SMART goals at work, with examples for different jobs

What the letters stand for

Each letter works as a question you can ask about a draft goal. If you can answer all five, the goal is usually clear enough to act on and to review later.

The acronym comes from a short 1981 article in the American Management Association's Management Review by George T. Doran, a management consultant who had previously run corporate planning at the Washington Water Power Company. He was writing for managers who had to set company, department and section objectives, and his version was slightly different: specific, measurable, assignable (who will do it), realistic and time-related. "Relevant" and "achievable" are later substitutions, and many other variations exist.

Doran also included two qualifications that are useful to know. He said it wasn't realistic to quantify every objective, particularly in some middle-management roles, and that an objective written with all five criteria wasn't a requirement. He treated the acronym as a guideline, and put as much weight on the action plan that goes with an objective as on the objective itself.

Turning a vague goal into a SMART one

Most goals start out vague, and that's a reasonable first draft. The work is in asking the five questions until the goal describes something you could check.

Say an administration officer writes "get better at Excel" in a development plan. Asking what exactly they need Excel for might narrow it to the monthly expense report, which currently takes most of a day to build by hand. That gives the goal a specific target. For the measurable part, the report could be built from a template with formulas, and the time it takes could be compared before and after. Achievable depends on access to training, so it may help to name a course or a colleague who can show them. Relevance is easy to explain, because the report is part of the job. Adding a date finishes it.

• Vague: Get better at Excel.
• Clearer: Learn to use formulas for the expense report.
• SMART: By 30 June, complete the organisation's intermediate Excel course and rebuild the monthly expense report as a template with formulas, so the July report takes half the time the June report did.

You don't need to write every goal as a single long sentence. Some people find it easier to write a short goal and then list the measure, the deadline and the support needed underneath it.

Examples from different jobs

These examples are illustrations written for this guide. The numbers and dates are placeholders, so replace them with measures that make sense in your workplace.

Several of these goals track something the person controls, such as running sessions or using a checklist, alongside an outcome that also depends on other people. A registered nurse can't control how many complex wounds come through the ward, and a customer service officer can't control how complicated the calls are. A goal that relies only on an outcome can be missed for reasons that say little about the person's work, so including an action you control gives the review something fair to assess.

Related occupation profiles: customer service officer, registered nurse, electrician, primary school teacher, payroll officer and cafe manager.

Using SMART goals in a performance review

In a performance review, goals are usually agreed between you and your manager and recorded in a performance agreement or development plan. The Fair Work Ombudsman's best practice guide on managing underperformance describes this as good practice for employers: set clear goals, record them, give regular feedback and review performance against the agreed goals every few months.

If your manager proposes a goal, you can ask why it matters and how it will be measured. Goal-setting researchers Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, summarising decades of their research in American Psychologist, reported that an assigned goal motivated people as well as one they helped set, provided the reason for it was explained. A goal handed over with no explanation led to noticeably lower performance. So asking about the purpose is a reasonable part of the conversation, and it often makes the measure clearer too.

It's also worth checking the "achievable" part before you agree. If a goal needs training, system access or time away from other work, write that support into the plan. The same Fair Work guide says a performance improvement plan should list the support that will be provided, and the principle is just as useful for ordinary development goals.

Career goals and development plans

Longer career goals are harder to make SMART in one step, because the path usually isn't clear at the start. It can help to write the long-term aim in plain terms, then set SMART goals for the next three to six months that move you towards it.

For example, a retail assistant who wants to move into a buying role within a couple of years might start with goals such as spending a day with the buying team before the end of the quarter, or taking responsibility for stock reordering in one section by a set date. Each step can be checked, and each gives them something concrete to discuss at the next review. Locke and Latham's review describes a business simulation study in which people given nearer-term goals as well as a distant one did better than people given the distant goal alone.

If your goal involves changing occupation, the guide on how to change careers explains how much retraining different moves require, which helps set a realistic timeframe. A record of goals you've met also gives you specific evidence to bring to a conversation about pay, which the guide on how to ask for a pay rise covers in more detail.

When a SMART goal isn't the best fit

The acronym came from management practice, and it wasn't built from goal-setting research. A 2023 review in Health Psychology Review by Christian Swann and colleagues looked at its use in physical activity programs and concluded that SMART isn't based on scientific theory and isn't consistent with some of the empirical evidence. That review focused on exercise goals, but two of the differences it points to also apply at work.

The first is difficulty. Locke and Latham found that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than being told to do your best, with performance levelling off only when people reached the limits of their ability or lost commitment to the goal. An emphasis on "achievable" or "realistic" can push people to set goals they know they'll meet comfortably. A stretching goal can still be SMART, provided everyone understands that coming close is a reasonable result.

The second is how new the work is. When a task is complex for the person doing it, Locke and Latham reported that a specific performance target can make people so anxious about the result that they try approaches haphazardly and learn less. In those situations a learning goal tends to work better, such as trying and comparing three different ways to handle a problem, and then setting a performance target once the skills are in place. A newly promoted team leader, for example, might set a goal to learn how two experienced leaders run their one-on-one meetings before committing to a target for staff engagement.

Measurement has its own trap. Some of the most useful work is hard to count, and a goal written around whatever is easiest to measure can pull attention away from what matters. Where numbers don't fit, you can use other evidence, such as a finished piece of work, feedback from the people you support or an observation by your manager.