How to Set Goals & Run 1:1s in Employment Hero

When your team is growing, keeping everyone moving in the same direction starts being a real operational challenge. Without clear goals and regular check ins, things slip. Priorities get muddled, progress stalls, and before you know it, review seasons roll around and no one's quite sure what they were working towards. That's what goal setting and one to ones are designed to fix.

Good goal setting comes down to three things. First, start with the why. Every individual goal should connect back to something bigger, a team objective, a company priority or a strategic direction. When people can see how their work fits the bigger picture, they take more ownership of it.

Second, make it measurable. Use the SMART framework. Instead of improved customer experience, try reduce average response time from twenty four hours to twelve hours by end of Q3. Third, keep it visible and accountable.

Goals set in January and forgotten by February don't move the needle. Build in regular check ins every ten minutes in a weekly meeting to track progress, flag blockers and adjust if needed. That's where one to ones come in. A structured regular one to one is the single best tool for keeping goals on track, surfacing issues early and making sure your people feel supported, not just evaluated.

In Employment Hero, this is all built in. No spreadsheets, no chasing people for updates. Under the performance section, you'll find goals. Employees can see their own goals at a glance with progress tracked in real time.

Managers can view individual, group and company level goals with full visibility across every level of the organization. Each goal shows the due date, completion percentage and how many key results have been set against it. So you can see at a glance what's on track and what needs attention. Creating a new goal is Hit add new, set the objective, attach key results, assign an owner and link it to a broader company or team goal.

That alignment is built in from day one. Now for one to ones. Under the development tab, you'll find a one to one section where managers and employees have a shared structured space for every conversation. Each session has a consistent agenda, a recap from last week, this week's priorities, and a space for questions or flags.

Both the manager and the employee can add notes before the meeting, so you're walking in prepared. Shared notes are saved on the platform, so there's a running record of every conversation. No more questions over what was agreed. It's all there documented and accessible to both people.

And because one to ones sit right alongside goals in the platform, it's easy to bring goal progress into the conversation naturally. Goal setting and one to ones aren't just performance management tools. They're how you build a team that knows what they're doing, why it matters, and how they're going to get there. Employment Hero makes it simple to set goals consistently across your whole team without the admin overhead.

To explore how this can work for your team, book a demo.