What this feature does
An objective group in Epowerhr is a reusable container of objectives that you can later push out to multiple employees at once. Instead of typing the same objectives onto every performance management document by hand, you maintain them once in a group and then publish them to the documents that need them.
Objectives are scoped by period (typically a calendar year). A single objective group can hold a different set of objectives for 2024, 2025, 2026… and so on; the period dropdown on the page determines which year's contents you are looking at.
Two pages make up the day-to-day work:
- Manage objective groups — create the groups themselves (just a name) and find existing ones.
- Manage objectives — open a single group for a given period, add or edit its objectives, and publish the result to performance management documents.
For the receiving side — how performance management documents pick up published objectives — see How to manage a performance management document?.
Before you start
You will need:
- The permissions Administration of performance management (
ADMIN_PERFORMANCE_MANAGEMENT) and Objective groups (OBJECTIVE_GROUPS) to open the Objective groups menu item at all. - Add objective group, Update objective group and Delete objective group to create, edit or remove groups on the overview page.
-
View objectives (
OBJECTIVES) to open the Manage objectives page of a group. - Add objective, Update objective and Delete objective to create, edit or remove objectives inside a group.
- The Publish action runs as part of Update objective — anyone who can edit objectives can also publish them.
Open the objective groups page
Navigate to Admin → Performance Management → Objective groups. The page header is Manage objective groups.
The search box at the top has a single filter:
| Filter | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | Matches any part of the objective group's name. |
Click Search to run the search or Clear search to reset the filter. Hide search / Show search collapses the box.
The result grid shows one column — Name — and the empty-state reads "No results found!".
From the result grid you can:
- Click Edit on a row to rename the group.
- Click Manage objectives on a row to open the group and start adding objectives.
- Tick rows and click Delete selected objective groups to remove them — a confirmation dialog appears: "Are you sure you want to delete the selected objective groups?".
- Click Add objective group to create a new group.
Add an objective group
The objective group form is intentionally minimal — it is only a container.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
Name *
|
The name shown in the dropdown on the Manage objectives page and in the Publish button. Validation message: "Name is a required field". |
Click Save to persist the group. Success toast: "Objective group added" for new groups and "Objective group updated" afterwards.
Tip: keep group names short and self-explanatory ("Sales targets", "Yearly goals — engineering", …). The full name is repeated in the Publish button label, so anything too long becomes hard to read.
The Manage objectives page
To open a group, click Manage objectives on its row on the overview. The page header is Manage objectives and a breadcrumb takes you back to Manage objective groups.
The top of the page is a small filter bar with three controls:
| Control | Notes |
|---|---|
| Group | A read-only label showing which group you are editing. |
| Period | A dropdown of every performance management period configured on the tenant (typically one per year). Pick the year you want to maintain first — everything below changes when you switch period. The current period is pre-selected if one matches today's date; otherwise the first period in the list is used. |
| Include | Two checkboxes — Active objectives (ticked by default) and Inactive objectives (unticked). Tick Inactive objectives to also see deactivated objectives. |
Click Search to refresh the grid.
The result grid has three sortable columns: Title, Active and Linked to number of jobs. Click the count in the last column to expand and see the linked job names.
From the grid you can:
- Click Edit on a row to open an objective.
- Tick rows and click Delete selected objectives to remove them — confirmation: "Are you sure you want to delete the selected objectives?".
- Click Add objective to create a new objective in the currently selected period.
- Click Publish changes for {group}, {period} (top-right, above the grid) to push the group's objectives to performance management documents — see Publish objectives to performance management documents below.
Important: the objectives you see and create on this page are tied to both the group and the selected period. Switching from 2025 to 2026 in the Period dropdown shows a completely separate set of objectives. If you maintain the same goals two years in a row, you create them again under the new period — they do not carry over automatically.
Add an objective
Click Add objective to open the Objective detail form. Fields marked * are required.
Identification
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
Title *
|
The headline shown to the employee on their performance management document. Translatable — see Translating Title, Description and Comment below. Validation: "Title is a required field". |
Description *
|
A longer explanation of what the objective entails. Translatable. Validation: "Description is a required field". |
| Comment | Optional internal note. Translatable. |
| Active | Ticked by default. Untick to deactivate the objective: it stops being published to new documents and disappears from documents that are still in the active steps. |
Competence
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Competence | Optional link to a competence from the global competence library. Click Pick from list to open the picker, or Clear competence to unlink — confirmation: "Are you sure you want to clear the competence?". |
Measurement
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Weight | The relative weight of this objective within its category on the document. Validation: "Weight must be a value between {min} and {max}". |
| Overall weight | The weight of this objective in the document's overall score. Validation: "Overall weight must be a value between {min} and {max}". |
| Score | The score that will be pre-filled on the document. |
| Unit | How the target/actual values are expressed: Number, Percentage, Currency or Text. |
| Target under achieved | The threshold below which the objective is considered missed. |
| Target achieved | The threshold at which the objective is considered met. Validation: "Target achieved must be greater than or equal to target under achieved". |
| Target over achieved | The threshold above which the objective is considered exceeded. Validation: "Target over achieved must be greater than or equal to target achieved". |
| Actual | The actual measured value, if known at this stage. |
| Date actual | The reference date for the Actual value. |
Linked to jobs
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Linked to jobs | Optional. If you link the objective to one or more jobs, only employees whose document role is tied to one of those jobs will receive the objective when you publish. Leave empty to publish the objective to all evaluated employees in the matched documents. |
Click Save to persist the objective. Success toast: "Objective added" / "Objective updated".
Translating Title, Description and Comment
Title, Description and Comment can be translated into every culture the tenant has enabled. The translation control appears on each of those three fields and lets you fill in a value per language.
When the objective is later published to a performance management document, Epowerhr picks the translation based on the evaluated employee's UI language (the Language set on their user record on the Detail tab of Manage users). If the employee has no language filled in, the tenant's default culture is used as fallback.
A few things worth knowing:
- The manager's copy of the objective on the document uses the employee's language, not the manager's. If your employee is French-speaking and their manager is Dutch-speaking, the manager will see the French Title and Description on the document.
- If the objective has no translation in the selected language for Title or Description, that objective is silently skipped during Publish — it never lands on the employee's document and no error is shown. Always fill Title and Description in every language used by your population.
- Comment is optional during Publish — a missing Comment translation does not skip the objective.
Publish objectives to performance management documents
When you have finished adding or editing the objectives of a group for a given period, click Publish changes for {group}, {period} to push them to performance management documents.
Epowerhr first asks:
Archived documents — Do you want to update archived documents as well?
- No — only active (non-archived) documents are updated.
- Yes — archived documents are updated too. Use this when you have to correct objectives on documents that have already been finalised.
While the operation is running you see "Changes are being published…". When it is done, a toast confirms "Changes are published".
What the Publish action does
For every performance management document that is eligible (see Which documents are eligible below), Epowerhr:
- Adds newly created objectives from the group/period to the document — both on the evaluated employee's side and on the manager's side (when the document has a manager role).
- Updates the Title, Description, Comment, Weight, Score, Unit, Target values and Competence on existing objectives that were previously published from the same group/period — so a typo fix or a target tweak on the central record propagates everywhere.
- Removes objectives from the document that you have deactivated or deleted in the group since the last publish, provided the document step they are on is still active (record status 0 or 1).
- Honours the Linked to jobs filter: a job-linked objective is only added to documents whose evaluated employee holds one of the listed jobs.
Which documents are eligible
A document is included in the Publish operation when all the following hold:
- The document's template has an Objective overview building block bound to the group you are publishing.
- The document's start date falls inside the start and end date of the selected Period.
- The document is not archived (or Yes was answered to the "Archived documents" question).
- The objective in question is Active in the group.
- The current document step has not been finalised away (record status 0 or 1).
Known limitation — period dates and fiscal-year documents
Document selection looks only at the document's start date, and only checks whether it falls between the selected period's start and end date. This catches the typical case where periods are calendar years and documents start somewhere inside that year — but it can quietly skip documents that straddle two periods.
Example:
- Documents run 01/07/2025 → 30/06/2026 (a fiscal year).
- Period "2025" runs 01/01/2025 → 31/12/2025. Publishing the 2025 objective group works — the documents' start date (01/07/2025) sits inside 2025. ✅
- Period "2026" runs 01/01/2026 → 31/12/2026. Publishing the 2026 objective group does not reach those documents — their start date is still 01/07/2025, which is outside 2026. ❌
If your performance management cycle does not line up neatly with calendar years, set up your PM periods to match your document dates (for example, define period "2026" as 01/07/2025 → 30/06/2026). The Publish action will then find the documents that belong to that cycle.
Frequently asked questions
I don't see the Objective groups menu item. You need both Administration of performance management and Objective groups permissions. Both are typically granted via the Administrators group — ask whoever manages permissions for your tenant to check your group membership.
I published, but some employees did not receive the objectives. There are three common causes. First, the document's start date may fall outside the selected period — see Known limitation above. Second, the objective may lack a translation in the employee's UI language: missing translations are silently skipped (see Translating Title, Description and Comment). Third, the objective may be linked to a specific job that the employee does not hold — clear the Linked to jobs field if you want everyone to receive it.
I switched the Period dropdown and the grid is empty. That just means no objectives exist for this group in the selected period yet. Objectives are not carried over automatically across periods — click Add objective to start populating the new year.
Can I copy last year's objectives to this year? Not from this page. You re-create them under the new period. Many customers maintain a master Excel of yearly objectives and use that as the input when filling in the new period.
I edited an objective. Do I have to publish again for the change to show on existing documents? Yes. Edits on this page only change the central record. The change reaches existing performance management documents the next time you click Publish changes for {group}, {period}.
I deactivated an objective. Will it disappear from documents that were already published? Yes — the next Publish run also removes deactivated objectives from documents whose current step is still active (not finalised). If a document has already moved past that step, the objective stays on it for the historical record.
The manager sees the objective text in the wrong language. This is by design: the document is owned by the evaluated employee, and the manager's copy of each objective uses the employee's language. Fill Title, Description and Comment in every language used in your organisation so that both sides always have a usable translation.
A document is archived. Can I still update its objectives? Yes, but only when you tick Yes on the "Do you want to update archived documents as well?" prompt. Without that, archived documents are skipped.