Creating a new goal / OKR

To view the self-guided tour below in full screen, click the fullscreen button at the top right corner. Then, click on the self-guided tour itself for step-by-step instructions.

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 Goals 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 '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:

Individual goals owned by you (completely private) allow 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. However, if you add contributors to your private goal, they will also have visibility.
Individual goals owned by you (approved by your 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.
Individual 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.
Individual 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 to 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. To assign a goal to an entire company, type your organization's name in the 'Owner' field.

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. By default, contributors cannot edit goal settings unless edit access is enabled through admin settings.

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.

Contributors

Similarly to goals, you can add contributors to Key Results. Contributors can always see and update the key results. 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 Result Options

There are further options to set for each key result. By clicking on the three dots next to 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.

Initiatives

In addition to key results (defining how progress is measured), you can also add initiatives, that define 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.

Initiatives can be added to both Goals as well as Key results.

Please note: Initiatives don’t influence the overall progress of the goal, unless you enable "dynamic progress calculation" on the key result level.

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 visualize how different goals impact each other.

Link to a competency

If the goal is a personal development goal, you have the option to link it to a competency. 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.

Goals & AI

At Leapsome, you can now create goals with the help of artificial intelligence. To enable AI in your Goals module, please navigate to 'Settings' > 'Company' > 'AI Features' > enable 'Goals: Suggest key results and initiatives' and click 'Update settings'.

With the assistance of AI, give your goal a title to receive suggestions for your key results. Please note: the title must contain at least 10 characters for AI to start working.

Click the button 'Get AI Suggestions' next to Key Results - in about 15 seconds, you will see a pop-up window with automatically generated KR suggestions. You can pick and choose which ones suit you best by ticking the boxes off.

Bulk Goal Creation and Assignment

If you or your organization has a process where you wish to create the same goal but assign it individually to different users or members of specific teams, you have the option to create and assign goals in bulk using the Goals module.

Simply go to 'Goals' > 'All goals' > find the goal you'd like to replicate > click on the three vertical dots, which gives you the option to 'Bulk copy and assign'.

If you select a specific team, this goal will be replicated for each team member, and each member will be assigned as goal owner. Details of the original goal like Title, Description, Key Results and Initiatives will all be copied to each individual goal.

Goal approval

If you are a manager, you will find a separate section on your Home Dashboard titled 'Approvals'. In here, you will find all the non-private goals of your team members that need to be reviewed and approved by you.

To approve or reject a goal, you can hover over the goal and click the green checkmark (to approve) or a red circle 'x' (to reject). Alternatively, click on the goal to either reject or approve.

You will also be able to check the goal approval flow to know which employees are responsible for the approval flow.

When creating an approval flow in admin settings, you can enable the setting 'Enable implicit approval'. If enabled, any steps in the approval flow that can be approved by the person requesting the approval, will be automatically approved. For example, if Goal Creation requires manager approval, and the manager is creating the goal on behalf of their direct report, the goal will be automatically approved.

Please note:

If a goal is rejected, it is sent back into draft mode so the employee can make relevant changes and submit the goal for approval again.
If the approval configuration steps are changed by a system admin while a connected approval process instance is still in progress, Leapsome updates all approval flows using the configuration and resets the progress of the approval instance back to the first step.
If the linked goal proposal is changed while the approval process is still in progress, Leapsome also resets the progress of the approval instance and starts the approval from scratch.
If a user is deactivated, they can no longer approve a goal. The deactivated user will be replaced in all approval steps with an active super-admin. If the super-admin is already an approver in the process, the alternative would be the manager of the user.
If an approval flow is created - Super-Admins will also be involved in it. However, if there are no relevant approvers (for example, the admin themselves is the only approver), the change is auto-approved in that case.

Articles in this section

Table of Contents:

Introduction