Objectives¶

An objective states what is to be achieved, how it will be measured and by when. Progress is derived from the measurement rather than typed in as a feeling, and dated check-ins record the story behind the number as it moves.

Objectives are useful on their own, and they are what a review has to talk about if the conversation is going to start from facts. A questionnaire section of the kind Objectives of the period renders exactly the objectives that were in scope when the review opened.

Where they live¶

Performance ‣ Objectives ‣ My Objectives and Performance ‣ Objectives ‣ All Objectives.
The same lists also appear under Employees ‣ Objectives, together with Employees ‣ Objectives ‣ Templates.
Employees ‣ Configuration ‣ Objective Tags for the tags.
Each employee’s form carries an Objectives smart button.

Creating an objective¶

Create a record and give it a Name — a sentence stating the outcome, not the activity.

In Scope, set the Kind:

Kind	Use it for
Objective	The thing to be achieved.
Key Result	A measurable component of an objective. Align it under the objective it belongs to.
Development Goal	Something the person is working on about themselves rather than about the business. It behaves identically; the kind is there so you can report on the two separately.

Then choose the Employees it belongs to. An objective may be assigned to more than one person, which is how a shared team objective works: it appears on each of their lists and there is only one of it.

Follow-up Owners are the people who follow the objective up besides the ones it is assigned to.

In Planning, set the Start Date, the Deadline and, if you want a rhythm, a Checkin Frequency.
In Measurement, choose how the objective is measured — see below.
Use Status on the status bar (On Track, At Risk, Off Track, Achieved, Missed, Cancelled) and Confidence (Low, Medium, High) to say how it is going. Status is a judgement; progress is arithmetic. Both are useful, and they are deliberately not the same field.

Measuring an objective¶

Metric decides what you fill in and how Progress (%) is worked out:

Metric	What you fill in	How progress is worked out
Done / Not Done	Current Value	100% as soon as the current value is anything other than zero, 0% otherwise.
Percentage	Current Value	The current value itself, kept between 0 and 100.
Number	Start Value, Target Value, Current Value, Unit	How far the current value has travelled from the start towards the target, as a percentage, kept between 0 and 100.
Amount	The same, plus a Currency	As for Number.

Direction says which way is good. With Increase, progress rises as the current value climbs from the start towards the target; with Decrease, it rises as the value falls. That is what makes “cut the scrap rate from 4% to 1.5%” a first-class objective rather than something you have to invert by hand.

Note

For Number and Amount, the target has to differ from the start value. An objective whose target equals its start cannot be measured, and saving it is refused.

Alignment, and why it is not roll-up¶

Aligned To points an objective at another one. That is a statement about meaning: this objective exists in order to serve that one. It builds the alignment tree, it lets you group and report along it, and it costs nothing — the parent’s progress is unaffected.

Roll Up Children is a statement about arithmetic: when it is ticked, the objective stops computing its own measurement and takes the weighted average of the objectives aligned under it instead, using each child’s Weight. An objective that rolls up with no children sits at 0%.

Important

Align freely; roll up sparingly. Alignment describes how the work fits together, which is almost always worth recording. Roll-up hands your number to somebody else’s data quality: a parent that rolls up is only as honest as the children under it, and a child nobody checks in on drags a whole department’s figure down without anybody noticing.

An objective cannot be aligned to one of the objectives aligned under it; a cycle is refused.

Who can see an objective¶

Visibility decides who reaches an objective:

Visibility	Who reaches the objective
Everybody	Every colleague in the company may read it.
Employee and Management Line	The employees it is assigned to, their line managers and its follow-up owners. This is the default.
Employee Only	The employees it is assigned to. Neither the line manager nor the follow-up owners reach it.

HR officers reach every objective whatever this says.

Employee Only is the setting to use for a development goal about a personal difficulty. Note that it excludes the line manager, which is usually the point, and that HR still reaches it.

Check-ins¶

A check-in states where an objective stands on a given date, how confident its owner is, and why. It is what turns a percentage into something the next review can actually talk about.

Open the objective and click Check In.
Enter the Date, the New Value the objective reached, and your Confidence.
Under What happened, write what moved, what is in the way, and what happens next.

Recording a check-in writes the new value and the confidence back onto the objective, stores a snapshot of the resulting progress on the check-in itself, and logs the change. The history is on the Check-ins page of the objective and behind its Check-ins smart button.

Keeping the rhythm¶

Checkin Frequency (No Reminder, Weekly, Every Two Weeks, Monthly) sets Next Checkin Date from the last check-in, or from the start date when there has not been one yet.

There is no nagging job behind this. “Stale” is simply a filter: the Needs a Check-in filter in the search view lists every objective whose next check-in date has arrived. Combine it with My Team to prepare a one-to-one, or with Late — deadline passed, not achieved and not cancelled — before a cycle launch.

Tip

The reason this matters at review time: an objective with monthly check-ins produces twelve dated facts a year. An objective with none produces one argument in December.

Templates and bulk assignment¶

When the same objective goes to many people, write it once as a template.

Go to Employees ‣ Objectives ‣ Templates and create a record, or tick Is Template on an existing one.
A template carries no employees — that is enforced. It is the shared wording, not somebody’s objective.
Build the tree under it if you want key results to come with it.
Use Instantiate Objective Template, choose the Employees, and optionally override Start Date and Deadline (leave them empty to keep the dates on the template).
Include Aligned Objectives also copies the objectives aligned under the template and aligns each copy under the copy of the template.
Keep Link to Template records on every new objective which template it came from, so the instances of one template can be reported on together.

Each selected employee gets their own copy. They can then be measured, checked in on and closed independently, which is what you want: one shared record with fifteen owners cannot say that eleven of them are on track.

Note

A template is explicit, never inferred. An ordinary objective that happens to have lost its employees does not quietly become a template.

Who can do what¶

An employee creates and edits the objectives assigned to them, and records their own check-ins.
A line manager, and anybody named as a follow-up owner, does the same for the objectives of the people they manage — except for the ones marked Employee Only.
Nobody but HR can delete an objective. Set its status to Cancelled instead; the record of what was agreed and then dropped is usually worth more than a clean list.
HR officers reach everything.