This is another installment of the series “Grow It Strong: Business Ideas For A Dream Company. Our road to the exceptional team, winning culture and Fortune 500 clients”. In case you’ve missed the previous posts, feel free to explore them here.

If you have decided to join the up-and-coming startup and business founding trend or are already in, then you probably understand that a huge part of your success depends on the right people to work with. A perfect team is like a perfect pair of shoes – it’s comfy and becomes you and you know you can walk longest distances without getting tired. And it’s sometimes hard to find.

Feeling super lucky to having hired those ideal employees, you don’t want to miss one nitty-gritty point: how your employees are doing now is important, but equally, if not more important, is what destination they will reach on their job path later.

Each member of your team should evolve. They should start with accomplishing things they are told to do, in a way they were told to, and end up becoming a pro able to teach vs. just learning by self-developing and tuning their skills to extend their area of expertise.

Imagine that employees are wheels of the vehicle that is your company: if the wheels ain’t moving, you’re stuck.

To move forward, employees need to keep in mind some sort of job goals, both short-term and long-term, to know the direction to go.

At Weavora, we (the co-founders) have come up with a set of requirements for each position at the company (obviously, there aren’t many job titles in the team of 10) to share and discuss them with the whole team. When making up the lists, we stood by some basic principles of good performance goals:

• they should be challenging enough but still achievable (you don’t want your employees to give up halfway);
• they should go in line with the company objectives and mission.

And you need to make sure that your team fully understands, accepts and truly commits to these goals. The best way to do it is to have a casual, relaxed discussion outside the office.

We personally booked a lounge room at a nice restaurant and after having a delicious dinner, proceeded with presenting requirements for each position and getting feedback from the guys. We never meant to force the goals, everyone was welcomed to give their honest opinion and agree/disagree.

So after that conversation, our developers, designer, QA specialist and content marketing manager have a clear understanding of what is expected from them which obviously leaves no space for idling on YouTube.

We haven’t included responsibilities of CEO, COO, CTO hoping that the team has a slightest idea of what the heck we’re doing here, but feel free to work out those as well.

For you to have a better idea of how these goals can look like, I’ve provided the senior developer’s and designer’s requirements below as an example, just the way they have been presented to the team.

One more thing I’d like to stress is that you need to get back to the goals at least twice a year to see where your team is, to review, reevaluate and perhaps adjust the requirements to the current work context. It’s natural that your company priorities may shift a bit over time so make sure your employees’ goals adapt accordingly.

What’s your experience with setting performance goals for employees? Do you think team members need to figure out those themselves or is it a manager’s call?