A goal survives the year when four things are recorded with it: the date the period opens, an owner who accepted it, a stated measure, and a check-in cadence somebody is actually reminded about. Goals set in January with a December due date and nothing else are abandoned by March, and the reason is usually mechanical rather than cultural.
Acas advises that objectives should be fair and reflect the employee's usual tasks and workload, and recommends SMART objectives. That is the drafting standard. What follows is what has to be true about the record for those objectives to still be in use in the autumn.
The date the period opens
A due date alone cannot answer the question that comes up every review season: was this goal set for this year? A goal created in November with a March due date and a goal carried over from last year look identical once the year turns.
Our goals carry a period start as well as a due date, for exactly that reason. Goals are set at the opening of a cycle and measured at the close, and both ends of that span have to be on the record for either to mean anything.
Say what kind of goal it is
Three kinds of goal get filed in the same list and carry very different consequences.
A routine business objective is a target to hit. A development goal builds capability and should feed development conversations rather than a rating. An objective on a performance improvement plan carries an employment consequence.
We keep that as its own field, separate from whether the goal is done. Lifecycle answers the question of whether it is finished. Category answers the question of what it is for, and the second one decides how the goal may be used.
The improvement plan case is the one that needs the separation most. Acas advises trying to resolve performance problems informally first, and describes an improvement plan as specific objectives, a reasonable timeline, and any further support or training the person needs. An objective written under that heading should be identifiable as such on the record, because months later somebody will need to know which it was.
An owner who accepted it
A goal assigned to someone who never agreed to it is a note in a manager's file.
Our approval loop runs in both directions. An employee can propose a goal, which sits as pending until their line manager approves or declines it with a note. A declined goal that the employee edits resubmits itself as pending rather than dying quietly. Goals a manager creates are approved as written.
The record also stores who assigned each goal, which matters more in a matrix organisation than it sounds. Several managers assign work independently and none of them sees the total. A field naming the assigner is what lets a second manager see that someone has already loaded this person up before adding to the pile.
People can also declare their own capacity on their record, in their own words, as open, at capacity or overloaded. It blocks nothing. It informs whoever is about to assign the next thing, and the only person who knows the real answer in a matrix org is the person doing the work.
A measure, and one canonical number
Goals get measured in different currencies: a percentage, a raw number, an amount of money, a milestone, a yes or no, or a written judgement. We record the measure type and the target value, and keep a single progress figure from 0 to 100 as the canonical measure everywhere else.
One number that every report reads beats six ways of expressing completion that nobody can aggregate. The measure type is there so the check-in form asks the right question, and so a check-in can derive progress from the value against the target when both are present.
A cadence somebody is reminded about
Every goal records how often its owner intends to check in: weekly, monthly or quarterly. A daily job reads those cadences and nudges owners whose window has elapsed.
This is the least glamorous part of the design and the one that decides whether the other three matter. A goal with a perfect measure and no reminder is updated twice a year, both times in the week before a review.
Keep the change history
Every change to a goal is recorded as its own event: created, status, progress, title, description, category, approval, removed, each with the old value, the new value, who made the change and when, stamped with the year and quarter.
That history is what turns a review conversation from two recollections into one record. A goal that went from 20 to 90 percent in the last fortnight of the year reads very differently from one that moved every month, and only the event trail shows the difference.
Where goals meet the review
Goals can be linked to the cycle they were set in and to a department or company target they claim to contribute to. Both links are optional, and both are worth making, because they are what let a manager answer the question of what their team's goals added up to.
One limit holds throughout. Goal attainment is evidence in a review, and a named person decides what it means for a rating, for pay or for anything else. Acas notes that the process for deciding performance-related pay should be fair and objective and must avoid less favourable treatment because of a protected characteristic. A percentage complete is an input to that judgement, never a substitute for it.
How to run an appraisal cycle end to end covers the phase that opens goal setting and the one that reads it back. Key person risk: the roles only one person can do covers the development goals worth setting against a role nobody else can cover.
Answered here.
- Why do employee goals stop being used after the first quarter?
- Usually because they were recorded with a due date and nothing else. Without a start date you cannot tell which period a goal belongs to, without an accepted owner nobody is committed to it, without a stated measure progress is a guess, and without a check-in cadence no one is reminded to update it.
- Should a development goal and a business target sit in the same list?
- They can sit in the same list as long as the record knows which is which. A routine business objective, a development goal and an objective on a performance improvement plan carry different consequences, and an improvement plan objective in particular needs to be identifiable rather than blended into a general list.
- Who should set an employee's goals?
- Either side can propose, and the manager decides. In Unframed HR an employee can propose a goal that sits as pending until their line manager approves or declines it with a note, and a declined goal that is edited resubmits itself. Goals a manager creates are approved as they are written.
- How many goals should one person have?
- Few enough that each one gets a real check-in. The practical constraint in a matrix organisation is that several managers assign work independently and none of them sees the total, which is why the record should show who assigned each goal.