Every year the same thing happens. Leadership spends weeks agreeing objectives. They are typed into the HR system, approved and filed. Then the year starts, and nobody opens them again until the review in December, when everyone tries to remember what they committed to and how far they got.
If that sounds familiar, the problem is rarely the quality of the strategy. It is that the plan has no home in the daily life of the business. Nobody is asked about it, nobody can see it, and nobody is reminded to update it.
Gallup found that 56 percent of US employees formally review their goals with their manager once a year or less, and only 47 percent strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work. Employees who have quarterly progress checks are 90 percent more likely to be engaged. In other words, goals that are set once and revisited at year end leave most people unclear on what matters, and a regular rhythm of updates is what closes that gap.
Link: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/644717/chros-think-performance-management-system-works.aspx
OGSM stands for Objectives, Goals, Strategies and Measures. The Objective is the destination, Goals make it measurable, Strategies describe the route, and Measures show whether the route is working. It is designed to fit on one page, so everybody can see how their work connects to the company direction.
The framework is the easy part. The hard part is keeping it alive once the one page is written. That needs a system, and the system needs to do a few specific things.
Accountability should cascade the way the strategy does:
| Level | Typical owner | Responsible for |
|---|---|---|
| Objective | Executive | The destination and the overall result |
| Goal | Director | The measurable target that proves the objective is met |
| Strategy | Manager | The approach and the people delivering it |
| Measure | Individual | One number or milestone, updated regularly |
The most important line is the last one. A measure has one owner. If two people share it, nobody owns it. Split it, or name a single accountable person with contributors.
Senior owners do not enter data. They review it, which keeps their time for decisions.
A strategy tree looks good on a slide but is hard to track. So the working version is flat: one row per measure, with the Objective, Goal and Strategy repeated on each row. Here is a simplified example:
| Objective | Goal | Strategy | Measure | Owner | Unit | Target | Actual | Progress |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Become the preferred supplier in our region | Reach 12M annual revenue | Expand into two new regions | New regional accounts signed | Priya | Count | 30 | 12 | 40% |
| Become the preferred supplier in our region | Reach 12M annual revenue | Expand into two new regions | Revenue from new regions | Tom | Currency | 2.4M | 0.9M | 38% |
| Become the preferred supplier in our region | Reach 12M annual revenue | Strengthen existing accounts | Customer retention rate | Aisha | Percentage | 92% | 89% | 97% |
| Become the preferred supplier in our region | Reach 12M annual revenue | Strengthen existing accounts | Account review programme live | Aisha | Milestone | 1 | 0 | 0% |
| Become the preferred supplier in our region | Cut delivery times by 20% | Simplify the dispatch process | Average dispatch time | Marcus | Hours | 24 | 31 | 58% |
The repetition is the point. Any leader can filter by person, by strategy, by goal or by team and get an instant answer, without a separate report being compiled by someone in a back office.
This is where most strategy systems lose their value. If one measure is a count, another is revenue and a third is a yes or no milestone, you cannot combine them. "How are we doing on this goal?" gets an apples and oranges answer.
You can keep different types of measure, but each must convert to one common scale. In the example, every row ends in a Progress percentage:
Once everything is on the same scale, progress can be summarised upwards, from measure to strategy, goal and objective. A word of caution, though. An average can hide a problem, because five measures at 100% and one at 0% still average 83%. So show the number of measures behind schedule next to the score, and compare progress to time elapsed. Thirty-eight percent in October means something different from thirty-eight percent in March.
Agree the units and conversion rules before the first measure is entered. Changing them later means recalculating everything.
A system that depends on people remembering to log in is just a nicer version of the HR system. Updates should come to owners, not the other way round. Two patterns cover most needs:
Completed measures are skipped, so people only hear about what still needs attention.
Strategy moves during the year. A new priority appears, a team takes on a new initiative, a measure turns out to be wrong. The system should absorb this.
A simple submission form lets anyone propose a new measure by choosing the Objective, Goal and Strategy it belongs to, plus owner, target and dates. It is added to the system, and it automatically appears in the reports and dashboards, with no rebuilding. If you want control, new submissions can be approved by the relevant manager before they count in the totals.
With the system in place, three audiences get three views from the same data:
Because everyone is looking at one source, the monthly review stops being a data-gathering exercise and becomes a conversation about decisions.
And remember that no tool replaces the review cadence. The system supplies the structure and the reminders. The leadership meeting where people discuss the numbers still has to happen.
Most organisations already have Smartsheet or something like it, and building on it means no new platform to roll out. Owners respond to update requests from their inbox, sheets and forms handle structure and submissions, and dashboards give leaders the live view. For a team of a few dozen active users and a wider group who just need to see progress, it is a practical fit, though you should check what your plan allows in terms of automations, reports and dashboards.
If your objectives are currently sitting in an HR system or a spreadsheet until the year-end review, I can walk you through how your own structure would map into this approach. Book a 30 minute conversation through the contact form, and bring your current objectives. We will look at how they would cascade from company to individual.