Cascading goals

Peter Williams

Updated 19 September 2023 13:29

Introduction

Yomly Performance Management provides you with a flexible goal management service. You can track goals over time. Goals can be of any arbitrary unit and are designed to provide continuous feedback to employees.

The goals within Yomly conform to the standard S.M.A.R.T definition. A SMART goal has the following characteristics:

Smart goals are designed for constant review and to change behaviours in the daily timeframe, rather than for revisit only at the time of a performance review. In fact, many goals might never be formally reviewed, and employees can set goals for themselves to help in time management.

Goals also have a social element. An employee can use the goal system to communicate directly with the person who assigned them the goal, for mentoring, or to acquire feedback during goal execution.

Is a goal a KPI?

Not always, but occasionally.

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a specific measurement that helps quantify how well an employee has achieved a portion of their job responsibilities. Many organizations set up KPIs to be part of the job definition, and they are not time-bound as such. Some organizations even use imprecise wording, which allows multiple interpretations. A goal is much more direct than a KPI.

If used correctly, a KPI can be converted to a series of goals that will help achieve the KPI. These goals can vary over time based on the challenges faced by the employee and environment changes. KPIs are largely static, but goals constantly change. New goals can be added and two employees with the same KPI might have different goals. Goals are much more targeted in nature.

Assigning Goals

Yomly introduces a new concept to Performance Management; assignee groups. Assignee groups are a shorthand way of assigning goals without having to perform specific assignments for individual people. Assignee groups are dynamic, which means that as employees change positions, locations, or progress through the company, they can be added to different assignee groups.

An assignee group is defined as a set of rules. For example, “Everyone in the Sales department”, “Everyone that reports to the CTO”, or “Everyone working in the UAE”. You can nest assignee groups within other assignee groups to allow a truly rich and automated way of assigning goals. Of course, you can still assign a goal to a single person. An assignee group of individual employees can be constructed within the group editor.

Cascading Goals

In the initial version of Performance Management, you could assign a goal to multiple people by assigning the goal to an assignment group. You could create the goal and then assign it to the whole company by simply assigning it to a single assignment group. This is a specific category of what is known as a cascade strategy. Cascade strategies define the part of the total goal value that each assignee receives when the goal is assigned to them.

In the most recent version of Performance Management, we have extended the concept of cascade strategies to automatically assign different amounts of the goal to the different assignees.

We support the following cascade strategies:

Cascade strategy	Description
Previously-available	Each assignee receives a copy of the goal and the target value of the goal is identical for each assignee. You can use this strategy for personal improvement goals, such as “Spend 10% of my time on training” or “Be on time for work 90% of the time”.
Fair	Every assignment group member receives a target, which is the simple division of the target by the number of assignees. For example, if the target is 1000 units and there are 100 people in the assignment group, each assignee receives a target of 10 units.
Fair with adjustment	Every assignment group member receives a target by fair allocation but also adjusted by fixed percentage. This lets you add a % increment to the fair value. For example, you have applied an adjustment of 10%, each assignee receive a target of 11 units.
Hierarchic split	Each level of the organization tree is assigned a weight. The target is first split among the organizational units (OUs), and then the assignees in each OU. This is a complex and powerful cascade strategy.
Hierarchic split with reserve	In addition to a hierarchic split, a fixed % of the target is reserved for an individual member, such as the manager. The remainder is allocated according to the hierarchic split strategy.
Policy-based	Lets you use the policy engine in Yomly to create your own strategy. All built-in strategies follow DMN policies, but you can modify any of them to tailor them to your requirements (by overriding the defaults) or create an entirely new policy (by completing a truth table).

Tracking Cascading Goals

When assigned (published), all goals are specific to individual employees. This is helpful for simple goals that use the duplication strategy. However, the purpose of goal cascades is to create shared goals, which multiple people work together to achieve. Different employees are assigned different parts of the target. However, the aim is achieving the shared goal’s target.

As a manager, if you have have assigned a cascading goal to an employee, you can also view that goal on your goal dashboard. (Managers are responsible for orchestrating the goal’s achievement.) The cascaded goal is displayed with a 3D overlay to indicate that it is made up of other goals.

When cascading goals is enabled, each assigned goal has a reference back to the original cascaded goal. The original goal is assigned to to the creator. Once a day, the values of the individual goals are summed up to the cascaded goal and compared with the target.

The owner of the cascaded goal can drill down, see who is contributing to the goal, and identify areas of improvement.

Remember, you must manage goals frequently and not just during the review period.

A goal cascaded over OUs has a summary goal assigned to the owner of each OU, so they can see how their team is contributing to the goal. This allows devolved management of the goal.

Defining Policies

You can create or change policies using the policy editor. Policies are DMN2-compliant truth tables. People responsible for organizational process management would be readily familiar with working with policies.

Policies take a number of inputs and provide corresponding outputs.

See the following example policy. In this case, the outputs define how to split the goal target.

Publishing a Cascaded Goal

You can differentiate between a normal goal and a cascaded goal by simply selecting the required options in the goal definition menu.

When creating a goal, if you need to configure additional parameters for the selected cascade strategy, the respective dialogues or fields are displayed in the goal definition menu.