measuring your progress toward the attainment of each goal.

ATTAINABLE/AGREED-UPON - You are unlikely to meet goals that are too far out of your reach but, at the same time, a goal needs to stretch you and your site so you feel you are committed to achieving it.

REALISTIC - All goals must represent an objective toward which you (and your organization) are both willing and able to achieve.

TIME DEFINED - All goals must be linked to a specific time frame.

Effective Goal Setting

Goal setting is critical to successful action planning, since effective Action Plans cannot be established without knowing the end result you want to achieve. In deciding what goals to set for your organization and/or your own department, site or functional unit, ask yourself:

Which issues are in your control to change?

What resources do you and/or your organization have available in order to resolve the issue?

How long will it take to correct the issue?

How will implementation of the proposed solution provide value to your employees?

All goals established for Action Plans should be divided into three categories:

Short-term "quick fixes" that can be implemented immediately.
Medium-term objectives that can be achieved in 2-3 months.
Longer-term goals that are more ambitious and likely require 6 months to a year to achieve.

Also, you should record the goals that cannot realistically be handled at the site level or cannot be tackled at this time. You need to let your employees know what these goals are and why they cannot be addressed at this time.