Creating a new goal / OKR

Introduction

Our Goal module helps you track progress on a specific measure - whether it's a goal related to your performance (such as achieving a specific Sales target), a personal development goal (such as delivering a great speech in front of your team), or a department or company goal.

Development goals are objectives you set to improve your personal skills and competencies.  

Performance goals are objectives set for specific tasks to evaluate employee performance in your current job position.

To create a new goal, visit the Goal module and click 'Actions' > 'Create a new Goal'. By default, admins can create company and team goals and assign a lead or owner to a goal. Team leads can create team goals. You can allow normal users to create team goals as well in the 'Admin Settings'.

If you are unsure about which settings to take, we defined a blueprint for you here. 

Goal Settings

As a very first step, you decide if the goal is a business or personal development goal.

Title

The title should be a short summary of your goal - it will be displayed in all goal lists and will help you (and others who can see the goal) identify the goal.

Description

The optional description adds a little more detail to your goal. You could for example describe the motivation of the goal, important outcomes, and how you want to get there. 

Owner

To define who is ultimately responsible for the goal, define an owner. You can assign goals to yourself, to one of your direct/indirect reports, to someone else, to a team, or to the whole company. Here is an explanation of the options available:

• Personal goal owned by you (completely private) allows you to manage the goal all by yourself. If you want to, you can track it completely privately. Your manager and HR team will not have access to the goal. 
• Personal goal owned by you (approved by manager) will create a goal that your manager will approve and see. All future edits will have to be approved by your manager. If you also use the Review module and add your goals to the assessment, only these goals (confirmed by managers) will appear in your reviews. You will get a notification as soon as your manager has approved your goal.
• Personal goal by one of your team members allows managers to create a goal that is owned by (and obviously visible to) one of your direct / indirect reports. Simply add their name in the 'Owner' field. 
• Personal goal by another person allows admins to create a goal that is owned by a specific other person and managed by his / her manager. Again, you can add their name into the 'Owner' field. 
• Team / department goal will create a goal that is owned by an entire team; it will be visible to the entire company and can be updated by you.
• Company Goal will create a goal that is owned by the entire company; it will be visible to the entire company and can be updated by you.

Only the owner or their manager can edit the goal settings.

Visibility

Similarly, you can manage the visibility of the goal. You can limit the visibility to the owner, manager, and contributors of your goal, the team or extend visibility to the entire company. Please note that team and company goals will always be visible to the entire company.

Contributors

Contributors can always see and update the goal. They can also leave feedback / comments on the goal. You can add as many contributors as you want by clicking 'Add contributors'. Contributors can be other users or entire teams - just add them by typing their names.

Key Results

Key results are partial components of the goal that need to be achieved in order to complete the entire goal. As with the main goal, you should add a title and a metric. You will need to add at least one key result to your objective. 

Key Result Metric

There are four metric types you can choose from:

• Achieved: Yes / No will simply allow you to mark the key result as 'achieved / not achieved'. It works well for qualitative goals.
• Percentage is a great measure for percentage increases of certain targets - an example being 'Increase Revenue by 30%'. You can add a start value '0' and target value '30'.
• Numerical works in a very similar way - the difference being that the outcome is measured as a (whole) number / integer, e.g. 'Win 3 new customers'. Here, 3 would be the target value. 
• Currency is again similar - but here the goal is a financial value.

Key Result Options

There are further options to set for each key result. By clicking on the setting icon behind the key result name you can select an individual owner of the key result as well as a weight (a percentage figure). In addition to that, you can also add a deadline and description.

Please note: If weight is set, the key result will receive that weight in the calculation of the overall progress of the goal. 

You can read more on progress calculation here.

Initiatives

In addition to key results (defining how progress is measured), you can also add initiatives, that are defining what needs to be done to achieve the objective. They are added almost exactly like key results, which means that they can also have owners, descriptions, metrics, or deadlines.

Please note: Initiatives don’t influence the overall progress of the goal.

You can change the order of your initiatives by drag and drop. 

Deadline

The optional deadline is the date by which the goal should be achieved. If you add a deadline, you will be able to sort goal lists by due date.

Parent Goal

If you want, you can set a parent goal for your new goal. This will link your new goal to another goal at a higher level. For example, you could link a personal goal to a goal that your team is trying to achieve. Defining a parent goal will link your goals in the Goal tree and help you to visualize how different goals impact each other.

Link to Skill 

If the goal is a personal development goal, you have the option to link it to a skill. This way employees can tie their goals back to any improvement area that previous performance reviews have shown. If you set up the goals as managed goals (goals that need to be approved by a manager), they can also be assessed in the next performance review. You can find out more about Development Goals here.