Performance
Goal-setting becomes a formality the moment nobody can tell whose goal it was.
A mandatory training item pushed to eight hundred people and a goal somebody chose because it mattered look identical in most systems — same row, same progress bar, same quarterly nudge.
So people stop distinguishing them, and then stop taking any of them seriously.
What a goal carries
More than a title and a percentage.
A category, a weight, a start and a due date, a state, and a health call — on track, at risk, off track — set by the people involved rather than inferred from anything.
And an origin: HR pushed it, a manager set it, or the person wrote it themselves. That is not a label. It changes what each of them is allowed to do with it.
- Complete mandatory compliance trainingHROn track
- Ship the billing migration by Q3ManagerAt risk
- Cut support escalations on my areaOwnOn track
- Mentor one junior through confirmationOwnOff track
- Mandatory is locked downstream —
A goal HR marked mandatory cannot be dropped or cancelled by the employee or by their manager — from the portal, or from anywhere else. The employee sees why, on the goal.
- Only HR can mark one mandatory —
Enforced at the record, so a manager cannot make their own goal undroppable for somebody else.
- Goals hang off other goals —
A goal can point at the one it supports, so why am I doing this is answerable one level up rather than in a slide from January. Reparenting refuses to create a loop.
- The first check-in wakes it up —
A goal somebody has actually started moves out of draft on its own, rather than sitting unstarted because nobody pressed a button.
The order things happen in
Company goals land before personal ones, per person.
In most companies goal-setting opens and everybody writes their own first. The company's priorities arrive a fortnight later into lists that are already full, and get treated as the afterthought they arrived as.
Here, within a review cycle, nobody can add their own goal until HR has pushed theirs to that specific person. Not per cycle — per employee, so a push that missed somebody is visible as a person still waiting rather than as a gap discovered in March.
- Employee A213yes
- Employee B201yes
- Employee C000not until HR pushes
- Employee D220yes
The push itself is safe to repeat: adding a sixth template and pushing again creates the sixth and nothing else. A template you have retired cannot be pushed at all. And it reports what it did — how many goals, from how many templates, to how many people, and who was skipped.
Check-ins
The goal shows the latest number. It keeps all of them.
A check-in records progress, a health call, a note and who wrote it — and it is never edited afterwards. The goal shows the most recent figure; every figure it ever showed is still there with the note that came with it.
So a goal that went off track in month two and recovered by month five reads as exactly that, rather than as a number that happens to be fine now.
- Dropping or cancelling needs a reason —
Which is what makes a quarter's worth of abandoned goals readable rather than embarrassing.
- A manager works the team's goals worst-first —
Off track and stale check-ins at the top, with search and a needs- attention filter — and they can log a check-in on somebody else's goal, or write a goal for a report.
- The review opens on them —
A cycle's self-assessment and manager review load the person's goals and ask them to reflect on each one, so the review starts from what was actually agreed rather than a blank box.
Being exact
It tracks goals. It does not grade them.
Health is set by the people involved. Nothing reads a goal's text and decides whether it is on track, nothing scores goal quality, and nothing rolls weights into a performance rating.
A goal is a sentence about intent written by somebody who knows the context. Grading that from outside produces a confident number about something the product cannot see.
What managers ask
Usually in the week before a cycle opens.
›Can HR push a goal to everybody?
Yes — as a template, across a cycle. Pushing again after adding a template creates only the new one, and a retired template cannot be pushed at all.
›Can somebody quietly drop a mandatory goal?
No. Neither the employee nor their manager can, from any route. That is the difference between recording the origin and enforcing it.
›What if we push a mandatory goal by mistake?
Today that is awkward — the lock that stops a manager dropping it also stops you retiring it mid-cycle. Push deliberately, and raise this with us if it bites.
›Can a goal be added after the cycle has moved on?
No. Once a cycle leaves goal-setting, its goal list is closed. That is the point of a goal-setting window, but it does mean a late joiner needs a goal outside the cycle.
›Does the product decide whether a goal is on track?
No. Health is set by the people involved. Nothing infers it from the text or from activity elsewhere.
›Do the weights add up to anything?
They are recorded, and nothing enforces that they total a hundred or rolls them into a rating. If weighted scoring is how you run, say so — today the weight is context for a human, not arithmetic.
›Can a goal exist outside a review cycle?
Yes. Not every goal belongs to a formal cycle, and forcing that is how goals become an annual ritual.
Book a demo
Open a cycle and try to write your own goal first.
The first step is the one that decides whether company priorities survive goal-setting season.
- Try it before HR has pushed anything — you should be blocked
- Push templates, then add your own
- Try to drop the mandatory one as the employee, then as their manager
- Add two check-ins a month apart and read the history