Objectives & Key Results

This guide covers setting goals and tracking measurable progress against them.

Purpose

A goal that can't be measured is hard to review fairly. This answers: "What is this person working toward, and how close are they?"

Objectives

An objective is a goal — a title, a description, a duration, and one or more key results that define what success looks like. It's created with one or more assignees; each assignee gets their own independent, trackable copy of that objective, so progress on one person's copy never affects another's.

An objective can also be created without going through a company-wide template — directly for a single employee, ad hoc.

Key Results

A key result is a measurable target attached to an objective — tracked as a percentage, a plain number, or a currency amount, moving from a starting value toward a target value. Progress on a key result is expressed as a percentage of that target, and an objective's overall progress is the average of all its key results' progress.

Updating any key result automatically recalculates its parent objective's progress — nothing needs to be manually recomputed.

Updating Progress

Progress and status (On Track, Behind, At Risk, Closed, Not Started) can be updated by:

• The objective's assigned managers.
• Anyone holding the relevant administrative permission.
• The employee themselves — if the objective is configured to allow it, which it does by default.

A key result automatically closes itself out once its current value reaches its target.

What Each User Sees

Action	Employee	Reporting Manager	HR Administrator
View their own objectives	✅	✅	✅
Update their own progress (if allowed)	✅	✅	✅
View their team's objectives	—	✅	✅
View every objective company-wide	—	—	✅
Create an objective and assign it	—	✅	✅
Add or remove assignees	—	✅	✅

How Visibility Is Decided

1. Being the assignee. An employee can always see their own copy of an objective, and update it if self-progress-updating is allowed.
2. Being an assigned manager. Whoever manages the objective can see and update every assignee's copy.
3. The reporting line. Without a broader "view all" permission, a manager sees their team's objectives, following the standard manager-hierarchy visibility used across the system.
4. Permissions. Broad permissions grant company-wide visibility and management.

Customization Options

• Duration is set per objective, in days, months, or years.
• Self progress updates can be turned off per objective, for goals that should only be assessed by a manager.
• Key results can be reused across multiple objectives from a shared library, rather than redefined each time.

Good to Know

• An objective is a template; the tracked record is per person. Editing the objective's assignee list adds or removes individual tracking records — it doesn't change a shared, single progress figure.
• Progress is a simple average across key results, not weighted — an objective with one easy key result and one hard one treats them equally when calculating overall progress.
• Comments can be left on an objective as a running log of context, separate from formal feedback.

Progress you can actually see.