🔐 Who can use this feature?
Subscriptions: Any Performance package with performance cycles
Turning on goals in a performance review cycle adds a person's goals, and a question about them, directly inside their manager review or self-reflection. Goal settings apply only to new review cycles and will not impact scheduled, live, or closed cycles. Check out the People Science guidance for using Goals in Reviews for more information.
See a person's goals inside a review
Goals adds two things to a review: a read-only block showing the person's goals, and one or two questions asking the reviewer to rate or comment on them.
Read-only: shows what's already true of the person's goals in Goals; nobody edits a goal from inside the review.
Not a new review type: it only adds to the existing Manager review and Self-reflection units, the same units you already set up in a cycle.
Not the Performance rating: a goal-based rating question is scored and answered separately, and never feeds into the cycle's overall Performance rating.
Before you turn on goals
Supported units: Manager review and Self-reflection only. Peer feedback, Upward feedback, and Probation Reviews don't have a goals option.
Supported goal types: Individual and Individual development goals only. Team and company goals can't be included.
One comment, not per goal: the written comment question always covers all of a person's included goals in a single answer. Only the rating question can be split out to ask about each goal separately.
Draft cycles only: you can turn goals on or off, and change how they're configured, only while the cycle is still in draft. Once it's scheduled, live, or closed, the setting is locked like every other unit setting.
Not Coach-aware: AI Coach doesn't currently use a person's goals when drafting or refining a review answer.
Turn on goals when you set up a cycle
Goals is a setting you turn on per unit, while setting up the cycle.
On the cycle's Settings step, find Select performance units.
Under the Manager review card, the Self-reflection card, or both, check Include goals.
You don't need to turn the unit itself on first. Checking Include goals turns on Manager review or Self-reflection automatically if it wasn't already.
Go to the cycle's Questions step. A Goals section now appears automatically among that unit's questions.
This section only sets how reviewers respond to the person's goals. You don't add or pick individual goals here; the next section covers which goals get pulled in automatically.
ℹ️ Note: If you don't see Include goals on the Manager review or Self-reflection card, it may not be turned on for your account yet. Check with your Customer Success contact.
Choose which goals appear
Inside the unit's Goals section, Which goals to include sets which of the person's goals are pulled into the review:
Goal type: check Individual, Individual development, or both. At least one is required.
Created on or after: the earliest creation date a goal can have to be included.
Due on or before: the latest due date a goal can have to be included.
Once you turn on either goal question below, you must set all three filter fields (Goal type, Created on or after, and Due on or before), to save your progress.
Default filters: if you leave them untouched, Individual goals created on or after 1 January and due on or before 31 December of the current year; you still need to confirm them to save the step.
Shared, not per question: the rating question and the comment question in the same unit always use the same filters, not separate ones.
Choose overall or per-goal ratings
Still inside the Goals section, two independent toggles decide what reviewers are asked. At least one has to be on, or the step won't save ("Turn on at least one question for the Goals section"):
Rating question: asks reviewers to rate the person's included goals. Turning it on shows two options:
Once for all goals: reviewers give one rating covering all of the person's included goals.
Once per goal: reviewers rate each included goal separately, up to the person's oldest 25 matching goals. A person with 3 goals gets 3 copies of the question.
Overall comment: one open text question asking about all of the person's included goals together. There's no equivalent per-goal comment option.
This works exactly the same way, with the same two toggles, for Self-reflection as it does for Manager review, so an employee can be asked to rate their own goals in a self-reflection if you turn that on.
What managers see in a review with goals
When a manager opens a Manager review with goals turned on, the Goals section shows above the question(s) it's asking about:
Title and progress: each goal's name, plus a progress bar and status such as on track, off track, at risk, or completed.
Type and dates: its goal type, an "Updated [date]" label, and its due date if one is set.
Key results or actions: key results for a regular Individual goal, or actions for an Individual Development goal, each with their own completion status.
Position in the list: for a Once per goal question, the one goal it's asking about, captioned "Goal 1 of 3" (and so on); for a Once for all goals question, every included goal listed together.
If a goal's figures have changed since they were captured, a "Progress as of [date]" notice appears above the goals with an Update data button:
Selecting Update data opens a confirmation showing exactly which goals changed, then replaces the figures shown with each goal's progress today.
It never rewrites what the reviewer already wrote; the confirmation says so directly: "This replaces the figures... Your written comment stays as it is."
This stays available for as long as the unit and cycle are both still open, even after that reviewer's own response has been submitted. It disappears only once the unit or cycle closes; there's no way to refresh a closed one.
A goal that changed but hasn't been refreshed yet is tagged "New goal updates available." A goal that was deleted after its figures were captured is tagged "No longer applicable" instead, a tag that a refresh can't remove because there's no current goal left to update it from.
What employees see in a self-reflection with goals
An employee completing a Self-reflection with goals turned on sees the same Goals section, scoped to their own goals instead of someone else's.
The goals block, the rating and comment questions, the out-of-date notice, and Update data all work exactly as described above for managers.
If you've turned on the rating question, the employee rates their own goals as part of the self-reflection; if you've only turned on the comment question, they write about their goals instead.
Goal visibility and private goals
You don't hand-pick which of a person's goals show up. Culture Amp pulls in whichever of their Individual and Individual development goals match the goal type and date filters you set for that unit, automatically, for everyone the unit applies to.
Own visibility setting: doesn't carry over. If someone has restricted a goal so only certain people, or nobody but themselves, can see it in Goals, that restriction isn't reapplied here. The goal still appears in the review as long as it's published and matches the unit's filters.
Wherever the goal context appears again later, such as in the Employee Profile or in an export, it follows the same visibility as the answer itself: if someone can't see the review answer, they don't see the goal context captured with it either.
Empty states and unsupported goal types
If a person has no goals that match the unit's filters, the section shows a "No goals" heading instead of a goals block. The question itself still appears so the review can still be completed.
Reviewing your own goals in a self-reflection shows "You did not have any goals during the period this review covers."
Reviewing someone else's goals (in a manager review, or viewing someone else's self-reflection) shows "[Name] did not have any goals during time of review".
Team goals and company goals never appear, however you set the filters; only Individual and Individual development goals can be included. Peer feedback, Upward feedback, and Probation Reviews don't have a goals option at all, so their questions never show a goals block.
If an included Individual goal is linked to a team or company goal in Goals, that link doesn't carry through to the review; only the individual goal's own title, progress, and details appear.
Exports and Calibration limitations
When you export Manager review or Self-reflection answers to CSV, a goal-based answer's cell includes the goal name(s) above the answer text:
A "Once for all goals" rating, or the overall comment: one answer, with the name of every matching goal bracketed above it, for example
[Goals: Name 1, Name 2].A "Once per goal" rating: each goal's own answer is labeled with that goal's name. In a with-comments export, each goal's answer gets its own row; in other exports, all of a person's per-goal answers for that question sit together in the same cell, one labeled block per goal.
An export never shows more than the person running it could already see of the answer; goal context in the export follows that same visibility.
ℹ️ Note: Goal-based ratings and comments never count toward the cycle's Performance rating or calibration scoring, and no goal-based content appears in Calibrations or Performance Insights today.
Troubleshooting
"Include goals" doesn't appear on the Manager review or Self-reflection card
This option may not be turned on for your account yet. Check with your Customer Success contact.
The Questions step won't save because of the goal filters
Check that Goal type has at least one option checked, and that both Created on or after and Due on or before have a date set. All three become required the moment either goal question is turned on, even though they're not required before that.
"Turn on at least one question for the Goals section"
Turn on Rating question, Overall comment, or both; the Goals section can't be saved with both switched off.
Can't refresh a goal's figures on a closed cycle
This is expected. Update data is only available while both the unit and the cycle are still open; there's no way to refresh figures once either one closes.
➡️ Next steps
Admin Guide: Tracking and Managing a Performance Review Cycle: Track a live cycle once you've launched it.
Performance Review Cycle Testing Guide: Set up a labeled test cycle to try goals in a review before you launch.
Managing Individual Goals: Create and manage the goals that show up in a review.
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