Setting employee goals

This intermediate Business English lesson plan is designed for managers, team leaders, and employees. This resource covers goal-setting strategies, relevant vocabulary, and practical activities. By completing this worksheet, learners will be able to identify and differentiate between performance and development goals, apply action verbs to set clear and measurable goals, and reflect on personal and team objectives to improve productivity and skill development. Other lessons you might like are “Key Performance Indicators“, “Performance appraisals“, “Performance punishment“, “Phrasal verbs: job performance“, “Idioms: goals“.

Activities Overview:
Speaking: Learners answer questions about their current work goals, goal-setting processes, and workplace practices.

Vocabulary: Students match key terms—such as target, deadline, performance, annual review, feedback, and development—to definitions, and then complete a gap-fill activity. Next, students work on collocations they will later hear in the video (e.g. establish expectations, develop skills, provide feedback, encourage growth) and discuss the questions given before moving on to the listening activities.

Listening: Students watch a video called “Setting goals for employees” and complete 4 different listening comprehension activities.

Practice: Students read examples of performance goals and match them to the correct job position. Then they link actions to expected outcomes to formulate development goals.

Vocabulary: Learners extract action verbs (e.g. implement, strengthen, resolve, enhance, prevent, optimize), while also identifying phrases that indicate measurement and results, such as “within [timeframe]” or “by X%.”

Writing: Using vocabulary from Activity 9, learners write 3 performance goals and 1 development goal for themselves or their team.

Vocabulary review: Finally, learners complete sentences using the correct form of given words (e.g., attend → attendance, perform → performance, strong → strengthen), reinforcing grammar and workplace vocabulary.

For more speaking practice, you can use the printable conversation cards.