Goals are a core part of employee development in Humanforce HR. They provide a structured way for employees and leaders to align individual effort with team and organisational priorities.
Within Humanforce HR, Goals support the creation of meaningful, measurable objectives that remain visible over time. They connect day-to-day work with performance, development, and organisational outcomes at an individual, team, and business level.
This article covers:
Capabilities
What are Goals?
Goals in Humanforce HR allow employees to set, track, and report on progress towards objectives at an individual, team, and organisational level. They are designed to support flexible ways of working, whether employees are office-based, remote, or hybrid.
Progress tracking and reminders help employees stay focused on what they are working towards. For leaders, dashboards and team views provide visibility of goal progress, supporting accountability and more effective performance conversations.
Goals in Humanforce HR are designed using the SMART goal framework, helping employees create objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Why use Goals?
While the value of goal setting is well understood, goals are often overlooked when they are not actively managed or revisited. Objectives that sit outside regular workflows can quickly lose relevance.
The Goals feature in Humanforce HR keeps goals visible and actionable by embedding them into performance reporting, analytics, and ongoing conversations. This helps employees understand how their contribution matters, while giving managers and HR teams the insight they need to support performance and make informed people decisions.
Goal visibility across the business
Goal visibility is based on a user’s role and reporting relationships. This ensures appropriate access for employees, supervisors, and system administrators while maintaining clarity and accountability.
Visibility for employees with no direct reports
By default, employees without direct reports can create, edit, and delete their own goals from their employee profile in the Goals tab.
They cannot create goals directly for other employees. However, they can create a parent goal and align it with other employees across the organisation.
When an aligned goal is assigned, the receiving employee is notified by email and prompted to create their own aligned goal.
If the Goal Approval process is enabled, aligned goals must be approved by the employee’s supervisor before notifications are sent. Goal Approval is configured by a System Administrator in System settings and managed through permissions by user group.
Visibility for employees with direct reports
Employees with direct reports can create, edit, delete, and view goals on their own profiles and on the profiles of their direct reports.
Supervisors can select Business units when creating goals, allowing the same goal to be assigned to multiple employees at once. This supports alignment around departmental or organisational goals, OKRs, or KPIs.
When assigning goals by business unit, supervisors can only create goals for employees they have permission to manage within that unit.
Supervisors also have access to the Team’s Current Goals overview from their Humanforce HR dashboard. This view provides a consolidated snapshot of active team goals and supports regular check-ins and goal-focused conversations.
Visibility for system administrators
System Administrators have full access to create, edit, delete, and view goals for all employees across the organisation.
They can also manage goal-related configuration options in Settings by navigating to Settings > System Settings, Goal Templates, and Goal Categories.
Tracking goal performance
Goals are integrated into performance reporting and analytics to support both individual development and organisational insight.
Goals within performance reports
Goal progress can be reviewed as part of an employee’s performance review using the Goals template in the Employee Performance Report.
This allows supervisors to review completion rates, track progress in real time, and understand how goal achievement contributes to broader performance outcomes.
Performance Reports can be customised to include or exclude goal data as required.
Goals within analytics
Humanforce HR includes purpose-built analytics reports to help administrators understand how goals are being set, communicated, and achieved across the organisation.
Access to goal analytics is managed in Analytics Settings and can be granted to Users, Supervisors or Permission Groups.
Available goal analytics reports include:
• Goal Compliance: Shows how goals are being set across the organisation, including the number of active goals and their focus areas.
• Goal Communication Sentiment: Provides insight into how effectively goals are being communicated between employees and supervisors.
• Goal Performance: Shows overall progress and trends in goal achievement across the business.
Additional information
Goal visibility and actions are permission-based and may vary depending on your organisation’s configuration.
Goals are intended to support continuous performance conversations, not only formal review cycles.
Analytics access must be enabled before users can view goal analytics pages.
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Users with limited permissions may not be able to create, assign, or view goals for other employees. Contact your system administrator to confirm your access.