When an orchestra plays music, you never hear flutes playing a Beethoven piece and clarinets playing something from Mozart. Each section has its own part to play in the ensemble. While these parts may be different, they are all necessary for the orchestra to perform together. 

Your organization is like an orchestra. Each person may have a different role to play, but their goals must be carefully choreographed for a harmonious final result.

Through performance alignment, you can ensure that each employee’s performance is working toward your company’s mission. To do this, you must set clear expectations for your employees’ performance and communicate how those expectations relate to the organization’s mission and goals. 

Do You Regularly Communicate Expectations for Job Performance?

Clear expectations aren’t just important for mission alignment. They also make a difference in your bottom line. In our recent 2024 HR Benchmark Report, we surveyed 1,065 small businesses on 40 HR questions. 

One of those questions was about whether employers regularly communicate expectations about job performance. Then, we asked the same companies about their growth during the previous year.

We received the following response from our survey. 

64% of zero-growth firms said they regularly communicated expectations regarding job performance.

85% of fast-growth firms said they regularly communicated expectations regarding job performance.

The 21-point spread between these two results shows the strong correlation between communicating expectations and achieving faster business growth. If your company isn’t communicating performance expectations clearly, your employees won’t be able to work toward your organizational goals. In turn, your business will be less successful. 

Why Communicating Expectations Matters

Communicating expectations is important because workers can’t achieve goals that they are unaware of. Annual performance reviews are simply the beginning. You should have regular follow-ups throughout the year and additional development opportunities so that workers can grow and gain a better understanding of their part in your organization’s mission. 

Align Workers With Your Company’s Mission 

The biggest reason why you need to communicate clear expectations is that it helps your workers achieve your company’s mission. Each person plays a role in working toward the organization’s objectives. The only way employees know what role they must play is through communication. 

Alignment plays a major role in your company’s success. In one study, highly aligned companies grew revenue 58% faster.

Encourage High Performance 

Another advantage of communicating expectations is that it encourages high performance. It’s easy for workers to coast along if they aren’t given a sense of direction. Setting clear expectations shows employees the type of performance you expect and prepares them for future performance reviews. 

Avoid Confusion 

If an employee is confused by a poor performance review, the manager hasn’t done their job in setting expectations and providing feedback. Feedback and goal setting are ongoing processes. Employees should be aware of the things they need to work on before reviews happen. By eliminating ambiguity, you empower people to complete their day-to-day tasks.

Ensure Team Collaboration 

Clarifying goals and your overall mission helps teams work together. Workers need to understand how their goals fit into the overall picture. Other than motivating workers toward the shared goal, this type of expectation setting can improve communication and coordination.

How to Communicate Expectations About Job Performance 

As an employer, there are a few things you can do to effectively communicate your expectations to workers. Creating goals is important because they give employees something to work toward. As the historian and poet Bill Copeland once said, “The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”

Clarify Your Expectations 

First, take a moment to clarify what you want to achieve. To make your goals and expectations clearer, start by creating SMART goals. 

• Specific: Make each worker’s goals something specific. Instead of saying salespeople need to grow their sales, set a goal of increasing order size by 5% or developing 10 new leads a month. 
• Measurable: The best goals are also measurable, so workers can easily tell when they meet them. In the previous example, an employer set a goal of increasing the average order size by 5%. The 5% goal is important because it helps workers know when they’ve reached their objective.
• Achievable: If a goal appears to be unachievable, workers will lose motivation and give up. Likewise, you don’t want to create an expectation that is unreasonably easy.
• Relevant: Your expectations and objectives for each employee must be relevant to the company’s mission and the worker’s job. If you can’t explain why the objective matters to your company’s mission, it’s probably a good idea to revisit why the objective exists.
• Timely: Time-bound goals are important for motivation and to avoid procrastination.

Explain the Why 

When talking to workers about your expectations, it’s important to explain why these expectations matter. This is your opportunity to connect the worker’s goals to your company’s overarching mission. Adults need to know why they’re doing a task to feel excited and motivated about getting it done.

Discuss Them With Your Employees 

Once you’ve made expectations for each worker, discuss them with your employees. Team goals can be covered in a group setting, like a weekly meeting. Meanwhile, you may want to discuss individual goals in one-on-one meetings and performance reviews. 

Meet Regularly With Your Workers

Don’t confine your goal-setting discussions to your annual performance reviews. As Mary Simmons, vice president of HR Compliance, Learning, and Development at Asure Software, recently said in a Mission to Grow podcast on performance management, “Your top performers are top performers because they’re driven and a driven individual wants to hear feedback.” Workers should always know what objectives they’re working on and how they’re doing on achieving those goals.

Take the Next Step in Becoming a Fast-Growth Company

By providing clear expectations, you can take the next step toward becoming a fast-growth company. You can provide workers with direction, remove confusion, and support your top performers. More importantly, goal clarity helps improve the mission alignment of your entire organization.

If you’re interested in learning more about performance management, reach out to Asure’s team of small business HR experts today.