Within Natural HR, you can allocate goals to employees which act as tasks which they will be required to complete. 

Once allocated, an employee will be able to log in to their self-service accounts and update their progress on the goal as well as enter comments.

Goals settings 

Depending on your configuration you may need to enable goals to be able to use them.

If you go to:

Administration -> Company -> Settings -> Display Settings

In the modules section, you should first ensure that you have ticked 'Performance'.

Once ticked, under Performance Modules ensure that you have ticked 'Goals'. 

On the same page, there is an additional setting that determines how employees can interact with the goals module. Towards the bottom of the page under 'Employee views' there is an option for 'Goals visible to employees' which has three choices:

• No
• Yes - view only
• Yes - employees can update
• Yes - employees can add and update

Under Performance Management, there is another setting called 'Performance goal system' that determines how updates for goals are stored titled Performance goal system. Which can be found if you go to:

Administration -> Company -> Settings -> Company Settings

The default option (Standard) is that the employee and manager each have an open text box into which they write their comments. Using this method the employee or manager can either append their most recent comments onto the end of the current comments or they can overwrite those previous comments and replace with the current or new comment.

The alternate option (Incremental) treats each comment as a separate entity and records the person who made the comment, the date and then saves the comment in history so you can see the current and all previous updates and comments:

Goal categories and options

When adding a goal for an employee you can set the category as well as goal options.

Goal category allows you to determine if the goal being set is a 'Developmental' goal or a 'KPI'. Typically a developmental goal will be one that is subjective in nature - improve a skill, gain more knowledge, get better at something whereas a KPI will typically be specifically target based such as sell £1000 of widgets, make 100 calls and so on.

In either case, when you are adding the goal you will need to choose the Goal options.

These options are the mechanism by which the employee progress will get tracked against the goal and will determine what options are displayed to the employee and manager when adding an update or indicating progress.

The options are:

• Default - this uses the default options of Behind, On Track, At risk, Completed and Inactive
• 1 to 5 - dropdown with options for 1 to 5
• 1 to 10 - dropdown with options for 1 to 10
• Percentage - this will present a blank text box into which you can enter a number
• Target - this allows you to enter a target value that the employee is working towards
• List - this allows you to specify your own option values which should be entered with a comma between each option such as Gold, Silver, Bronze. These will then be displayed as a dropdown options list with your choices in the list.

Show goal progress on employee home screen

If you choose 1 to 5, 1 to 10 or Percentage for the Goal option above you can optionally choose to display progress against these type of goals on the employee home page in self service. Please note: this gets displayed to the right of the Upcoming Events section which is shifted to only fit on half of the screen:

How to allocate goals to employees 

If you go to:

People -> Employees

Select the 'Goals' icon on the employee file and you will be able to add a goal to an employee. 

 Select 'Add' at the bottom of the table.

The visibility section at the bottom of the form dictates whether this goal is visible to the employee or not. If this is set to private managers and HR users will be able to see the goal but the employee will not, whereas setting this to public will allow the employee to see the goal and their progress.

The employee will then be able to update the status field and return any comments back to the manager to keep you updated with their progress. 

Once a goal has been completed it can be archived; archiving a goal will retain the record but move it away from the active list (accessed through the Goals icon on the employee card). 

To archive a goal, select the actions button followed by Archive 

To view archived goals, select the 'Archived' button on the Goal Library - any goals which have been sent to the archive will then appear in this section. 

You now have the option to allow managers to edit certain properties of a goal such as the goal name and description. To enable this option, tick the 'Edit performance goals' tick box of the manager views section in the company display settings

 Administration -> Company -> Settings -> Display Settings

With this enabled, managers can click the edit pencil of the goal to change these additional parts of the goal. Please note, they will still not be able to change the Category or Type of goal once a goal is created.