10 Best Goal Setting Software Of 2023 For Keeping Teams On Track

Connecteam is a workforce management software provider. It has communication, operations, and HR platforms that can be used separately or as a complete solution. The HR platform offers tools for managing individual employee performance and goals, while the operations solution helps teams achieve success and hit their targets.

Why I picked Connecteam: The HR module allows you to build unique learning experiences for employees, helping them to grow in their roles. You can create evaluation quizzes and assessments, providing on-the-job training. It also has a unique employee timeline feature that can be used to map out each employee's growth path with your business. This helps employees visualize a future with your company and understand what goals and milestones they need to achieve to progress.

As for the operational software, its task management tool helps keep teams focused and on track. You can assign tasks to specific team members, and add checklists or forms to facilitate their work. This helps ensure targets are hit and nothing is missed.

Integrations include Google Calendar, Gusto, QuickBooks Payroll, and others.

Trakstar is an HR software that covers performance management, employee learning, hiring and onboarding, and workforce analytics. The performance management module of the software can be used to set and track employee goals, conduct performance reviews, and collect 360-degree feedback. The software also measures employee engagement on an ongoing basis with surveys.

Why I picked Trakstar: Employees can set SMART goals with their manager in the software, adhering to the goal-setting framework that keeps goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Managers can then track employee goal progression by scheduling regular check-ins and building improvement plans as needed with the software. Automated reporting gives you visualized data on how team performance evolves over time.

Key features include check-ins, note-taking, self-evaluations, peer feedback, employee surveys, real-time reporting, 360 feedback, SMART goal setting and tracking, customized development plans, and skills appraisals.

Integrations include ADP Workforce Now, Azure, BambooHR, Checkr, Google Workspace, Namely, Office365, Okta, Slack, Zoom, and other workplace tools.

PerformYard’s performance management software integrates goal tracking with performance reviews, check-ins, and continuous feedback to create a holistic employee development experience.

Why I picked PerformYard: Their cascadable goal feature makes it possible to link goals from top-level company objectives and OKRs down to individual employee or shared team goals, broken down into more manageable parts. To ensure all elements of employee progression are transparent, their goal analytics dashboard produces clean charts and stats that are available to management and executives, as well as the individual employees themselves.

Their system is fully customizable, giving you the flexibility to provide feedback to your employees or check in on their goals whenever it works for you, including daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. You can also customize the timing of your performance review cycle too, as well as the forms and question templates that work best for your organization.

PerformYard also helps managers celebrate goal achievements either privately or publicly so all team members can witness employee progression firsthand. On top of all that, co-workers can also provide feedback to other colleagues directly too through their 360-degree feedback feature.

Integrations are available with many commonly used software systems, including, ADP, BambooHR, Gusto, Microsoft Teams, Paycom, Paylocity, Rippling, Slack, UKG Pro, and Workday.

Leapsome is a people enablement platform with a focus on performance management, goals & OKRs, employee development, and employee engagement.

Why I picked Leapsome: Their system helps companies create a culture of alignment, accountability and transparency across all levels of the organization through a continuous cycle of goal setting, tracking and reporting at the company, team and individual levels.

To ensure goals are always top-of-mind for users, Leapsome integrates their goal management features across their other modules, including their 1:1 check-in tools and continuous feedback loops. You can use Leapsome to create 1:1 meeting agendas with your goal status embedded at the top—a helpful way to ensure progress is touched upon during each meeting.

To reduce your administrative set up time, Leapsome also supports recurring goal cycles with fixed timelines that can be easily tweaked on a quarterly or annual basis. Their goal tree feature also adds an interesting visual element to the goal-tracking process, creating a visible link between individual or team goals that shows how they’ll contribute to the company’s overall success.

Integrations are available with many popular productivity tools, including Active Directory, GSuite, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Okta, OneLogin, and Slack, as well as with popular human resource information systems (HRIS) like ADP, BambooHR, HiBob, PayFit, Personio, Rippling, and Workday.

Lattice’s platform combines performance management software with goals & OKRs, and employee development features. It was designed to help people become high performers and achieve their personal goals.

Why I picked Lattice: Their software helps organizations achieve strategic alignment across all levels of staff through transparent goals that are linked to top-level business objectives. It also helps to increase employee engagement by integrating objectives into continuous processes such as 1:1’s, status updates, and performance reviews.

Key features in Lattice’s software include goal trees that break big-picture goals down into smaller components, and automated reminders that ask employees to update their goal progress periodically, as you configure it. Data is updated in real-time, giving managers and leaders a birds-eye-view of how teams are performing, including analytics and visualization tools. Their system also includes modern performance management features such as 360-degree feedback, performance review comment sentiment analysis, and custom question templates.

Integrations are available with common HRIS and HCM systems including ADP, BambooHR, Namely, Rippling, Personio, Workday, and Zenefits, as well as popular systems such as Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Slack, among others.

Profit.co offers dedicated OKR software with additional features for task management, performance management and employee engagement.

Why I picked Profit.co: Their software can track any type of goal using 7 different types of key results, and comes with 400+ pre-built KPIs (key performance indicators) that you can customize to start tracking your corporate goals easily and quickly. Their OKR template (shown above) is also easy-to-use and walks you through the process of setting an OKR in less than 5 minutes.

Other key features included in Profit.co’s platform are flexible task tracking tools that let you prioritize and set deadlines, with the ability to break major tasks up into minor sub-tasks, plus a kanban style view for tracking progress. You can also set up links between tasks and key results, so your progress dashboards update automatically as items are completed.

As well, with Profit.co, OKRs are also linked to employee performance, giving a full picture of an individual’s achievements during their performance review. This helps to provide an unbiased picture of an individual’s performance, while aligning their employee development goals with corporate objectives.

Integrations are available with 40+ popular software applications including Chrome, Gmail, Google Calendar, HubSpot, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, Slack, Snowflake, Wrike, Zapier, Zendesk, and many others.

ClearCompany is a talent management platform that organizations can use to set individual and team-wide goals and measure progress. It combines features such as reporting, analytics, and real-time feedback to create a comprehensive suite of tools for teams to use.

Why I picked ClearCompany: Their software makes it easy for users to stay organized by allowing them to set due dates for tasks and assign those tasks to specific individuals or groups. This helps ensure everyone is aware of what needs to be done and when, which can drastically reduce time wasted due to confusion or miscommunication. ClearCompany also offers additional support such as templates and best practices that help make goal creation easier.

The software includes powerful analytic tools that allow you to gain valuable insights into your team's performance as a whole, as well as that of individual team members. ClearCompany offers a range of pre-built reports that are generated from real-time data covering all aspects of a team’s operations, including employee engagement surveys and performance reviews. Admin users can also create custom reports based on specific metrics or KPIs that are relevant to their business.

Their feedback-gathering feature allows users to solicit feedback from team members to gain insight into how well things are going internally and externally. This helps organizations understand what's working well or needs improvement, and provides clarity on how to move forward with projects or initiatives to achieve desired results. Feedback gathered can include quantitative metrics and qualitative opinions from stakeholders across all levels of an organization.

Their team alignment feature helps teams stay connected and motivated through frequent communication. This includes integrated applications such as Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other popular communication tools. Team members can share documents, access reports remotely, and send messages directly from within the app.

Integrations are available with 100+ popular HR software solutions, including Absorb LMS, eSkill, Google Calendar, GrowthPlay, HR Avatar, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Predictive Index, Skill Check, Slack, and many others.

OKR Board for Jira by Oboard is a goal-setting software that integrates directly with your Jira environment.

Why I picked OKR Board for Jira: You can use the platform to establish your Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), and then connect them with your epics, issues, and projects right in Jira. It's a great way to keep your projects and initiatives aligned with your broader goals, and keep goals top of mind in project planning through execution.

The OKR builder offers a hierarchy that's both flexible and customizable. You can set up your goals in whatever way makes the most sense for your business or team, and create multiple levels of cascading goals. You can also group OKRs together as they relate to specific initiatives, departments, timelines, or teams. The software has powerful reporting and analytics capabilities as well, so you can track your progress and identify areas for improvement.

Other features included in the platform are roadmaps, custom weights and levels, and private workspaces.

The native integrations available include Jira, Confluence, and Salesforce, and the REST API allows you to build integrations with other tools and systems if needed.

Quantive Results is a strategy execution platform designed to help businesses align their data and personnel around a common mission and clear goals.

Why I picked Quantive Results: This software offers a range of features that support your strategy planning, cross-departmental alignment, and goal setting. There's a focus on collaboration in strategic planning, with tools like whiteboards and retrospective templates to help your leadership team work together towards a plan.

When it comes to goal setting specifically, both OKR and KPI tools are included in the platform. You can set cascading goals, assign KPIs to specific teams or employees, and link related goals to one another. The software also has AI tools that help you set your KPIs and suggest relationships between OKRs.

Key features include pre-built OKR templates, multi-level goal setting, multiple key result types, tags, OKR and task alignment, automated notifications, advanced access permissions, and reporting and analytics tools.

Integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Asana, Miro, Jira, SurveySparrow, BambooHR, Workable, Humaans, and Rally, among others. You can also access additional integrations with a paid Zapier account.

Asana is a popular productivity tool that’s often used for project management and team alignment in terms of task tracking and company-wide goals. Their software includes several different views to organize task and goal-based information, including kanban boards, gantt charts, a shared calendar view and a list view.

Asana’s goal tracking system allows teams to create top-level company goals, with contributing sub-tasks that feed into the larger objective. You can assign individual team members to specific sub-tasks, and visualize their progress using their dynamic task-tracking progress bars. This helps to keep team members on track, and provides a visual representation of each individual component of a company-wide goal, helping to flag any issues early if one sub-task is falling short. Asana can also be used to set objectives and key results (OKRs) to align teams around measurable goals with easy-to-digest visualization components.

Asana integrates with over 280 apps and counting, including Azure Active Directory, Chrome, DropBox, GitLab, Google Workspace, Loom, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Outlook, Okta, Slack, Trello, Zapier, Zoho Desk, and many others.

Pricing for Asana starts at $10.99/user/month. You can also request a 30-day free trial through their website. They also have a free forever plan for individuals or small teams too.