Setting annual goals for your company allows you to grow from year to year and have a companywide focus everyone can work toward. There are many reasons you should set regular goals for your business.

If you don’t have a set point, then measuring what you’ve accomplished in the previous year is more difficult. Goals also bring your entire team together for a common purpose.

However, getting your whole company on board and even exceeding those goals isn’t as simple as it sounds. It’s easy for employees to experience burnout or have difficulty staying the course for an entire year. Employees will come and go and goals may shift.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways you can motivate your company to not only meet, but also exceed your yearly goals.

Here’s how to motivate your company to meet and exceed your yearly goals

1. Build Your Team

Teambuilding activities allow everyone to get on the same page and better understand what unique strengths each team member offers to the group.

Take time at the beginning of a big project to get the entire team on board. At times, this will mean a companywide teambuilding outing. At other times, it might mean simply pulling together members of one department for a short teambuilding session.

Be sure to have smaller meetings occasionally to keep everyone connected and give new employees a chance to connect.

2. Teach New Skills

Upskilling your employees creates many benefits for your business. However, when it comes to working toward specific goals, those new skills should align with what will help the employee work toward reaching those goals. For your sales force, if they are to reach a set number goal, teaching new skills that will allow them to upsell or improve customer relations is a smart time investment.

Ask each department what skills would best help them reach the goals they’ve set and provide the resources via speakers or classes that will allow them to develop those skills.

3. Ask for Ideas

Are your employees engaged and do they feel appreciated and heard? The average cost to hire and train a new employee is about $4,000, and that cost rises for higher level professionals.

It makes more sense to ensure your employees are highly engaged and invested in their work, so it’s less likely they’ll leave for a new position. Ask your employees for ideas about how to improve their jobs.

What can the team do to improve the overall process as you all work toward goals for the year? Really listen to the ideas your employees bring to the table. They know the job they do better than anyone else does.

4. Offer Incentives

Offering incentives drives sales performance. However, the compensation needs to make sense for your employees. Offering something they don’t want is almost worse than not offering any compensation at all.

If you aren’t sure what compensation is most wanted by your employees, ask them. Take a poll or create incentives that have a number of options, so everyone finds something to drive them toward goals. Cash is almost always a safe choice, so you can fall back on bonuses for certain goals met.

5. Set Specific Goals

Make sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T. goals, meaning they are specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused and time-bound. Setting goals that are specific allows a narrow focus for everyone on your team.

It’s much easier to meet a goal when it’s broken down into small, specific steps. Narrowing your focus month-by-month allows you to work toward larger goals without everyone feeling overwhelmed.

6. Show Passion as Leaders

If leaders aren’t passionate about achieving goals, then employees aren’t likely to feel passionate about putting forth the daily effort toward achieving those goals.

Company leaders need to be fired up about what meeting these goals does for the business, and in turn for them as leaders. Leaders include team leaders, department heads and upper management. The passion to exceed annual goals must trickle down from the top.

7. Give Feedback

Businesses that give consistent and frequent employee feedback have nearly 15 percent lower employee turnover rates than companies that provide no feedback.

Giving your employees regular and specific feedback in a constructive manner not only reduces your turnover rate, but also helps employees learn better skills and improve over time. If the attitude is that you appreciate your employee and want them to be the best they can be, then the feedback won’t sting.

8. Recognize Excellence

When an employee goes above and beyond what is expected, recognize that effort. Employees really do want to know you see their effort.

In fact, 78 percent of employees indicate that being recognized motivates them to do even better. This might be as simple as a short note letting the employee know what an excellent job they’re doing, or a small token of appreciation.

9. Celebrate Together

Most employees are pretty loyal to the place they work. About 66 percent of employees say they are highly committed to their company — this number is slightly lower for millennials.

Being part of a group and offering opportunities to feel like a work family brings everyone together and reminds employees on those difficult days that everyone is working toward a common goal.

Go ahead and throw a pizza party on Friday if the month’s goals were met. Offer a quick breakfast standup meeting to make sure everyone is still on board and celebrate the small successes along the way.

10. Nix Multitasking

Recent research shows our brains don’t multitask very well. This means that jumping from one task to the next makes you less effective at all of them.

Instead, train employees to pick a task and focus on it to completion before shifting to another. This might mean breaking larger jobs into smaller ones so they are easily focused on and completed.

Stop multitasking, and everyone on your team will be more productive and better able to meet and exceed annual goals.

Motivate Everyone

These are just a few of the ways to keep momentum going throughout the fiscal year. Use what tools you have to drive everyone on the team toward success.

Remember that employees who are engaged with the company are much more likely to work hard toward that common goal.

If you get feedback from employees, stay abreast of where you are in the process and all work together, you can accomplish almost anything as a brand.