What is the difference between aligned objectives and objective actions? Which one should you use? This is a commonly asked question that we answer in depth below.
TLDR;
Aligned objectives feed directly into the main objective. Their progress pushes the progress of the main objective forward. For example, breaking down a goal of achieving 10,000 social media followers into targets for each platform.
Objective actions are not connected to the topline objective and act more as tasks that you want to track, and may need to get done to help reach the objective.
Building more depth to your objectives
Within Empiraa you can create a few different types of objectives. This has been done to give you and your business the flexibility to break down your goals to the level you want.
For some, setting your organizational goals and then breaking those into objectives is enough detail. Others may use the platform more extensively to break down those objectives further into smaller, trackable tasks.
We recommend the latter. It gives you a clear direction of exactly what you have to do to achieve your goals.
Aligned to the Organization Objective
Aligned objectives contribute and feed directly into your main objectives. Their progress pushes the progress of the main objective forward.
Examples of aligned objectives:
You may have a goal to reach $100k in revenue. You can break this into four quarterly $25k aligned objectives and as you progress through them they will feed directly into that $100k metric.
You have a goal to reach 10,000 social media followers. You can break this down into an aligned objective for each platform that contributes to the total.
💡 Tip: Aligned objectives must use the same metric type as your main objective. For example, a task-based metric cannot feed into a percentage-based objective.
Organization Objective Actions
Objective actions are not connected to the top objective and act more like tasks that need to be done to help reach the main objective.
Actions are a great way to break down an assortment of tasks that you can delegate out to people in your team. These work well for critical tasks and projects that don't necessarily have a direct correlation to your main organizational goals or objectives, but that you still want to track with meaningful data.
💡 Tip: While objective actions are not limited in metric type, you are still restricted to make it within the same date range as the initial objective has been created.
Example
We are going to show you how to build more complexity to your plan in Empiraa.
For this example, we already have a topline Organization Objective called Social Media Following, with two Objective Actions underneath it called Improve Engagement rate per post, and Increase Conversions from Social Media Engagement %.
Those two objective actions relate to the Social Media Following and the larger Branding Organizational Goal this business has, however their totals don't have a direct impact on the number of social media followers.
Creating Aligned Objectives
The objective to have 10,000 social media followers is a little vague and too broad to properly keep track of. We are going to break down that total and create some smaller aligned objectives, based on the different social platforms. This will give us greater visibility of how our audience is spread.
Step 1
In the objective manager first click edit, and then the plus icon beside the aligned objectives.
Step 2
The objective designer will confirm which goal and which objective this will be aligned to. Then we will title it and set our target. The majority of this company's audience is on Facebook so the majority share will be allocated here. We can also assign this to anyone we want and are not restricted to the person assigned to the main objective.
By default, the objective will be aggregated to add to the objective but you can also make it subtract if need be.
Step 3
Now that we have saved it, we get an alert to say that we haven't fully allocated the target of the objective. You won't be able to publish until you have added another 5000 somewhere else.
Step 4
You can see below we have created four aligned objectives and allocated them a target based on how the audience is split. We have successfully allocated the 10,000 and don't see any errors. So now you can hit publish!
Feel good knowing exactly how you are going to reach your goals. That's where the power of Empiraa lies.