Goal-setting for support staff goes digital for the first time ever

The support staff performance year is well underway — performance documents are already available at my.ucalgary.ca, and this year, the goal-setting process is going digital, too.

Making goal-setting a formal part of the support staff performance cycle is part of a strategy to make a more dynamic and engaging career experience through Connect to Perform, UCalgary’s renewed approach to performance management. Connect to Perform was first launched for MaPS in 2017 and for support staff in 2018.

Marcia Bulchholz, associate vice-president of human resources, says goal-setting ensures employees understand how their contributions align to department-, faculty-, and campus-wide initiatives, and is vital to career development and growth.

“By integrating goal-setting into our formal processes and providing an online tool to use, we’re setting an institutional standard that will help us reach farther as individuals, as teams and as an institution,” says Buchholz.     

Setting goals can also set the stage for a more engaging annual review in 2020. Assessing the goals you set, as well as assessing the eight core competencies offers a more complete review of your performance: both what you accomplished, and how you did it.

Online goal-setting and performance documents

Online goal-setting replaces the previous paper-based method for recording support staff goals, and offers a more dynamic and collaborative experience for managers and staff.

Now that most support staff have been through the online performance management cycle once, adding goal-setting to the process will be a snap. Many support staff members and their managers already work together to set annual goals — the only difference for them will be how they record them. Here’s how you can get started:

• Explore and use your online performance documents:
  • Support staff: Log in to my.ucalgary.ca and click on All about me > My job > Performance management
  • Managers: Log in to my.ucalgary.ca and click on My work > People Management > Manager self-service > Performance management
• Managers may hold one-on-one meetings to discuss goals with their direct reports.
• Once discussed, staff visit my.ucalgary.ca to enter their goals in the online performance document before Sept. 28. 2019. Sept. 28 may fall before broader departmental planning is complete, but you are still encouraged to move ahead with individual goal-setting — if necessary, goals can be easily changed, added or removed using the online goal-setting documents.

Managers and their direct reports should continue to meet one-on-one regularly. Record notes from one-on-one meetings under the Check-ins tab. Both support staff ­­and their managers can add notes and view each other’s comments.