Traditional goal setting has always been secretive.
The goals, invariably, would be set by the manager. Besides manager, only the relevant team member would know what those goals are. And may be the HR team.
Objectives & Key Results do not fit this mold. Recommendation is to share them with the entire organisation. This aspect serves two purposes –
- Every one knows what others are working on & how the jigsaw forms a bigger picture.
- Since commitments are public, there is a less chance that individuals will try to game the system.
Feature highlight
As an OKR tool, its not quite uncommon to force public visibility of goals.
What sets ‘UpRaise for Employee Success’ apart, is its ability to control OKR visibility.
At the time of objective creation, visibility can be either set to public or select. Do know that, super admin has access to all OKRs irrespective of their visibility setting.
What teams and/or users have this ‘select visibility’, can be defined by the creator. This results in a selectively visible objective. Key results within that objective also inherit the visibility.
One important thing to note about ‘team’ visibility. If a user belongs to the team that has visibility into the objective, she will be able to view the same.
Meaning, people can come in & move out of the teams but the visiblity always is limited to the team members. So a user who was able to view the objective today, won’t have access to it tomorrow since she moved into a different team.
This does not break the hierarchy view even if an ‘invisible objective’ breaks the chain. The links remain intact but the content of the objective is not visible for restricted users.
Why
In the initial few versions of Employee Success, visibility of OKRs was forced public.
As the product continued to evolve, we came across a few compelling scenarios. There it made compelling sense to restrict the goal visibility. Although this would be a mistake in OKRs, it was worth the trade off. Not doing so would mean, revealing invaluable trade secrets.
Pro-tip
It is possible in UpRaise to set a ‘default visibility’ under OKR settings. Of course the objective creator/editor can override this.
