You want to get the most out of your employees, and they want to develop their skills while doing something meaningful. If you think about it, those are pretty complementary ambitions, so you should find a tool that satisfies them both. Setting objectives for your employees that are tied to your organization’s mission helps them stay focused and allows them to see where they’re improving and what they still need to work on.

First, let’s talk about why you want to set objectives in the first place. You have a collection of free-thinking, idea-spouting folks working for you, and that’s great. But in terms of your profitability, you need to keep that creative energy focused. It may be a pretty broad focus, but still, you need to keep them moving at least in an appropriate direction. By giving them some guidance about what they should be doing, at least in the short term, they have a pretty good idea what they should be thinking about when they come to work.

That “short term” stuff is key…their objectives are likely to change over time, especially as they start accomplishing them, because that’s what you do when you meet objectives: you set new ones. This is how businesses grow, by improving their employees’ skills and increasing the quality of their product while reducing the cost of creating it. Whether that “product” consists of marketing campaigns, original academic research, capacity-building programs for developing nations, lines of code, or whatever, you should be able to measure improvements in your employees’ performance.

Measuring performance is another reason for setting objectives: how can you tell if your employees are doing well or not if you don’t know what they should be doing well at? Performance feedback should not be random and it should not be a big surprise to your employee. You should never hear someone say to you, “I didn’t know you wanted me to do THAT.” If you are measuring your employees against one set of standards and they think they are supposed to be doing something else, then somebody has done something wrong, and chances are, it isn’t them.

Your employees want objectives because they also want to know how well they are doing. They want to see their own progress, and there’s a good chance they will be a harsher critic of themselves than you are. They also want some focus…how many times have you heard someone say “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing!” (hopefully, never) A group of people sitting around unsure of what to do is a bad idea.

Bottom line: you want your folks to have some focus and be working to improve and increase their skills, and that’s pretty much what they want, too. So where do these objectives come from?

Well, what does your organization do?

This is where you look at your mission statement, and consider what’s realistic and what’s out of reach for right now, and the create a set of objectives that helps you reach the goal you have set. They might be related to output (for example, completing a certain number of storyboards each week) or maybe linked to appropriate improvement (say, earning a particular certification within 6 months). Since your concern is on profitability, you need to focus your employees on those objectives that help you achieve that. Then use these objectives when you give them performance feedback, and be sure to highlight the link between what they are doing and the overall direction of the enterprise.

Your workers, of course, would like to see the company be profitable, because then they get to keep their jobs. But they also want to know that they are doing something worthwhile. When I was teaching college I often heard older professors comment that Gen X (which, incidentally, included me) and the Millennials were slackers. I never believed that…instead, I saw people who were not going to waste their time doing something useless (that’s where the “slacker” impression came from), but rather, would work hard at something where they can make an impact. If you tie your workers objectives to the firm’s mission, and they can easily see how what they are doing matters, then they are a lot more likely to work hard on what you want them to do than to take off in their own direction.

If you have trouble doing this well, then work with your employees to set the objectives rather than doing it yourself in isolation. That way everybody understands and accepts them. In the end, that’s a lot more useful.