This article will help you create a Soft goal and will explain their use cases in eloomi.

Soft goals are subjective goals which are evaluated by a manager’s rating. They’re often used to evaluate values and behaviours, soft skills, and OKRs.

Every company will expect employees to exemplify certain values, its ethos. These values can be created as Soft goals which will be assigned to all employees regardless of their job role. Managers would rate how well employees display these cultural values in eloomi.

In some cases, Soft goals are used to evaluate goals with measurable results where it’s not required to record actual figures. For example, whether a user has reached a high enough threshold of performance.

A Helpdesk team member might be required to respond to all new enquiries within a specific timeframe. Whether they achieve the desired SLAs (service-level agreements) could be measured generically e.g. 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of the time. Instead of recording how many tickets in total the team member has responded to that meet the SLAs, the overall average of achievement could be recorded instead, meaning they meet the SLAs 75% of the time and are therefore a high performer.

1. To create Soft goals in eloomi, you must first create a Rating Scale.

Navigate to Admin > Performance > Rating Scales > Create a new rating scale. Add a name and define the minimum and maximum value. For example, if 1 is the minimum value and 4 the maximum value, four rating descriptions boxes will appear. Update the Rating Guide with your relevant description. It’s not necessary to include the number in addition to a text description.

Important: you cannot use 0 as a minimum value because the platform does not consider 0 a rating.

2. We would recommend creating Categories in Admin > Performance > Categories, to help you organise your Goal library. Category names in English and your desired translations should be included.

3. In Admin > Performance > Create & Edit Goals > select Create a new goal, Add a title, and the optional Category and Description if required, and specify the Goal Type.

Bear in mind that you will not be able to change the Goal Type after you save. You will need to create a new goal should you wish to create a Hard goal instead.

‘INCLUDE IN PERFORMANCE INDEX’ will allow this goal to be included or excluded in the user’s overall Performance Index (PI).

‘ALLOW MANAGER TO ASSIGN THIS GOAL TO USERS’ will allow Performance Managers to assign this goal to their direct reports.

‘ALLOW MANAGER TO CUSTOMISE THE GOAL ASSIGNMENT (GOALS TARGET FOR EXAMPLE)’ will allow managers to change the target when assigning this goal to a user in an Appraisal process.

Where Strategic Roles are enabled on a platform, ‘LOCK THIS GOAL FOR THE MANAGER IF IT'S ASSIGNED THROUGH A USERS PROFILE’ will not allow managers to customise this goal if it is assigned to users as part of a Strategic Role.

‘COMPETENCE IS CONNECTABLE IN ITEM LISTS’ will allow users to connect this Main-goal as a Category when they create non-measurable goals with the Item List component in an Appraisal process.

Specify a Weight out of 100%, to communicate the prioritisation of the goal. In ‘Order’ you can specify the position of this goal on the user’s Performance > Goal Page.

Bonus: more information on Soft Ordering can be found here.

Select a Rating Scale for the goal and click ‘Create goal’.

Every Main-goal must have Sub-goals, as the latter are evaluated. The steps above will create the Main-goal. Upon clicking ‘Create goal’ you will be prompted to create a Sub-goal.

A Customer Service team would be expected to exemplify certain values and capabilities to perform well. These could include being a subject matter expert, an empathetic and solution-orientated manner, an ability to think strategically, and being a team player overall.

This set of goals could be called 'Customer Service Competences'. This would be the Main-goal.

The Sub-goals which will be evaluated would be a) a subject matter expert, b) empathetic and solution-orientated, c) strategic thinker, and d) a good team player.

4. To create a Sub-goal, add a Title, optional Description, update its Weight and Target based on your rating scale.

For example, with a Rating Scale of 1-4, 3 could equal 100%. Where the maximum value of 4 is achieved, the user will have over-performed by 25%.

We would recommend you allow over-performance to be recorded to incentivise users and to help identify your top performers.

Update the Order if required. You can also include an External Link or File Upload to support the performance evaluation.

It’s also supported to add a ‘Custom Rating Scale Description’ for a specific sub-goal. This will not overwrite the existing Rating Scale.

‘Create and create another’ will allow you to save your sub-goal and create another. ‘Create sub-goal’ will save your sub-goal and direct you to Performance > Create & edit goals.

5. Bear in mind that you can also create new Sub-goals from Performance > Create & edit goals by hovering over a main-goal e.g. Sales Competences and clicking the + icon.

Was this helpful?