Goals or objectives help businesses define focus areas and use limited resources to achieve maximum results.
It’s never enough to state or define business goals. The hard work is in the implementation, where many companies falter.
Many layers and tools must be in place to successfully execute these goals.
The first is aligning every goal to the organization’s short and long-term corporate strategy, and the second is instituting a strong corporate performance management structure.
The latter includes adopting technology like Kippy, which empowers you to cascade goals to all layers of the organization, attach key performance indicators (KPIs) to objectives, track performance, visualize performance data, and make reporting easy.
Kippy is a cloud-based performance management tool that ticks all these boxes.
In this article, we dive into what Kippy does, its features for powering the strategic planning process, and the benefits of adopting the tool.
What is Kippy best for?
Two ideas capture the very essence of Kippy as a tool: performance management and strategy.
There are numerous reasons many companies struggle with performance management, like lack of proper strategy formulation, but one of the chief reasons is only strategic plan monitoring at scheduled intervals, typically once or twice a year.
The problem with that approach is that it makes companies reactive rather than proactive in dealing with unproductive strategies and projects.
Kippy provides a comprehensive set of tools to facilitate the delivery of a functional and strategy-centric data-driven performance management system in real-time.
And more importantly, it helps you integrate your core objectives, goals, and strategy into every productive endeavor, whether on an individual or unit/department level.
Features of Kippy's goal-setting tools
Whether you’re a regular company or run a strategic planning consultancy business, Kippy has the right business process management solution for your performance management. Some of its features include:
Strategy
Define your corporate strategy using different frameworks or methodologies. You can choose between Balanced Scorecard or Objectives and Key Results.
Cascade goals
Let’s say there’s a goal to redesign the company website and get to 10,000 monthly visitors in a month. These goals cut across many departments, especially the marketing, design, and IT teams.
To properly hold each team accountable, each department must know its role and responsibilities. Kippy enables you to cascade one big goal down to the minutest details to every layer of the organization.
For our example, one cascaded goal would be for the design team to produce a mock-up design and user experience research in three months.
The cascade feature helps you create autonomous teams pulling together in the same direction.
Artificial intelligence
Every goal needs a KPI to track implementation and measure progress. But what if you’re unsure which KPI(s) to choose and which ones best capture your intent?
Kippy comes with AI, which proposes KPIs based on the team or organization generating the KPI and the objective or goal put into the system.
You can see a title, description, unit (percentage, days, etc.), and direction (increase is good, decrease is bad, or vice versa) for all the KPIs.
Admins can choose to add or discard any of the suggestions. The AI feature is there to help you jumpstart KPI ideas when you’re unsure how to measure some objectives.
KPIs and targets
Define KPIs for each objective. A vital addition to defining KPIs unique to Kippy is that you can define “weight” for each KPI. Weight assigns a level of importance to each KPI.
This is important during reporting. You want the most important goals and objectives to have a higher bearing on appraisals and performance. Outperformance in an unimportant goal may skew your perspective.
Individuals and teams can also suggest KPIs for personal and shared goals or projects they’re assigned. However, the manager must approve the KPI before it is active. One of the ways Kippy ensures strong governance on the app.
Track KPI performance
With balanced scorecards, quickly see the status of each KPI under every goal.
You can see the KPI name, the KPI owner, the target, the actual figure achieved, and a percentage score showing how well or poorly a team or individual overperformed or underperformed. The score is color-coded for easy reading.
Kippy also provides an executive summary dashboard of your goals across all perspectives, objectives, and teams. You can see how the whole organization is progressing and how a unit or department fared in isolation for a specific period.
You can dive into details for each KPI to learn more, such as historical performance and target vs. actual. You can also read previous notes to gain context on the KPI.
For example, a note might state that a new and sudden government regulation resulted in poor performance for a specific period. Managers can also use the notes feature to request more information from KPI owners or assign new tasks.
You may also like: How to Measure Performance Metrics like a PRO.
Goals analysis and reports
You can analyze and create charts for every goal and KPI on the Kippy platform. There’s no need to export data to Excel, Power BI, or Tableau to generate visualizations or perform additional analysis.
And for each KPI, you can drill down to see how employees are performing. This feature is essential for managers held responsible by the executive for meeting KPI targets.
Drill down helps them investigate which team member is not producing results.
You can also auto-generate reports using numerous report templates in Kippy. For these reports, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. It’s plug-and-play and helps you save time.
Examples of reports you can download include HR reports, strategy-centric project milestones reports, objectives reports, risk reports, and talent reports. You can generate these reports for a stipulated period or a whole year.
Appraisals
Leaders and managers can make appraisals and provide feedback in real-time. You don’t have to wait till the end of the year or wait to find the best time for a 1:1 meeting before providing feedback to an employee.
You may also like: Focus your appraisals on corporate objectives.
Check-in
Check-in allows KPI owners to provide updates on the goals they’ve been assigned. System admins can set the frequency of updates to any interval.
Benefits of using Kippy’s goal-setting tools for your performance management
Kippy is an outstanding software tailored to the needs of businesses that want to thrive and accomplish their strategic objectives. It offers tremendous user value and many benefits, including:
1. Time savings
You’ll spend less time micromanaging performance when you can set up triggers and alerts when KPIs reach certain levels.
With numerous report templates, you don’t have to expend a lot of energy and time on generating reports.
2. No more spreadsheets
Spreadsheets have their uses but are severely limited for managing goals and KPIs. With various users filling in data, there’s a high likelihood that the data is tainted with multiple errors.
Using such data to build graphs and visualization will lead to wrong conclusions. Additionally, it’s difficult to know who made what changes to the spreadsheet.
With Kippy, you don’t have to worry about version control. You can track all changes and who made them. Moreover, Kippy permits flexible configurations based on your needs.
So, you can assign different levels of permissions to your employees depending on your business user requirements.
3. Zero-coding
Manage and use Kippy with little to zero coding knowledge from your end. It’s easy to use and requires minimal setup to get started. You can also plug in data from multiple sources using readily-available integrations.
You may also like: 5 Tips for Holistic Performance Data Integration (Explained!)
4. Structured
Kippy provides a structured way to track goals by assigning roles. You can then always drill down into the organizational level you’re most interested in.
Managers and supervisors can track those on their teams, and executives can monitor department heads for the goals and KPIs they’re responsible for.
5. Accurate and safe
As a business leader or manager, you need reliable and accurate reports and visualizations of current performance to make data-driven decisions.
Is this strategy working? Is the project progressing as planned? Who are the high-performers, and who are the laggards? These are some of the questions Kippy helps you answer.
Takeaway: Utilize Kippy's goal-setting tools for the best performance management
Organizations that excel at performance management use and leverage powerful tools that transform how they manage, track, monitor, and appraise goals.
Kippy fits the bill and can be your reliable partner in managing and setting goals that help you achieve your strategic objectives.
Its features, like artificial intelligence, analysis and reports, appraisals, check-ins, and cascading goals, provide a platform for more seamless performance management.
Do you want to see Kippy live in action? Schedule a live demo today to see for yourself how Kippy can elevate your goal-setting and tracking experience.