Note from the editor: there have been terminology changes since this guide was made. Pillars are now referred to as goals.
What are objectives?
In Empiraa we use a few different terms to explain the different levels of goals.
Pillars (now goals) are the top of the chain and refer to the company goals for the next 3-5 years.
Objectives are the goals that need to be achieved in order for your business to reach its pillars. Examples of objectives could be:
Develop a new marketing strategy for the new year
Develop your product from point A to point B
Get $500k revenue more than last year
Aligned Objectives (formerly actions) are even smaller goals, or more accurately tasks, to tick off that contribute to reaching your objective.
For example: If your objective is "Develop a new marketing strategy for the new year", some aligned objectives to help you achieve this could be:
Review the current marketing strategy and identify areas where we did well and areas that need more focus.
Consult with the rest of the team with a series of meetings to gauge where they see our weaknesses.
Collate the findings into the new marketing strategy
Get approval from the board on the new strategy
So to achieve our objective we have to first tick off the four tasks outlined.
How to build an objective
Watch the video below that shows you exactly how to build an objective in real time or follow the step by step process below.
The objective fields
There are a few simple fields you need to fill out and select in order to craft an objective in Empiraa. We have built flexibility into our objective designer metrics to fit in with a lot of businesses' different preferences.
Objective Alignment
Your objective is ultimately contributing to one of your company pillars so here you will select which one.
Title & description
Keep your title concise and easy to understand because this will be visible on your myHub dashboard. Your description can be more detailed.
Assigned to
Who is going to be responsible for this objective? Executive status people will be able to assign anyone in the business to an objective. Employee status people will only be able to assign those in their direct team. If you tick only visible to assigned user, they will be able to see it in their user dashboard but it will be exempt from the company-wide plan.
💡 Tip: if you have staff in multiple teams make sure that you select their name with the most suitable team.
Objective Type
You can choose your objective to be either a KPI (key performance indicator) or OKR (objective key result). Most businesses tend to use one format or the other so you may have your own preference. Ultimately they
KPIs are quantitative success metrics so they often represent specific number based goals. KPIs focus solely on tracking your progress and performance. We often think of them as the traffic lights to tell you, you're still on the right track.
Example: Increase MQLs by 30% this year
OKRs require you to identify both your target and the metrics that will help you stay on track. OKRs represent aggressive goals and define the measurable steps you’ll take toward achieving those goals.
Example: Become the #1 donut company in Australia
Type
Financial means a dollar-based goal. ie: earn an additional $500,000 in revenue
Metric means hitting a specific target. ie: create 3 new donut flavors
Skill is a specific outcome you are looking to achieve that you can state in the description and title
Task is measured as either finished or not, like ticking something off your list
Target
If you choose financial or metric as your type, you will be prompted to enter your exact target number here.
Positive Outcome
Is your goal to be on or above the target or on or below? You might choose to have your revenue be on or above while your customer churn rate would want to be on or below. if you choose a skill or task based objective, these fields won't be visible.
Start/End date
When does the objective start and end? You will be restricted to keep the objective within the length your aligned pillar is active for.
Impact Level
Think about how influential your objective is to your business success. Things directly related to revenue would typically be marked high while you might have an objective for implementing more policies and procedures that aren't as critical and could be rated low-medium.
Progress Data Capture
This is how often you will be prompted to update your progress.
Send reminder on
What day of the week or date in the month should you be reminded.
Example Objective
We are going to create an example so you can see exactly what building out an objective looks like. As a part of iDonut's mission to become the number 1 donut company in Australia we want to expand our product offering and build out some new flavours. To make an objective around that we will do the following:
Assign the objective to a company pillar
Give it a title, description and assign it to the right team member
Because our target is 10, this will be a metric-based KPI. We would like to get 10 or more flavours made and this objective will run for a year. We want Homer to check in monthly with how he is tracking, so we will remind him on the 1st of each month.
When you press save you will be taken to the draft page. From here you can either create more actions that break this goal down to even smaller tasks to achieve or you can just publish.
In this example, we will publish, but we recommend businesses build another level of aligned objectives to make it easier to reach your goals.
💡 Tip: If you cannot see the objective that you have created after you publish, check the date field to make sure it's during the active window of when you set it for. The myHub dashboard gives you visibility of the objectives that are currently active.