Feature
Employee goal setting software for small teams
Employee goal setting in a small business fails the same way everywhere: goals get written once, filed somewhere, and reopened eleven months later as a surprise. MARS keeps a few clear goals per person visible all month, scores them every month, and feeds the scores straight into reviews and dashboards — so the goal is a working tool, not a filing exercise.
How goal setting works in MARS
A few goals, agreed together
Each person carries 3–5 written goals, set by the manager and employee together. A good goal at small-business scale is specific enough to score — "keep first-response time under 4 hours", "ship the new quoting flow" — and short enough to revisit monthly. MARS deliberately does not push cascading company-wide OKR trees; those coordinate departments you do not have yet.
Visible all month, to everyone involved
The employee sees their goals and current standing any day of the month, not just at review time; so does their manager, and so does the owner on the dashboards. Progress conversations stop being ambushes because both sides are looking at the same numbers all along.
Scored monthly, so goals stay honest
Every goal gets a score each month as part of the review cycle — the little-and-often rhythm from our guide to performance management for small business. A goal that has stopped being relevant gets changed in the open instead of quietly ignored; that is management working, not failing.
Connected to reviews, feedback, and one-to-ones
Goals are the spine the rest hangs on: feedback attaches to them during the month, one-to-ones open with them on the table, and monthly reviews score them. Nothing has to be compiled, because nothing ever left the system.
What it costs
Goal setting is part of the core platform, not a module: $50 a month for the company account plus $10 a month per active user, billed monthly, with no minimum* and no yearly contract. Every number is on the pricing page, and our Lattice and 15Five comparisons show how that stacks up.
What MARS goal setting does not include at this time
No cascading multi-level OKR hierarchies, no goal libraries with hundreds of prewritten competencies, and no weighting formulas that need a spreadsheet to explain. Those serve larger organizations. We are constantly working to improve the platform and add features, so your feedback will be appreciated.
Want to try the rhythm before trying the software? Set this month's goals on paper with our free performance review template and score them at month end — it is free and needs no sign-up.
Goals your team can actually see
A few clear goals per person, scored monthly, connected to feedback, reviews, and dashboards. $50 a month plus $10 per person, billed monthly, no yearly contract. Built for companies with 2–100 people and no HR department.