Creating & Editing Goals
You can set up Company goals and objectives by going to Goals -> Configure -> Goal Items
This screen will show you all the individual company specific goals that you have set up for your employees, including what type of goal it is, how many times it has been used (assigned) to an employee, whether the goal is currently included in any templates, and also whether it is active or not.
To add a new goal, just click the ' Add New Goal' button. You can also edit or delete existing goals, but please be aware that you cannot delete goals that are actively in use by employees right now.
Please note that this button allows you to add company goals that can be re-used across multiple employees. If you wanted to set up a specific employee goals for a particular employee, then there is another way to do this as described below.
Adding/Editing Goals
When adding or editing a company goal, here are the fields that you will be asked to complete:
Here is an explanation for each field:
| Description | This is a short description of the goal that will always be shown on the goal list, and can be clicked on to update the goal. Make it something short and meaningful to describe the basic outcome required. |
| Comments | This is a longer form description of the goal which will be hidden initially, but can be expanded when looking at the goal. Please note that this comment is visible to the employee, so be sure to include extra information here like what they need to do to accomplish this goal, or reasons behind why they need to complete it. |
| Type | This determines how the goal progress will be measures. The available types are:
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| Due Deadline | You can set a specific deadline as to when the goal will need to be completed by (e.g. end of month, end of year, a specific date) and the system will calculate the deadline when assigning to your employee. You can also opt NOT to have a deadline, which will make the goal 'open ended' and never expiring if you needed to. |
| Default Target Value | For Number, Currency and Counter type goals, you can set a target that the employee progress will be measured against. This is the default target for this company goal, and don't worry, you can change the target later after it has been assigned to your employees, so you can in fact have different targets for the same goal for different employees. |
| Employee can exceed | This flag determines whether your employees can exceed the above target. In some cases, once the target is achieved, the goal can be marked 'Completed' and no more progress is needed, but sometimes, like for a sales target, you might want the employee to push past the set target to see how far they can go. |
| Goal active | This is a flag to determine if the goal is currently active. Only active goals can be assigned and monitored by employees. |
| Employee can update | This flag determines whether the employee can actually update their progress on this goal. In most cases, you WILL want your employee to update their own goals, but you might have a case where only admin users can update goals based on information they have, so you wouldn't want your employees to update the goal progress themselves. |
| Employee can edit | This flag determines whether the employee can edit their pre-set Target and Due Deadline. In most cases, you wouldn't want your employees doing this (only admin user should do so), but there could be certain circumstances where you might want to give your employees more freedom to manage their goal scopes. |
| Admin user can update | This flag determines if an admin user can make updates to this goal progress. Generally, you would want this, but you may have a certain goal that only the employee can/should update, so you might not want admin users making changes that might upset the employee. |
| Goal visible | This flag determines if the employee can actually see this goal on their portal. You might have a company specific goal you are measuring that you only wanted the admins to update and the employee not to be able to even see, in which case you should hide this goal from the employee to prevent confusion. NOTE: Please ensure that you set up the other permissions above to allow admins to edit this goal, and employees not to be able to, otherwise nobody will be able to update goal progress! |
Once you have set up all the above fields, you can click ' Save' to save this goal to the main list of Goal Items.
Creating Goal Templates
Goal templates are basically a way of grouping goals together. The reason for doing this is so that we can deploy a package of multiple goals to employees at once, which is quicker than doing them one by one.
This can be useful if, say, your Sales team has a set of common goals to achieve, and your Operations team may have a different set (but with some common goals between the two teams).
To set up your goal templates, just go to Goals -> Configure -> Templates
You will see a list of goal templates here, and you can click ' Add Goal Template' to add a new one, or you can edit or delete existing templates.
You can drag and drop any existing Goal Item that you created previously from the right hand column to the left hand column to add it to the goal template. Similarly, you can drag from the left to the right to remove an item from the template.
There is no limit to the number of goal templates that you can create.
Creating Employee Specific Goals
The process at the top of this page describes how you can create a company goal that can be reused among many employees, but sometimes you might want to create a goal specifically for one employee to track something unique to only themselves and no one else. To do this, you will need to pick the employee from your employee list, and go to their ' View Employee' page, then click the 'Goals & Objectives' option from the employee module menu:
This will show you all the goals already assigned to this employee. To assign or create a brand new goal for them, you can click the 'Add Goal' button, and choose one of the following options:
The options are:
- Add Pre-Defined Goal - This allows you to choose a previously created company goal to assign to this employee
- Add Goals From Template - This allows you to choose a template to mass assign multiple company goals to this employee at once
- Create A New Goal - This allows you to create a brand new employee specific goal on the fly
When you create a new employee goal, you will get this pop up window where you can specify the goal parameters:
As you can see, these are very similar options to creating a company goal, but there are less flags to set as there are automatic restrictions around employee goals that make some permissions obsolete.
When viewing the list of goals assigned to an employee, we do differentiate then with a little grey tag as to whether it is a Company or Employee goal.