Create a goal or OKR

What this achieves

An objective is something someone is trying to achieve in a period. Adding key results turns it into an OKR, so progress comes from recorded measurements rather than from an opinion about how it is going.

Required role: Administrator or Manager. Employees see their own goals in their own view.

Steps

Go to Performance → Goals.
Create a new objective.
Enter the Title and an optional Description.
Set the Owner type and the Owner.
Choose the Visibility.
Set the Period, with a Start date and Target date.
Set Align to, and pick the parent if you are aligning it.
Select Create objective.

Owner type

An objective can belong to a person or to part of the organization.

Option	Description
Employee	One person owns it.
Team	A team owns it.
Department	A department owns it.
Business unit	A business unit owns it.
Organization	The whole company owns it.

Example: a company objective at HC Corp UK Ltd is owned at organization level, and Olivia Bennett’s engineering objective aligns up to it.

Visibility

Option	Description
Private	Visible to the owner and those who would see it anyway.
Team	Visible within the team.
Company	Visible to everyone.

Visibility is a real choice for individual goals. A development goal someone is working on privately is different from a delivery commitment the company should be able to see.

Alignment

Option	Description
No alignment	The objective stands alone.
A parent objective	It ladders up to another objective.
An org-tier goal	It ladders up to an organization-level goal.

Alignment is what makes the cascade readable — an objective with a parent can be traced upward, and the alignment view draws the resulting tree.

Align where the relationship is real. An objective aligned to a parent it does not genuinely serve makes the tree look tidy and tells you nothing.

Key results make it measurable

An objective on its own is a statement of intent. Adding key results turns it into an OKR, and the form says so — key results can be added later.

Each key result carries a Metric, a Start, a Target, a Current value, and a Unit. Progress is derived from those numbers rather than typed in as a percentage.

Example: an objective to improve retention at HC Corp UK Ltd gets a key result with a starting figure, a target, and the current value — so progress is arithmetic, not opinion.

Check-ins move the numbers

A check-in records a New value for a key result, along with a Confidence and an optional Note.

The note is what makes a check-in worth reading later. A number that moved without explanation raises the same question every time somebody reviews it.

Status

Objectives carry a status — on track, at risk, off track, completed, or cancelled — and key results carry their own. Status is a judgement about direction; the key result values are the evidence for it.

Weighted goal plans and the appraisal

Where your organization uses weighted goal plans, goals carry weights and the plan produces a score for the period. That score suggests a rating during review — it does not set one, and the manager decides.

What happens next

Goals feed the review cycle where the cycle includes goal review: reviewers rate goal outcomes, and a weighted plan produces the score that suggests a rating. Employees see their own goals in their own view, and the alignment tree shows how individual objectives ladder up.