Thread: Facility Goals and Objectives

I am interested in finding out just how many owners and managers have specific written Goals and Objectives for their operations. The types of goals I mean would be something like: Increase the number of customers using AutoPay from 24% to 45% or We expect to sell an average of $8.45 in products and supplies for every rental. It is not enough to have simply talked about it in general terms, I want to know if they are in writing and success is measured throughout the year.

MisterJim444

To clarify, I have written goals and objectives but my input to the owner falls on deaf ears.

Get rid of slogans, exhortations, and targets for your employees asking for lower past due amounts and new levels of Occupancy. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the MAJORITY of the causes of low rental leads and low occupancy belong to the market as a whole and thus lie beyond the power of some employees.

By definition an exhortation is “communication intended to urge or persuade the recipients to take some action” OR “a form of relating personal opinions, belief systems, personal values and recommendations about certain situations relayed in some context to another person, group or party often offered as a guide to action and/or conduct”

Examples of things to remove... “Increase Occupancy to 95% by Oct2010!” or “Reduce Past due to 3%”...... You should consider the impacts and reactions when these types of Goals or targets are presented... You will find some of your best employees will provide shortcuts or go outside normal processes to achieve these goals. This causes personnel to react by moving units out to reduce past dues.. you would not believe the things I have seen some Managers do just to hit their GOAL.. like Rent storage space themselves just to hit numbers... this type of activity not good for the business and is only a short term fix..

Suggest the ideas of improvement and not targets ... less stress.. find other ways to reward your employees but always keep in mind the reactions some make to hit those goals when there is money involved.

Dispel FEAR, so that employees and management may work effectively for the company. The goals brings fear into the workplace... there is no reason to cause this type of stress and fear into the workforce.

Remove quotas, numerical goals, Management by numbers, or Management by objective.

Let me clarify this.... All Companies should have Goals.. as well as MOST Owners and Managers would have Personal goals AND business goals.. however.. setting a Quota or numerical goal to make others react or perform, for the most part, causes employees to change process, fudge the numbers, Lie, cheat, or steal. The really sad part of all this, Companies continue to make this fundamental mistake without understanding the situations they put their employees in or why they do not do well in the long run. Try setting your Company goals for yourself.. THEN create ITEMS you will act on/introduce to your workforce to achieve these goals. If you do NOT your achieve your goal.. you can and should adjust your ITEMS in order to get to your goal..

Senior Storage has the same liberal mindset that has now infected our Nation. I would suspect that SS doesn't like goals because SS abhors anyone measuring his/her performance. Our country has dumbed down everything from academic scores for school children to no longer flying the American flag over Haiti so as not to "offend" anyone. SS derides performance goals because liberals arrogantly think that the world revolves around them. Dam those pesky self storage owners, after all, what do they know? MisterJim444 asked a simple question and instead, SS launched into an incoherent diatribe filled with liberal, left wing rhetoric that totally skirted the question.

Goals and objectives are not a sinister plot and managers that toy with occupancies, statistics, rentals or other dishonest factors to adjust their numbers are manipulative and stupid. Goals bring fear into the workplace, wow, what a ridiculous statement.

Goals and objectives are powerful tools. At one time, running a six minute mile was considered impossible. Once a noble young man ran the mile in less than six minutes, the oppressive bonds of limited thinking was forever changed. Today, individuals routinely run the mile in less than six minutes.

MisterJim444 brings up a timely topic, too bad that SS is too feeble to understand basic management.

First I should correct something that was said by me.. "The goals brings fear into the workplace" I meant to say “A "quota" brings fear into the workplace. If this is a concept is beyond your understanding... The exhortation definition may have confused you as well... simply put.. create an environment the builds trust and give people the pride to do their work .. and not be worried about items they cannot control.. as for me being too feeble to understand basic Management.. you should do your homework and understand Management principals before you put your thoughts down. I would bet you clearly didn’t study this in school if you had even attended you may not have said what you said.. BTW.. this is not a NEW mindset .. nor would I expect you to understand this way of thinking based on the comments you made.... if you think people DON’T react when owners and or managers set unrealistic quotas or things that are beyond their control .. you are blind to it or you are simply NOT experienced enough to know any better..

As far as YOUR Liberal comments ..YOUR WAY OFF. If you had read the entire note you may have noticed I said Goals are good for Companies and individuals.. somehow you must have got me confused thinking I am some individual who works FOR a owner.. you would be wrong in that assumption too. If I were a employee .. I would not be opposed to letting my performance show for itself or be measured.. however.. From my experience, with all the companies I have Consulted and worked with, even the “experts” or “Pros” have no idea really what to measure.. in fact their goals don’t line up to their mission statement and typically contradict their cause.. that is a whole different topic of conversation..

Having Misguided goals is something I see a lot of and expecting people, who have no control over the environment, to obtain those goals is ridiculous .. it is too bad many cannot see it for what it is .. Set goals .. however measuring people and not the process is NOT the right thing to do ..

And what the Hell does a Liberal movement, 6 min mile, American flag & Haiti have to do with Management of storage facilities … and you say I am the one who went into a incoherent diatribe … lol

Typical liberal blathering. Of course, none of the experts know what they are talking about either, after all, your the expert.

"Wow, the hits just keep on coming......"

I want to shed some additional light on my feelings about setting Goals in the management of a self storage facility. These goals need to be established as a result of discussions with the entire management team – owners and facility staff. If we as a team decide that it is important to increase the number of people paying by Auto Pay, there must be a specific tangible goal that we all are trying to achieve. It has never been enough to simply state – “Won’t it be great if out percentages increased.” Or “Let’s try to make it better.” There must be a success measuring stick from my experience.

Senior you wrote “You should consider the impacts and reactions when these types of Goals or targets are presented”. If all the goals are just crammed down from the owner to the employees of course they will not be received well. If it is a collaborative process the outcome in my experience is totally different.

One of the biggest management problems that I have watched for decades in this industry is the misalignment of owner expectations with his / her staff. If I am a manager that does not know specifically what my owner expects from my performance (except just making more money) how will I ever achieve or exceed those benchmarks. I know owners around the country who don’t even work with their team in developing their annual budgets nor do they provide them with Budget to Actual monthly figures. I just don’t’ understand that logic and never will.

There can be almost as much learned by falling short of a goal as in achieving it IF everyone involves discussed why the goal was not met and what additional resources may be needed or additional actions are necessary to try again. If you are out hunting every shot doesn’t find its target. The same is true with written goals – the mantra needs to be “ready – aim – fire – re-aim – fire again.”

I am blessed to have four grandchildren. Matthew played T-ball last season and in the league they don’t keep score. Yet every time I talked to him about how he did at one of the games he would always say we won or lost and tell me the score. Goals and objectives, in addition to the annual budget, are a critical method of keeping score. We are all in the business of making a living and measuring things that we do is vital, from my experience, to knowing if you are succeeding or not.

MisterJim444

I would like to correct a previous statement, Roger Bannister ran the first FOUR minute mile. Previously, such a feat was considered impossible. Bannister proved that it was achievable and subsequently, many routinely run the four minute mile and it has now become the measuring stick for mid level runners. The same is true for goals and objectives. Recently during a company meeting, one of my managers proudly announced that 22% of his customers had signed up for autopay (credit card). None of the other managers had come even close to this goal. When we asked Bill how he did it, he replied "I just ask every customer to do it!" I now have facilities that even exceed Bill's autopay penetration goal.

MisterJim444 makes many good points and perhaps Senior Storage has had some bad experiences with goals and objectives in the past. Goals and objectives, recognizing all the caveats and limitations, are great tools for any endeavor........

BTW, I apologize to Senior Storage for being snarky in previous posts...sorry!

I would not say bad experiences.. I would call it experience…. being able to point out misguided goals my clients put on their employees and then seeing them reach goals they desired (after they realign) is quite a reward … where as you say .. would have never been possible without understanding what the cause of the problem was... again, I am not saying creating goals is not important .. It’s a MUST. However, many Owners/Managers create numerical goals or quotas that are unrealistic and unattainable by the personnel themselves. It’s hard to change the mindset that the process is the key as to how they achieve the goals. Focus on the process like the “Action items” or written process you are going to follow to achieve the given goal.. We, as Leadership, should take an active part helping the company as a whole team to reach those goal. You will find there are at times things only the Owner/Manager can address for help resolve. And the employee does not have the power to change or resolve some situations.. There are MANY tools out there that help Management align actions to results … in addition to tools and techniques that allow owners and management to really understand how and what to focus on … Examples are: Scatter Plot Charts to help you understand the reactions a correlations of activities, Quadrant Analysis and Pareto Charts to help guide you to the RIGHT things to focus on..

I don’t claim to know it all nor do I claim to be an expert. I can help you make an informed decision by looking at data. We can all learn from our mistakes and better understand our industry through trial and error.. BUT, there are tools out there to help Owners select goals and what items that need to be measured..

What I mean by even the “pros” or “experts” do not always know what to measure or set as a goal.

Example… One of my clients ultimate goal was to break 60K a month AVG for all his stores combined. I asked “How do you expect to do this?”… Mind you, this is someone who has been in business for a long time and KNOWS the Storage industry very well.... one of their measurements was to reduce the outstanding AR. Their past due in their stores were well under 3%.. They created auctions constantly even if they didn’t need them to get the past dues down.. because this numeric goal was included in their bonus plan. After showing them on paper with the tools described above that their Key quotas directly contradicted their Goal.

Bottom line, once they stopped focusing on the past dues… they were able to easily make their numbers even without increasing occupancy.. HOW you ask? They had an increase in late fees… because items stayed around longer and tenant actually came back and paid IN FULL and paid late fees. (This was a shock to the owner) and the Company ONLY had auctions when really needed the units. Also I noticed, after really digging, the Managers of his stores would settle for less money before the unit could be sold into auction, not to get the owner to pay.. but to NOT have the high Past due % so they could get their bonus.. this is just an example of an employee reacting to the numeric goal passed down from management..

I am not saying this will work for everyone.. but I would hope you would get the idea. I see it many times that management, without knowing , creates situations that can and should be avoided. I would hope that someone gets something out of this and I would hope this helps the thinking process before setting a goal.

Hope this helps, And really, I am not a Liberal ... but if your want to keep saying it ... its really not worth the effort to explain why I am not..... Have a great day..

Ok.....uh...

I'll answer the question...

I was given goals for the last year that were totally unobtainable. "Maintain 95% occupancy and delinquency under 1% per month".

I think I averaged about 1-2% delinquency, which was extremely difficult, but there was no way that I could keep an average 95% occupancy in this economy. I did my best, though, as always.