//  University

Create a SMART Objective for a Department

In this lesson, we will look at how you can assign a personal SMART objective to a Department. Objectives within the platform can become quite complex with several different variables so we would recommend that you look at the various objective-related lessons in the University to make sure that you are getting best use of the platform.

Creating departmental objectives within the platform will allow you to link personal objectives which are assigned to individual employees. This means that the departmental objective is automatically updated by the personal objectives which feed in to it.

Step One

Navigate to the Objectives and Reviews area using the side-bar navigation on the left-hand side of your screen, then hover over the Objectives and Reviews section of the side-bar, then navigate to: Manage ➡️Objectives. Select the ➕ next to Objectives to open the ADD OBJECTIVE pull-out drawer.

Step Two

Within the Add Objective drawer, you will see a collection of tiles. The first four are SMART objectives and the different ways they can be measured in the platform: number, percentage, financial, and yes/no.

Select the tile which best reflects how the objective is measured to start navigating through the pages of the wizard. Please see below some examples:

Step Three

Under the type of objective, select the ‘Department’ tile as indicated by a group-person icon. This is because you are assigning this SMART objective at an Departmental level.

Step Four

Select a competency for the objective. If this does not apply, or you company is not using the Competency feature then simply select the ‘No competency required for this objective‘ tile.

Step Five

You will now need to assign the objective to a Department from the ‘Select a department‘ drop-down menu. You can only assign the objective to a single department.

Step Six

Now select the start and end dates for the objective, this will determine when you would like the department to start and when the objective needs to be achieved by (due date). Use the date picker to amend the ‘Date starts‘ and ‘Date ends‘ fields accordingly.

If you wish to apply a reoccurrence to the objective, you can so by ticking the ‘The objective should recur’ tick-box. Then select the frequency of reoccurrence (i.e days, months, years).

Step Seven

Enter the start and target value for the objective. For example, for a percentage objective you may choose 0 as your start point, and 100 as your end point (0-100%).

An objective does not necessarily need to start at 0, for example if your customer satisfaction rating was at 57% and you were looking to raise this to 85% then we would recommend putting 57 as the start value, and 85 as the target value. StaffCircle will calculate the range between these two numbers as 100%, and this will be illustrated in the progression bar as the objective progresses.

If the intention is for the department objective to be linked to personal objectives, we would recommend keeping the ‘Allow manual progress changes‘ toggle off. Toggling this on will allow you to manually update the progress of the objective.

Please refer to this lesson for guidance on linking objectives.

Step Eight

This is the final page of the Add Objective pull-out drawer where you can give a title and description to the Objective. The title of the objective should briefly summarise what the objective as about, whereas the description should provide more context if required.

On this screen you can also set a priority for the objective, however, this is not a mandatory field.

Step Nine

This is the final page of the wizard where you can define a title and description to the objective. The title of the objective should briefly summarise what the objective as about, whereas the description should provide more context.

On this screen you can set a priority for the objective. Whilst this is not a mandatory field and does not change the way the objective behaves, associating an objective with a priority will allow you to search for objectives associated with this priority and the priority colour is visible to both the assignee and the reviewer.

Step Ten

Click the ‘Save’ button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen to add the Objective to the platform. Doing so will open a pop-up in the centre of the screen where you will have the option to either create a new objective or view the objective you have just created.