Your Voice: Half year gone? More can be done!

At this time every year we usually ask ourselves, and our business superiors ask us about our achievements during the first half of the year. We try to highlight the goals we have already accomplished. We also review the goals we are still struggling to complete and the ones we haven’t started yet.

Critical time and great opportunity

This time is a critical milestone for employees to review the progress of their annual performance, productivity, and even creativity. It is also a valuable opportunity for leaders and supervisors to reflect on their leadership skills and how to support their team members to keep up the good work, or to get back on track if they have failed to start the most important goals. 

According to the American writer and philosopher Elbert Hubbard, many people fail to achieve their goals, not for lack of abilities or brains or even courage, but simply because they haven’t organized their energies around the most critical goals they have. 

Why employees don’t achieve enough in six months

The big question we should ask ourselves here is why we haven’t achieved enough of our annual goals within six months although we have discussed them with our supervisors and agreed upon them since the beggining of the year. 

In her article in the Forbes website, the career coach and writer Caroline Ceniza-Levine said, “People who fantasize by setting unrealistically high expectations generally see horrific results in completing their tasks.” She also added, “Most people have the tendency of gravitating toward what we call ‘busy work;” work that makes you feel like you’re doing something impactful, when in reality what you’re doing is not impactful at all. The brain is naturally wired to want to do busy work.” 

Here, I list some of the reasons why employees don’t achieve enough in six months:

• Procrastination: The feeling that there is no need to rush as we can do everything whenever we decide. 
• Setting undoable goals: When we set goals that are not SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound), we actually set a plan to fail. 
• Misalignment: If our goals are not aligned with the organization goals and key performance indicators, this will lead to either ignoring the individual goals or completing them without being impactful. 
• Unplanned assignments: It happens that after setting the goals the organization assigns some employees to work on tasks that are different from their initial goals. 

What can be done?

Here are some suggested actions to achieve more goals in the second half of the year:

• Complete the goals you have already started as this will boost your spirit
• Discuss the goals that don’t fit your current duties and the ones that don’t fit the organization with your supervisor for modification
• Breakdown your big goals into small ones to achieve small wins that can keep you motivated
• Team up with colleagues who have similar goals to have win-win execution plans
• Follow-up on your progress on a monthly basis or even more frequently
• Park all the activities that keep you busy but have nothing to do with your goals until you complete them.