I’m wondering if anyone has suggestions for best practices in using Asana to track annual goals at the employee level.
My thought is to just create a project for each employee — e.g., “Jane’s 2024 Goals” and a section for each goal, then track tasks for each goal. E.g., if the goal is “Train on video in social media marketing,” tasks could be created for specific steps like “Identify training opportunities” and “Get management approval for course fees.”
Has anyone else done something similar? Are there custom fields that make this work better for you, etc.?
EDIT: I’m thinking this would not need to use the Goals functionality in Asana — but it maybe could? I’ve found info suggesting the Goals feature isn’t really designed for goals at the employee level, so not sure if that makes sense.
@Brian_Fewell - from what I can tell (I’ve only used them a bit, to be candid), goals can be valuable if you want to have multiple components contribute to a goal, which in turn rolls up (along with other sub-goals) to a parent, and so on. E.g., if you have a company-wide objective to build 100 houses, you could have 2 teams that have a goal to build 50 houses with 5 employees each having a goal to build 10 houses. These would all be connected in parent-child relationships that automatically update, so as individuals make progress on their goals, this would all be visible at the company and team level as well.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to try your approach either, depending on how you want to structure and maintain these goals. Philosophically, I would think about what constitutes a goal vs. a task (if you’re familiar with the OKR philosophy, you would have a high level objective, a measurable key result, and then tasks/work that is encompassed in that key result; this process can be replicated at every level of your organization).
That said, if you know that these goals have a time horizon (annual, per your first sentence) and you want to leverage the cascading nature of Asana goals (and assuming you are on a plan that supports goals), I think it might be worthwhile to try them out. You might be able to even combine the two approaches to surface different data in different contexts.
E.g., start with a company (or team) goal, create sub-goals for each person, then create tasks or projects for each person (the unique bundles of work they want to accomplish in a given period). Have the individual sub-goals fed by tasks/projects, then the company goal fed by the sub-goals. At the end, people will see the work they need to do (projects/tasks), how they’re tracking toward their individual goals (sub-goals), and how your entire team/company is performing (company/team goals).
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