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Introduction to Workteam Goal Management

Workteam Goal Management is a tool based on the “Objectives and Key Results” (OKR) principle, which high performing companies like Google and LinkedIn use to help their employees remain highly focused and aligned with the company strategy.

The idea behind the OKR principle is that each employee works with their manager to create and agree a set of OKRs (objectives and key results) that they will aim to achieve during the goal period and that each OKR that is set will align with one of the company’s OKRs.

Each OKR should include at least one key result, which defines the success criteria for the objective. For instance, if the objective is “Increase channel business”, one of the key results might be “At least 4 new channel partners will be signed up” and another key result might be “Monthly channel sales will increase from $3.5m to $4m”.

Goals that employees set themselves should be challenging and not just goals that they know they will achieve. For this reason, Workteam lets employees associate a confidence level with each key result. At the beginning of each goal period, employees will specify their confidence of achieving a particular goal by setting the confidence level appropriately on each key result. With OKR, the idea is to set goals which have a 70% chance of being achieved. Over the course of the goal period, employees will adjust this confidence level to indicate their updated confidence of acheiving each goal.

However, key results may track more than just confidence. Key results may be defined to represent percentage-based outcomes, currency-based outcomes, unit-based outcomes and boolean outcomes. See Key results for more.

At the start of every goal period, once organization goals have been published, each employee will be invited by Workteam to start planning their goals.

Workteam lets employees define personal goals, departmental goals, team goals and, if appropriate, you can also cascade goals to other members of the organization, although the latter is not considered to be “the OKR way”.

Goals should also be aligned to another goal in the organization. This may be a top-level company goal, or it may be a manager’s goal, a team goal or a departmental goal, depending on how Workteam has been configured.

Once goals have been agreed between employee and manager, employees can keep the progress of their goals updated to give their manager a clear indication of the progress and confidence level of achieving each goal. Employees may be prompted to update the status and confidence levels of each goal and key result through a simple weekly check-in feature. Find out more about Workteam check-ins.

At the end of the goal period, employees are prompted to review their goals, where they have the chance to grade themselves and to give a retrospective on how well they feel they achieved the goal. Managers also get a chance to grade employees goals and comment on their retrospective before signing off on the goal period.