Good personal development objectives
Once you have collected your 360 degree feedback or run your performance review, it's time to define new objectives and start working towards them. While you're at it, share your objectives to inspire others, and check out other people's objectives to learn from them! By the time the next performance review comes around you'll have a neat collection of your objectives, your notes and your progress available.
Setting up your own objectives
Just click the "Objectives" menu item on the left. You will see all the objectives for the current quarter (or year, or month, depending on your company's defaults). It will look like this:
Click the "Create" button to add an objective, or edit one. You can only do this within the time frame defined by your HR staff though. At a certain point in time the objectives get locked down, and you can only comment on the objective, but not change the core objective data anymore.
Hint: Writing good objectives is easy if you follow the SMART formula. Make your objectives Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Although it sounds like just another acronym, SMART is actually easy to understand and very useful to follow. Click here to learn more.
Change the status of your objective
Are you done with your objective? Let your manager know by changing the status of the objective. You can change the status when editing the objective, or by simply clicking the status in the list:A dropdown opens up, letting you change the status of the objective really easily.
Objective visibility: Sharing with others
In Small Improvements, there are three main visibility levels for objectives:
- Public : shared with everyone in the organization
- Protected: only visible to you and your manager(s), and to HR (unless they report to you)
- Private: only visible to yourself
When you create a new objective the visibility dropdown defaults to "protected", so it is only visible to you and your manager. This prevents you from accidentally sharing too much information. But we encourage you to share objectives publicly so you can get insight from others.
Note: People with HR permission can see protected objectives in general, but not for anyone the HR person reports to, either directly or indirectly.
In addition to these core levels, you can share your objective with arbitrary people! You could make an objective "protected" so it's shared with your manager, and additionally grant access to one of your peers, or a manager from another team. You'll find a light-grey link next to the main visibility dropdown:
Why share at all?
Admittedly, some objectives may be difficult to share. You wouldn't want the sales department to know that you intend to "Improve the relationship with the arrogant sales department". This should really just be between you and your manager, and your manager may want to help you channel your frustration into something more positive before word gets out!
