Understanding Types of Objectives

To further help you create a Goal-setting methodology that is best optimised for your company’s processes, we have introduced the flexibility to configure the definition of objectives on Mesh.

Read on to understand more about the different types of objectives that you can use to setup your goals:

 

Best suited for startups, small businesses, and organisations that operate in fast-paced or dynamic industries, the Simple setting allows you to create objectives fast so that you can deliver a concise idea of the top-level goal ASAP, and then build the process to get there via defining key results.

In this setting, your Objectives need to be defined only with an Alignment and an Overview of what you wish to achieve with it.

You may choose to add a description by pressing the Add Description button to provide more context to your stakeholders.

In comparatively larger setups with a focus on people management, the Compact setting in objectives makes a lot of sense as along with the parameters defined for Simple Objectives, you can also add Owners and Collaborators to the objective by visiting the Add Additional Info section. The creator of the objective is added as the Owner by default, and more owners and collaborators can be added by clicking on the respective options.

 

 

Adding owners and collaborators to objectives fosters accountability, collaboration, and shared responsibility for achieving the desired outcomes, and this is particularly useful for tracking individual progress.

For companies that stress ownership and chase goals with a metric, setting objectives with the Detailed setting would prove to be most useful to foster better performance among employees.

Detailed objectives narrow the gap between objectives and key results, and allow the goal creator to set up tracking in order to define and measure the outcome of an objective. While this may seem elaborate, it also works well in a company that has complex, interconnected goals, where an objective may be dependent on another, and thus, tracked accordingly.

 

 

The creator can set up rules around tracking of objectives in the Tracking section.

 

If you manage an organisation that treats its goals more like KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), having a single level of goals may be more suitable for you than having both, objectives and key results. In this case, you can keep your objectives in the Disabled setting and simply add Key Results directly, measure them by adding metrics and create Initiatives to define what would be required to achieve these key results.

You can find the settings to select the type of objective in the following manner, while editing a particular goal-setting methodology, customising a goal-setting methodology by creating a copy of an already defined methodology, or when you add a new goal-setting methodology. You can read about this in the following article: Customized goal-setting methodologies with Mesh