Creating public objectives fosters a culture of transparency and alignment across your entire organization. When goals are visible to everyone, it encourages cross-departmental collaboration, allows senior leaders to model openness, and ensures that every employee understands how their work fits into the bigger picture.
The value of public personal objectives
While company and group goals are often public by default to aid in cascading, making personal objectives public can significantly impact team culture.
Leading by example
Senior leaders can use public objectives to share what they are focusing on. This creates transparency and trust, showing the rest of the organization that everyone—from the C-suite to new hires—is accountable for growth and results.
Creating invaluable feedback loops
One of the most powerful aspects of public goals is that they are open to input from the entire company. Instead of a goal that lives only between a manager and a direct report, a public objective allows subject-matter experts from other teams to weigh in.
Example: A Marketing Manager sets a goal to "Improve website conversion." A developer sees this and leaves a comment suggesting a technical optimization they’ve been wanting to implement. This creates a feedback loop that improves the quality of the objective itself.
Encouraging collaboration
Public goals act as a conversation starter. If a developer sees a support representative’s goal about "Improving Technical Documentation," they might reach out to offer specific insights, sparking a collaboration that wouldn't have happened behind closed doors.
Building momentum
Seeing a feed of active goals creates a sense of shared purpose. It reminds the team that they are part of a moving, growing organization, which helps drive platform adoption and engagement.
Setting public visibility as an Admin
When you set up a new Objective cycle, you can choose the default visibility. Setting this to Public encourages a culture of "open by default" while still allowing individuals to keep specific objectives protected if necessary.
Navigate to the Administration tab.
Select Objectives and click into the specific cycle you wish to edit.
Under the Visibility section, select Public as the default.
Save your changes.
Note: Even when the default is set to Public, if you allow employees to change visibility, they can still manually switch an individual objective to Private or Protected when handling more sensitive personal information.
Boosting engagement with Slack
To maximize the impact of public objectives, you can integrate Small Improvements with Slack. This pushes real-time updates of public goals into a dedicated channel, making achievements visible where your team already spends their time.
Why use the Slack integration?
Instant Awareness: The whole company (or a specific channel) sees when a new goal is published.
Social Reinforcement: Team members can react with emojis (like the party parrot or a thumbs up) to celebrate a colleague's new initiative.
Reduced Silos: It brings goal-setting out of the "HR tool" and into the daily flow of work.
How to enable Slack notifications for Objectives
Ensure your Slack Integration is active in the Integrations settings.
Navigate to your Objective Cycle settings and locate the Slack Integration section.
Check the box for Post public Objectives to Slack channel.
Select the specific Channel from the dropdown where you would like the notifications to appear.
Click Save at the bottom of the page.
Tip: We recommend creating a specific channel like #goals or #growth so notifications stay organized and don't overwhelm your main general channel.