When you set a goal to achieve something specific, you are much more likely to achieve it. Ambitious goals also turn out to be more motivating than goals that are easy to achieve. At SWOOP, our mission is to make organisations and individuals better at collaborating, and that is why we are now introducing goal setting in SWOOP.

It will go live later in January 2021, and you can read all about goal setting for Yammer and Workplace from Facebook in this blog post.

Since 2015 we have done extensive research into how organisations, groups, communities and people collaborate on Microsoft Teams, Yammer and Workplace and we have published this in our annual benchmarking reports which are freely available at www.swoopanalytics.com/benchmarking.

Our Enterprise Social Network performance measures are aligned the SWOOP maturity model which is based on prior work by Simon Terry and Siemens. In the graphic below you will see how the goals are aligned to the different maturity levels:

Our ongoing investment in benchmarking since 2015 has enabled us to form a comprehensive picture of what ‘good’ looks like, and we now feel confident we have been able to find the important signals that can provide insights into collaborative performance. Using an Olympic team analogy, we can measure resting heart rate, body mass and other important performance metrics for each athlete, for each team, and for all the teams in different sports. We also know what athletes from other countries are achieving. This will help you focus your attention on where it will provide the greatest return.

The goal setting feature in SWOOP is available for all dashboards and nearly all quantitative metrics.

You will need to set a date range of at least three months to be able to see and adjust the goals. This is because the default goals are sensitive to shorter date ranges.

SWOOP provides a suggested default goal where we have the data to back it up, i.e. based on our benchmarking data set. For quantitative measures where you do not see a goal flag in SWOOP, you can set a goal yourself. For example, in the Response Rate measurement shown above, we include a default goal of minimum 50% of posts having received a reply, but there is no default goal for Likes or for how fast those replies should come, but you can set that if you want to.

The default goals provided by SWOOP are set to what the top 20% in our benchmarking data have achieved. Undoubtedly, that will be ambitious for some and worth striving for. However, for others it may not be right given an organisation’s particular stage of adoption or unique context. Therefore, we allow you to adjust the target.

Enterprise goals, Community/Group/Team and Personal goals

Our global benchmarking reports showed us that goals do not scale, so they need to be adjusted for the size of the group of people they relate to. Therefore, SWOOP provides different goals for the same measures at the Enterprise, Community/Group/Team, and Personal level. First, we will explain what the metrics are, and then we will show what the goals are for each level.

Overview of metrics and why they are important

Enterprise default goals

The following default goals represent what the top 20% of benchmarked organisations have achieved:

Community/Group default goals

The following default goals represent what the top 20% of benchmarked communities/groups have achieved. Community/group goals are different for small, medium and large communities/groups. Size is based on the number of members:

• Small Group/Community: 1-50 members

• Medium Group/Community: 51-499 members

• Large Group/Community: 500 or more members

 Personal default goals

These personal goals are derived from the Enterprise and Community/Group goals:

Collaboration strategy and goal setting

Goal setting is a strategic planning activity, and it can be a very powerful way of engaging your organisation and/or your team in thinking through what you want to achieve from your collaboration platform. Do remember the goals are nothing more than signals that will tell you if you are heading in the right direction, but achieving them is not necessarily success in itself. Collaboration is a means to an end, but not the end itself.

We suggest you approach goal setting the following way:

1. Decide what the most important business outcomes are for your organisation.

2. Decide what role the collaboration platform will have delivering these outcomes.

3. Decide what the collaboration goals should be. SWOOP provides default goals based on what the top 20% of organisations achieve, but you need to confirm these are right for your context.

Here are two examples of how a desired business outcome drives the goal setting for collaboration:

Example 1

An organisation had been implementing Lean Six Sigma to drive further efficiencies in the sales process. It discovered the remaining sticking issues were not about process, but about how people executed the process. Head office could not understand why it was so hard for the field-based salespeople to follow the prescribed process. They then introduced an enterprise social network to improve collaboration between field-based salespeople and head office to uncover what was getting in the way.

Several regional groups were created for salespeople to ask questions and share photos etc., as they ran into problems following the process in the field. Since the core aim of the group was for head office people to answer questions from the field, a goal of 90% replies to posts was set, and a minimum 50% of the field-based salespeople had been actively engaged by posting or replying.

After just four weeks, nearly a hundred questions had been asked, every single question had been answered and 67% of the salespeople had actively taken part. The sales process was tweaked as additional training was provided where needed.

Example 2

A recurring issue identified from the annual employee satisfaction survey was employees asking for more direct interaction with the senior leadership team. To augment existing communication channels, the leadership team decided they would use the company’s enterprise social network more deliberately to engage their people in two-way dialogue. A goal was set for the senior leadership to become Catalysts or Engagers, to post updates and reply to questions (proportionally aiming for two replies for every post) as well as posting questions to encourage feedback (Curiosity Index of 10% or above). The senior leadership team members received individual coaching from the corporate communications team, and the leadership team was able to sustain an improved online engagement profile which led to significant uplift on this specific area in the following year’s employee engagement survey.

More information

If you would like more information about goalsetting in SWOOP, we would love to talk with you. Contact us today.