This article will guide you through the available features for Objectives in Small Improvements, explaining how each feature can help your team track progress and achieve goals more effectively. Understanding these options will empower you to tailor Objective settings to best suit your organization's unique needs.
How to Customize Objective Features
To access and customize your Objective features, you will typically need administrator permissions.
Navigate to Objective Settings:
From your Small Improvements dashboard, go to the Admin section.
Look for Objectives or Goals in the navigation menu and select it.
Find the Compose Objective Features section.
Enable or Disable Features:
You will see a list of features with checkboxes next to them.
To enable a feature, check the box next to its name.
To disable a feature, uncheck the box.
Use the pencil icon to customize the Category or Ratings further.
Understanding Each Objective Feature
Here's a breakdown of each feature you can enable or disable, along with how it can benefit your objective-setting process:
Cascading Objectives
Description: This feature allows objectives to be linked hierarchically, so that higher-level objectives (e.g., company or team objectives) can be supported by individual objectives. See here for more in-depth info on using this specific feature.
Why it Matters: Cascading objectives are crucial for ensuring organization-wide alignment. They help everyone understand how their individual contributions tie into larger strategic goals, fostering a sense of shared purpose and ensuring efforts are channeled effectively. This helps align goals across teams and reduce admin time.
Key Results
Description: This feature allows individuals to define a checklist of specific, measurable Key Results that an objective should achieve.
Why it Matters: Key Results provide a clear roadmap for how an objective will be accomplished. They help break down large goals into actionable steps, making progress easier to track and celebrate. This ensures alignment on what success looks like.
Status
Description: The Status feature lets you indicate the current progress of an objective (e.g., "On Track," "At Risk," "Achieved"). You can customize the names and colors of these statuses to match your organizational terminology.
Why it Matters: Statuses offer a quick, at-a-glance overview of objective health. They help teams identify objectives that need attention and provide a standardized way to communicate progress across the organization.
Advanced Options
These features offer more detailed ways to categorize, assess, and prioritize objectives. You can enable them as needed to suit your team's specific tracking requirements.
Category
Description: The Category feature enables the grouping of objectives by various classifications (e.g., "Company," "Team," "Individual," "Product Development," "Sales").
Why it Matters: Categorizing objectives helps organize and filter them, making it easier to find relevant goals and understand their alignment with broader organizational initiatives. This improves clarity and reporting.
Rating
Description: When enabled, the Rating feature allows managers or staff to indicate how well they believe an objective was met using a defined rating scale.
Why it Matters: Ratings provide a formal way to assess objective achievement at the end of a cycle. They can be used to inform performance conversations and provide valuable data for organizational goal-setting in future cycles.
Completion Percentage
Description: This feature allows people to update a percentage to track progress over time towards the objective's completion.
Why it Matters: Completion Percentage offers a quantitative measure of progress, providing a clear visual indicator of how far along an objective is. This can be particularly useful for ongoing objectives or those with a clear, measurable endpoint.
Weighting
Description: The Weighting feature allows individuals to indicate how much importance or effort should be given to each individual objective in their list. For example, a critical objective might be weighted at 50%, while a smaller one is 10%.
Why it Matters: Weighting helps prioritize objectives when an individual or team has multiple goals. It communicates which objectives are most critical and helps allocate focus and resources effectively. This feature ensures that the most impactful work receives the necessary attention.
Tip: We recommend starting small. Turn on only the features that clearly add value to your team's objective-setting and tracking process. You can always add more features as your needs evolve. This approach helps reduce complexity and and ensures a smooth adoption.