Rolling out Goals

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So you decided you want your employees to begin setting goals!  You know that goals will help you remain agile, adapt to shifting priorities and form a crucial component of your performance process as employees update and complete these over the course of the year.  Excellent, the article below is designed to provide advice on how to roll out goals to your organisation and the resources you will need.

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What Resources are You Providing

• Video Introduction to Goals
• Quick-Start Guide (in-app)
• Template goals email
• Example Performance Process Diagram

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The Preparation

1. Review the goal categories currently on your platform.  By default, these will include Strategic, Operational and Personal.  If you wish to amend these categories so they are in your language or represent the types of goals you want employees to set the options can be changed by navigating to Settings >> Goal Categories >>Edit.

2. Depending on the size of your organisation set aside some time to meet as either an entire business or as a leadership team.  Work out what your 'Company Mountain' is (e.g. Shareholder Customer Value).  What is the overarching goal your business will be working towards over the next period and how can this be broken down into smaller strategic goals aligned to different areas/departments in your organisation (e.g. Customer satisfaction, procurement spend, overhead costs).  From this starting point, each department and in turn employee can begin creating goals aligned to the strategic direction of the business.

3. Ensure all the employees you wish to be logging goals have a user account and are able to access the intelliHR platform.

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The Roll-Out

1. Decide when you want to roll out goals to your employees.  We have found this often works well when introducing a new performance process or alternatively during the beginning of a quarter.

2. Communicate with employees that they will soon be asked to log into intelliHR and log their goals for the coming period.  Include the short video guide provided in the resources above.  Make sure to include a time frame for the creation of goals and emphasise the pivotal role they will play in ongoing performance.  It will also be beneficial to reference your company mountain and what was identified as the organisation's strategic direction.

Template Email:

We've been using our People Management system intelliHR for a while now and we're excited to start the next phase of our use.  As part of our improved and cut down development process we will be asking you to record your goals on the platform, you can edit, amend and tick off these goals at any time and the real kicker is that these will pull through in real-time to a summary of our performance as a business helping us offer help when needed and make sure that everything we do is aligned to our success as a business.  This feature will make work life better for everyone. Some of the things we're really looking forward to are:

• The ability to align your goals to those of your department and those of the business.
• Quick and easy communication between managers and team members regarding progress towards their goals. 
• No double-entry come review time as completed and active goals will pull through to your performance report in real-time.
• Flexibility to add new goals and edit current goals to pivot in line with the business and your role.
• It's all online, so you can access it by computer or on your phone

Over the next two weeks, you will be sitting down with your manager to discuss your goals for the coming quarter.  Please ensure you have added your goals for the next quarter by [dd/mm/yyyy].  Here's a little video to explain more about goals and how to record them on the platform.

3. (Optional) Depending on how familiar your employees are with intelliHR focus groups and small training sessions can be a good way to set aside times for individual departments/areas of the business to enter their goals onto intelliHR.  If employing this step we recommend that this takes place after the employee has discussed goals with their manager and is aware that they should be bringing smart goals to the session as this will be based around entering goals onto the platform rather than deciding on the goals they wish to record.

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Ensuring Goals Remain Relevant

The default monthly check-in on your intelliHR platform prompts the employee to provide an update on their goals.  However, if you do not wish to use the monthly check-in we suggest automating a form to employees on, at least, a quarterly basis for employees to provide an update on their goals and meet with their manager.  This time can be spent discussing the goals and if any changes need to be made to the action items, direction or due dates to ensure they remain relevant and manageable for the employee.  By including a link to the performance report within form the link between goals and ongoing performance will be further reinforced. 

Example performance process including Goals:

To access an interactive version of the process described below please click on the image.

Tip: The biggest obstacle to employees setting meaningful goals on intelliHR is not a lack of knowledge of how to do this on the system but rather not knowing what those goals should be.  We recommend setting aside some time as a business/department depending on the size of your organisation to sit down with employees and work out both the goals and specific action items/targets they can work towards that are aligned with the business goals.  Goals will always require an initial investment of time to be truly meaningful but understanding, where their goals fit in the bigger picture, leads to greater motivation and a higher adoption rate when using goals.