How Kommon Helps You Better Set and Track Career Goals with Your Team

It’s hard to make progress in the right direction if you’re not clear about where someone wants to go. 

Taking the time to discuss a team member’s professional aims and aspirations and write them down is a fundamental part of being a good manager.  

The discussion is made harder because it often overlaps with formal performance management processes where employees commit to goals which they are assessed against later in the year.  This can turn the conversation from a constructive chat about career ambitions to a sterile HR exchange.  We wrote an article here to help you ensure that doesn’t happen.

But even if you have a great discussion, and have established some areas for your team members to work on over the coming months, there’s still a few of problems:

1. Writing goals up wrong: even if you know what your team members should be working on, how and where should you formalise them. 

2. Goals become irrelevant: companies can evolve quickly, and your team members’ work can too.  How can you make sure the goals you set are still helpful measures of progress?

3. It’s hard to track progress: a goal title on a page doesn’t tell you much about how someone’s doing.  How can you capture information which indicates genuine progress?  Particularly if it’s for performance management purposes.

How to Structure Career Goals

If you want some help knowing how many goals to set, how to phrase them, SMART goals etc. then all that is covered in our article on How to Start Setting Goals with Your Team.   That should give you plenty of ideas for what the text should be. 

Then Kommon comes in.  Whenever you set a New Goal, you or your team member (whoever’s setting it) will be asked to fill in these parameters.  It ensures your goals are SMART goals, and contain the relevant information. 

Each team member’s goals are then stored in a simple list within their profile on Kommon so it’s clear what everyone is working towards.

How to Keep Career Goals Relevant

If the aim of a goal is long-term and the due date is far away, it can feel less relevant to a team members’ day-to-day work.  

Best practice is to break down the goal into smaller pieces.  This gives the team member a pathway to make progress against, rather than feeling they’re working towards a distant objective.

This is where Kommon’s milestones come in. 

When you create a goal, Kommon generates a goal timeline to which you can add milestones, leave comments and get feedback (more on those last two in a moment).  

By adding milestones to the timeline with your team member, you can create a pathway for them to achieve the goal, track their progress, and keep the goal relevant to their day-to-day work.

As we discuss in our main guide on goal setting, you can also keep goals relevant by discussing them every month or so in your 1:1s.  Kommon’s 1:1 tool has a specific feature to add Goals as topics for discussion for this purpose. 

How to Track Progress with Career Goals

Kommon helps you and your team members track progress against goals in three ways:

• Hitting milestones: as the individual reaches their milestones, you can mark them as completed on the timeline. 

• Leaving comments: as relevant events happen which demonstrate progress on this goal, both you and the individual can leave comments on the timeline.

• Asking for feedback: if you want to evidence progress by asking for feedback from others, you can launch our feedback tool directly from the goal timeline.  Any feedback collected will be tagged to this goal and be accessible from the timeline. 

Together these tools help you and the individual build a richer record of their progress towards each goal.

Beyond increasing transparency, motivation, and trust, when it comes to assessing performance, all the information you need will be right here.