The management board of one company set a task: make the business more manageable through a high-quality breakdown of strategic goals — from top management down to frontline specialists. The client put it bluntly: “Our goal is to double turnover this year. We need a team that will pull its weight. We don't need generals, we need officers who can fight on the market.”
Why this is not just a task for the sales department
The first thing that comes to mind is to make the commercial director responsible for sales growth, bring in marketing for traffic and leads, and allocate a budget and an incentive program. But that is not enough.
To achieve the “×2” goal, the whole company has to be involved: production, logistics, procurement, finance, accounting, IT, support, risk management, analytics — as Peter Drucker wrote back in 1954. If departmental goals are not aligned with each other, by the end of the period top management will be disappointed and the other departments will feel a sense of injustice: “we worked, prepared reports, set up processes — our goals just weren't linked to the overall one.”
The conditions of the task
Take a typical case: a company with 500+ employees, at least 4 levels of structure, a head office and regional branches, administrative and functional hierarchies at the same time, and approved goals for top managers.
Requirements for the goal system:
- goals are set together with the employee — only they know what can realistically be done;
- goals are formulated both quantitatively and qualitatively;
- goals are ambitious but achievable;
- a minimum of 3 goals and a maximum of 7;
- a direct report's goals are cascaded from their manager's goals;
- progress is regularly monitored and adjusted.
If goals are approved and tracked monthly for six months, that is already 15,000 metrics per period. Doing this manually is practically impossible. The bad news: Excel does not solve it either — by the time you have covered all 500 employees, the next reporting period will have started.
The solution: the Goal setting and performance review module in TopHR
We worked out a module in TopHR in detail that removes the routine steps: employees fill in goal cards “cascading” down the hierarchy, from top management to frontline specialists. The system automatically notifies each participant that they need to fill in, change, adjust or approve their card for the period. Approving goals requires both sides — the manager and the direct report; when one side makes changes, the other is always notified. This provides transparency and a clear understanding of everyone's area of responsibility.
While running the module, we identified several bottlenecks that could not have been foreseen at the design stage.
Bottleneck 1. The goal-setting form
We moved the structure of the familiar Excel file into a web form, assuming that filling it in through a browser would not cause any difficulties. Reality turned out differently: users confused their own goals with their manager's goals, did not understand the cascading logic, and confused the metric with the goal itself. Despite training, the question “why do we need a metric type” remained open.
Solving this took three sprints: two weeks of joint work with a design studio on the concept of the new form and another two weeks to configure it.
Bottleneck 2. Delegating goal setting
The business process as a whole did the job but created inconveniences for top and middle management. The main problem: a group head received goal cards from regional employees he did not know personally, even though he was formally their supervising manager. The real results were the responsibility of lower-level managers who kept the regions under constant control.
We added a feature for delegating goal setting by organizational unit. After that, the number of support requests dropped sharply.
Bottleneck 3. Keeping cards up to date as staff change
An organization is a living organism: new employees join, someone transfers or goes on maternity leave, someone resigns. At first we handled such cases semi-manually — but the remaining 20% of non-standard situations began to eat up 80% of the team's effort.
We agreed a new iteration with the client: every HR event in 1C now has a trigger that automatically launches the corresponding sub-process in TopHR.
- Hiring an employee → the manager receives a task to set goals for the probation period (3 months), and after it is successfully completed, a task to set annual goals.
- Transferring an employee → the previous manager receives a task to record the results achieved, and the new one a task to set goals for the transferred employee.
- Termination → the goal card is closed automatically with the note “closed due to termination”.
The result
The outcome is a full performance management cycle: from goal setting to the final review, with interim monitoring and timely adjustment. The process has gone through two annual goal-setting cycles in live operation and has been tested on 1,000+ employees in a wide range of roles.
We understand that a ready-made implementation may not suit other industries “out of the box” — so we made the process adaptable: it is easy to customize for a specific client's needs, following low-code development principles.
