Does your company have overarching goals that you’d like employees to align with? We’ve shipped some neat improvements to our objectives module that will help you.

Improved alignment

We added categories and ratings to objective cycles last week. This allows for lean objective alignment towards your quarterly company goals: When employees are creating objectives, they’ll now be able to tie in those objectives with specific quarterly company goals.

For instance, if your Q3 company mission is “Reduce Customer Churn” and “Improve Conversion Rate” you can set up these categories in your Q3 objective cycle, thus helping people rally behind those goals. In Q4 your company focus might change, you’d then set up categories such as “Improve Support Efficiency” and “Christmas Revenue Drive” for your Q4 cycle.

To ensure that personal development goals are also covered, just add a category like “Personal Growth” to each cycle.

You’ll find the new settings in the cycle-create/edit dialog. Take a look at the improved documentation screen for more details and watch it in action below:

More relevant analytics

The improved categorization also makes the analytics screen more relevant. Check out the screenshot on which we’ve drilled into people whose objectives are aligned with the goal “Reduce Churn”:

Global presets

Until last week it was only possible to define categories and ratings globally, e.g. across all objective cycles and their objectives. The global settings screens are still there, but they now only define the rating/category defaults during cycle creation. So you can make any changes you like to the global presets, and they won’t affect existing cycles nor objectives anymore, they will merely guide you (or other admins) during cycle creation.

The Road Ahead

This is a welcome improvement to the objectives module, but more is in the pipeline. We’ll soon start beta-testing a new navigation concept that makes objectives a lot more accessible to everyone, and we’ll also provide an activity stream that helps you notice changes to objectives easily. Are you interested in participating in the beta program? Sign up for the beta program and attend our upcoming webinar on that matter.