Working with Goal Plans

Goal Plans are online worksheets the employee and manager uses to create performance goals in one central place and track progress throughout the year. Goal Plan Templates control the look and feel of the Goal Plan.

Goals can be organized into any number of goal categories that the organization defines to help report on goal progress.

Employees can choose to make their goals private or public and track a goal’s metric, weight, or status, manage milestones, post comments, or create activities, among many other customer-defined attributes.

Manager responsibilities include:

• Working collaboratively with each direct report to identify performance expectations for the upcoming review period.
• Actively monitoring goals to ensure effective communication of progress up and down the organization.
• Cascade goals to their reports from their goal plan or goals assigned to them from the top hierarchy.

Another way of assisting employees from the Goal Plan is to use the threaded Goal Comments, available in the goal details. Employees and Managers can have a direct communication which will also trigger an email notification whenever the comment has been responded.

Responsibilities of employees include:

• Creating and reviewing performance goals that align with achieving role, team, and organizational goals. Typically, goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound).
• Collaborating with their manager to regularly CHANGE progress on goals.
• Focusing their current job performance on achieving performance goals.

SAP SuccessFactors uses data from the User Data File (UDF) to determine the reporting relationships between employees. These reporting relationships determine who can see whose goals in SAP SuccessFactors, and this is known as the Line of Sight.

For example, you may allow all managers above an employee to see an employee’s goals, but you may choose not to allow peers to see that employee’s goals. These relationships are also used to permission Goal Plan actions like adding, deleting, and cascading goals and determine the field's visibility. The overall access to the goal plan template is granted in Role-Based Permissions and will require a target population (To access a direct report's goal plan, a manager needs Goal Plan access for themselves and their direct reports).

In addition to the read and write permissions, it is possible to configure an option that allows users to define the goal visibility, as public or private.

Defining a goal as Private restricts the visibility of that goal using permissions defined within a goal plan template's XML configuration. A Public designation can be defined as the goal being viewable by a broader population.

A goal is specified as public or private when added to the Goal Plan. The employee can change it at any time if they have permission to do so. Private goals would allow for more restrictive access through permissions or exclude these goals from the performance evaluation.