Configure Objectives feature settings

While most companies set objectives or goals, they might not always call them by this name. We know "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," so we allow you to rename the Objectives feature, in addition to the terms objective and key result, in 15Five to suit your team's needs.

Use the "Display name" section to provide alternative names for "Objective" and "Key result." Make sure you type the singular version of the name (e.g. "Goal" or "Sub-goal").

In this section, let us know when your business calendar ends and how frequently you set Objectives. This will help us give you and your team the best experience with Objectives.

Select the date your business calendar ends, and how frequently you set objectives (monthly, quarterly, annually, or a custom frequency).

During the process of creating an objective, employees have the option to create currency-based key results. While all currencies are available as options for employees to select, you can set the default currency that will be applied in this section.

Simply click on the currency box and select your desired currency from the dropdown menu. Only one currency can be applied.

With Aligned Objectives, 15Five users can choose to align their objectives with a larger department or company objective, creating a parent-child relationship. Aligning objectives creates a cohesive effort to achieve a company goal.

In this section, choose whether or not Objectives can be aligned to parent objectives, and how the metrics of child objectives should affect the parent. Toggle the option to 'On' or 'Off.'

• Enable aligned objectives allows employees to align objectives with parent objectives.
• Enable automatic roll-up allows the progress of a child objective to directly impact the progress of the aligned parent objective.
  ✏️

  Note

  How does the progress of child objectives impact that of the parent objective? All child objectives and key results aligned with a parent objective have equal weight on the parent objective's progress. For example, if you have a company-wide objective that has three key results and two child objectives, each child objective and key result will contribute to 20% of the completion of the company-wide objective.

Following objectives allows people visibility into objectives and key results that they themselves don't own, but may be stakeholders in. This ability is especially helpful for projects that require collaboration and for people who want to stay up-to-date on an objective's latest progress.

Toggle this option 'On' to give team members the ability to follow an objective. When this option is enabled, the Follow button will be displayed on all objective pages that a person has permission to view.

Tags are a great way to organize objectives that are not necessarily related to hierarchy and/or team structure. Adding another layer of organization to Objectives, tags are ideal for customers who want to be able to easily see who is working on OKRs that are related to specific, shared themes. Some ideas for tags are company-wide initiatives or themes, KPIs, and priority levels.

If you'd like for individuals in your company to have the ability to add tags to objectives they have permission to view, toggle this option 'On.'

Once tags are enabled, you can manager then in the 'Tags' tab. Please refer to the last section in this article for steps on managing and creating tags.

Use this section to disable or re-enable the Objectives feature. Disabling the Objectives feature will remove the Objectives tab from the 15Five navigation for all individuals in your organization. Historic Objectives data will be saved in case you choose to re-enable this feature at a later date.

If you'd like to, instead, limit who can see and use the Objectives feature, you can do so in Feature settings > Objectives > Permissions > Who can see the Objectives feature?

Here, determine what privacy options are available for objectives. By default, the "Public" option is enabled, which means that all objectives are public and visible to everyone in your organization. However, you can select the "Custom" option to customize privacy settings and options.

Custom options you can enable are:

• Public objectives, which are objectives that everyone in your organization can see;
• Objectives that follow 15Five permissions, which means that only people who have visibility into a person's Check-in can see the objective, or
• Objectives that are private to specific groups and individuals, which means the individual creating an objective can select which individuals and/or groups can see their objectives.

Enable objectives for groups

At the bottom of this section, determine whether or not you want to enable objectives for groups. Enabling this option will mean that group-type objectives will be visible to all members of the group and the hierarchies of group members (i.e. group members' managers, their manager's managers, etc.).

In this section, decide who in your organization should have access to the Objectives feature. By default, Objectives are enabled for everyone in your organization. However, you can limit access to specific groups or people by selecting the "Custom" option.

Here, manage who has the ability to create and edit objectives, for whom they can create objectives, and who can create company-wide objectives.

Standard permissions

By default, standard permissions are applied. This option means...

• Account admins can create/edit/update objectives for everyone
• Managers/Reviewers can only create/edit/update their immediate direct reports' objectives (and cannot create/edit/update objectives for their hierarchy)
• Individual contributors can only create/edit/update objectives for themselves.

Advanced permissions

If you want to customize permissions, select the "Advanced permissions" option.

Customization options are:

• Everyone: Allows everyone in the company to create/edit/update objectives for everyone else in the company.
  ✏️

  Note

  This option allows anyone in the company to create, edit, and manage objectives for anyone else in the company. If your company is not flat and fully transparent, we do not recommend using this setting. Alternatively, this setting is helpful if people on a team need to be able to create objectives for their teammates. If you are concerned about this setting being abused, please select another option.

• Reviewers: Allows managers to create/edit/update objectives for their entire hierarchy (not just their immediate direct reports), choose the 'direct managers' option.

Permissions for updating and editing objectives

If you select the Standard permissions or Advanced permissions > Reviewers option, you'll be asked to determine whether or not an objective's owner/contributors can assign additional editors for the objective. This option should be used for opening up visibility on objectives that more than one person might need to edit/update.

Use cases for enabling this setting may include team/group objectives, objectives being worked on by multiple people from different teams, or cross-departmental objectives.

When a person is assigned as an editor on an objective, they are automatically added as a follower on the objective (if enabled in feature settings). Edits can be made by following the steps outlined in our "Edit an objective" article.

Permission for creating objective types

At the bottom of the "Creating, editing, and assigning objectives" section, determine who can create company-wide and group-type objectives.

Options for objective-type creation are:

• Everyone: Anyone in the organization can create this objective type.
• Custom: You can select specific roles, groups, or individuals who have permission to create this objective type.

1. Click on the Settings menu at the upper right corner of your 15Five account.
   
2. Select Features from the dropdown menu.
   
3. Click on 'Objectives'.
4. Click on the 'Import' tab in the top navigation bar.
   
5. Click Create new import.
   
6. Download a template for your import CSV by clicking Download template.
   
   Alternatively, if you already have OKRs in a separate spreadsheet, pull up that spreadsheet and make sure the columns match those in the "Prepare your CSV" section. Then, click Skip.
   
   
   💡

   Tip

   Even if you have OKRs in a separate spreadsheet already, we suggest downloading the template and adding your existing data to the template. This minimizes the leg work of adjusting your existing CSV to match our required format.

7. Fill out your bulk import CSV and save it as a UTF-8 file. Refer to the "Prepare your CSV" section of the OKR creation page to see how columns should be formatted and which columns are optional and required.
8. Click Create new import, then select your saved CSV file. The import will begin automatically.
   
9. Review the upload. If you need to make changes, click Start over. If everything looks as expected, click Publish (#) objectives.
   
10. You'll be redirected to the Import history page, which contains all previous imports. If you published changes that you didn't mean to, click Revert import to the right of the import.
    

You can toggle on/off the ability for users to create default objective types (company-wide, individual, and self-development) and group-type objectives.

A group type is an umbrella label used to organize groups. Learn more about groups and group types.

If you enable objective creation for a group type, individuals have the option to select that group type when creating a group objective.

1. Scroll to the top of the Objectives settings page and click on the 'Tags' tab. If tags aren't enabled, you will not see this tab.
   
2. You are now on the 'Manage tags' page, from which you can add or archive tags for Objectives.
   
3.  To create a new tag, click Create a new tag.
   
   Name your tag and Save your changes.
   
4. To rename or archive a tag, click on Rename or Archive.
   
5. To view archived tags, check the box next to "Show archived tags."
   
   When viewing archived tags, you can unarchive a tag by clicking Unarchive to its right.
   

To apply a tag to an objective, simply select the appropriate tag in the "Add tags" field during the process of creating an objective or editing an objective.

1. Go to the Objectives Dashboard by clicking Objectives in 15Five's main, left-hand navigation.
   
2. Select the tag using the "Tags" filter in the bottom, right-hand corner of the filters bar.
3. All objectives that have the selected tag will appear in the Objectives summary.