Updating Goals/ OKRs

Once you’re done with the Goal creation process, the next step is to manage your Goals. This largely involves updating the progress of the Goals and the Goal owners, managers and collaborators can also modify the Goals, divide Goals into sub-parts and give appreciation or share feedback for the progress.

There are 5 parts to “Updating Goals” in Mesh.

1. Progress
2. Details
3. Alignment
4. Initiatives
5. Comments

And all of these parts contain a few important sub-parts as well. Let's now look at each of them thoroughly.

1. Progress

The Progress section is for any Goal owner to update the progress of their Goals. This helps managers keep an eye on the productivity of every team member and align responsibilities. To update the Goal progress, either write down the corresponding value of the part of the Goal that has been accomplished in the “Achieved” box or click on the progress bar to open the check-in window. (The unit of the Achieved box will be on the basis of how the Goal owner has chosen to measure the Goal (currency, percentage or count) during creation)

Goal Status Updates

In Progress:

Any new Goal will always have a start date and a due date. And every Goal needs to be timely checked-in so as to be on-track for its completion. This would also help your manager be in the know of the Goal’s progress.

On the Mesh dashboard, there are 3 types of status updates available that indicate the progress of your Goals.

• On-Track - Indicates that a Goal is progressing aptly and is likely to be completed by its given due date
• Off-Track - Indicates that a Goal is not progressing as expected and might not be completed by its due date
• At-Risk - Indicates that a Goal is severely lagging behind and is unlikely to be completed by its due date

Closure:

There might be situations where irrespective of the progress (or no progress) on a Goal, it’s still achieved due to some third-party help. Or, the Goal has ceased to be a priority now. In such cases, this is the section where you mark the final status or closures on your individual Goals. This can be done without clicking on a Goal from the Mesh list as well as the status dropdown in the Goal progress.

These are again of 3 types,

• Closed - Achieved - Mark this when the Goal has been accomplished.
• Closed - Not Achieved - Mark this when the Goal has not yet been accomplished but it’s still in progress.
• Closed - Dropped - Mark this when the Goal is no more a priority and has been abandoned.

2. Details

The Goal details section houses the same fields that are required to be filled in during the “Goal creation” process, except two new additions - “Tracking” & “My Weightage”. Every single detail that you filled in during the Goal creation process can be modified again, at any point of time, through this window.

Talking about the 2 new additions,

Tracking:

For teams that predominantly work with external platforms for managing their initiatives, such as Jira for developers and product managers or Salesforce for sales folks, Mesh provides you with tracking options to automatically sync your updates on Jira/ Salesforce with your Mesh account. 

Here’s the detailed write-up on configuring the Jira and Salesforce plugins for your Mesh account.

My Weightage: 

The weightage part is where, as a Goal owner for multiple Goals, you can assign different weightage to your Goals, as per their individual importance. To know more about Goal Weightage, checkout Understanding Privacy Settings & Weightage of Goals.

3. Alignment

This section will help you change the alignment of your Goals from one Objective to the other. The Default view will show you how the selected Goals is aligned at the moment. A detailed process on how to check the current alignment or realign the Goals is given here.

4. Initiatives

An in-depth write-up on what Initiatives are and how to set them up is detailed here. 

5. Comments

The comments section is something anyone can use, from your team members to your manager to collaborators, for a whole bunch of things. 

A few major use cases could include,

• Status updates on Goals
• Suggestions and feedback 
• Applauses and recognition

Apart from text, one can also add images, GIFs and emojis to the comments, and can also edit the comment after it has been given. The best part, however, is that with a simple click of a button, you can change the visibility of comment from public to private. Checkout Understanding Privacy Settings & Weightage of Goals in Mesh to know more about adjusting the privacy settings of your comments, 

While checking Goals and OKRs are a great way to stay on top of all your responsibilities, another equally important concept postulated by John Doerr is CFR, which stands for Conversations, Feedback & Recognition. And this is where the Comments box comes into play. 

Through the Comments box, managers are expected to, 

• Exchange bidirectional dialogues between the contributors and themselves, aimed at driving performance and improvement 
• Foster an environment of appreciation and recognition towards deserving contributions

Deleting Goals

Deleting Goals can be done individually only and currently there's no option to bulk delete Goals. The simple two-step process for deleting Goals are, 

Step 1: Click on any of your Goals from anywhere in the dashboard to open its panel.

Step 2: Click on the three dots at the top right corner to open the dropdown. Hit delete to successfully delete the said Goal.

Any time a Goal is deleted, the Goal owner's manager will receive a notification for it. The notification channel will be as per that the platform settings.

Checking Goals through the help of Integrations

We are fully aware of the fact that people from different domains have their own preferred tool for managing their tasks. Which is why, we’ve built powerful integrations for Mesh so that employees, without leaving their preferred tools, could still be able to stay on top of their responsibilities. 

Let’s look at the most popular integrations we have today.

• Gmail
  The Gmail integration makes it easy for your employees to view their goals and share/ request feedback straight from their inbox.
  For more information on configuring Gmail for Mesh, head over to Mesh <> Gmail integration. 

• Slack
  Integrating Mesh with Slack allows your employees to keep up with your Mesh activity through your company's Slack channels, which includes receiving public Feedback, updating public Goals, posting public Updates, etc.
  For more information on configuring Slack for Mesh, head over to Mesh <> Slack integration.

• Jira
  Integrating Mesh with Jira allows employees to stay on top of all their deliverables and progress from Jira itself, which in turn helps managers keep a track of the progress and share feedback with their direct reports.
  For more information on configuring Jira for Mesh, head over to Mesh <> Jira integration.

• Salesforce
  Integrating Mesh with Salesforce allows employees to stay on top of all their deliverables and progress from Salesforce itself, which in turn helps managers keep a track of the progress and share feedback with their direct reports.
  For more information on configuring Salesforce for Mesh, head over to Mesh <> Salesforce integration.