Atlassian: only 7% of executives know how each team’s work supports company goals. 5 ways to make team performance visible before review season.

A Thursday question for People leaders and CPOs in Dublin, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Tallinn: when your leadership team sits down for calibration, can anyone show, with evidence, how each team’s work moved the company goals this year? Or does the room rely on whoever tells the best story?

Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025 report suggests most leadership teams can’t. Atlassian’s Teamwork Lab surveyed 200 Fortune 1000 executives (SVP level or higher) and 12,000 knowledge workers across six countries. The headline finding is blunt: only 7% of executives feel confident they know exactly how the work that each team in their company is doing supports their biggest company goals.

1. What the report actually found

In plain language:

• Leaders can’t see the link between work and goals. Only 7% of executives feel confident they know exactly how each team’s work supports the biggest company goals.
• Finding information eats the week. Executives and teams alike spend a quarter of the workweek searching for information. 56% of workers say the only way to get the information they need is often to ask someone or schedule a meeting.
• Work gets duplicated. 1 in 2 knowledge workers say teams at their company tend to unknowingly work on the same things. Just 20% feel confident their team has an effective process for quickly telling other teams about decisions that affect them.
• Clear goals rank high on what workers ask for. Asked what would help them work faster, 43% chose easier access to information, 41% the same processes across teams, 40% clearer goals and 31% goals that didn’t conflict with other teams’ goals.
• Alignment pays off. When teams align work to goals, Atlassian reports they are 6.4x more likely to produce high-quality work, 2.2x more likely to focus on the work that matters most and 4.9x more likely to meet deadlines.

Atlassian’s advice is practical: 3–5 goals per team, ranked by priority and reviewed quarterly, with short progress reports on goals monthly and on projects weekly. Its ‘not this, that’ table swaps “a clunky spreadsheet no one looks at again” for an open platform with weekly stakeholder updates, and “annual goal-setting (and forgetting)” for monthly goal reviews.

Honest caveats. This is vendor research: Atlassian sells Jira and other work management tools, and Revolut People, where I work, sells performance software that integrates with Jira. The executives are from Fortune 1000 companies and 88% are in the US, so they run bigger organisations than most of the 50–1,000 person companies I talk to. The “x times more likely” figures compare teams that say they align work to goals; they show an association, not proof of cause. It’s a useful signal, not a controlled study.

2. The mid-market hurdle: the review is where the missing link shows up

In a 200–600 person company, goals usually live in a slide deck or a spreadsheet set in January, and the actual work lives in Jira, the CRM and the ticketing tool. Nobody connects the two during the year. Then review season arrives. Managers open a blank form, try to remember what each person shipped, and copy goal progress by hand, if they update it at all. Calibration turns into a debate about impressions, and the People team gets the blame when ratings feel political.

The bigger cost is the decision you make on top of it. When a team misses its targets, leaders pick between hiring and training without knowing whether the cause is skills, capacity or burnout. Without goal progress, skills scores and engagement for the same team and the same period, it’s a guess.

3. 5 ways to make team performance visible before review season

1. Cut each team to 3–5 ranked goals that ladder up. Atlassian’s own guidance. Every team goal should name the company goal it supports. If it can’t, it’s a task, not a goal. In Revolut People: goals cascade from company to department, team and individual, so the link to the company goal is visible on every goal.
2. Pull progress from where the work happens, not from memory. Self-reported progress goes stale within weeks. In Revolut People: a goal can use Jira as its metric. Paste a Jira epic link and progress is calculated from the epic’s child issues (for example, 3 of 8 done shows 38%), synced daily, with a refresh button for the latest number. Engineering and Product leaders don’t update the same work twice.
3. Review goals monthly, not just at year end. Atlassian recommends short monthly progress reports on goals. A 15-minute monthly check in each team’s 1:1 or team meeting is enough. In Revolut People: 1:1s sit in the same system as goals, with AI-assisted 1:1 summaries, so the conversation starts from current progress.
4. Start every review from evidence. If goal progress is already tracked, the review form should open with it. In Revolut People: the review scorecard opens with the person’s goals filled in and previous-cycle data carried forward, so managers write about contribution, and calibration compares the same evidence for everyone.
5. Read goals, skills and engagement together before you hire or train. A missed goal alone doesn’t tell you why. Check the same team’s skills scores and engagement trend for the same period. Run the team performance diagnostic for a quick read, and use the competency matrix templates if you don’t score skills yet. In Revolut People: engagement survey results can be compared with performance data, on the same platform as your HRIS records.

The diagnostic takes about 2 minutes; the full breakdown goes to your work email. The call is 15 minutes, calendar only.

4. Where Revolut People fits, and where it doesn’t

Revolut People started as the in-house system Revolut uses to run performance. The part that maps to this report is Goals: cascading goals with progress pulled from the tools teams already use, including Jira epics, and feeding straight into Reviews and calibration. 1:1s, engagement surveys and core HR records sit on the same platform, so a People leader can see goal progress, review outcomes and engagement for one team without stitching spreadsheets together.

To be straight about the limits: an integration won’t write good goals for you, and a progress bar driven by Jira tickets only measures delivery, not impact or quality. Keep goals few, outcome-based and ranked, and use the review conversation for the judgement a ticket count can’t make. Related reads: goals that don’t cascade, Betterworks on goals that lag priorities, and Lattice on more review cycles without more admin.

Bottom Line

Atlassian found only 7% of executives know exactly how each team’s work supports the company’s biggest goals. For a mid-market People team in the UK, Ireland, Benelux, the Nordics or the Baltics, that gap shows up every review season as blank forms, stale goals and calibration by anecdote. Fix it before the cycle: 3–5 ranked goals per team, progress pulled from where the work happens, a monthly check, and reviews that open with the evidence. Try it with one engineering or product team this quarter.

FAQ

What did Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025 report find about goals?

Atlassian surveyed 200 Fortune 1000 executives and 12,000 knowledge workers. Only 7% of executives said they feel confident they know exactly how the work each team in their company is doing supports their biggest company goals. Atlassian also reports that when teams align work to goals, they are 6.4x more likely to produce high-quality work, 2.2x more likely to focus on the work that matters most and 4.9x more likely to meet deadlines.

Why does this matter for performance reviews?

If leaders can’t see how a team’s work connects to company goals during the quarter, they can’t see it at review time either. Managers then rebuild the story from memory, and the review rates effort and visibility rather than contribution. Making goal progress visible during the quarter, from the tools where the work happens, gives the review real evidence to start from.

Is this independent research?

No. Atlassian sells Jira, Confluence and other work management software, so this is vendor research, and the report recommends tracking goals in a central system. Ash works for Revolut People, which also sells software and integrates with Jira. The executive sample is from Fortune 1000 companies, mostly in the US (88%), so it reflects larger organisations than a typical 50–1,000 person company. The “x times more likely” figures describe teams that say they align work to goals; they show an association, not proof of cause. Treat it as a useful signal, not a controlled study.

How many goals should a team have?

Atlassian’s guidance in the report is 3–5 goals per team, ranked in order of priority, reviewed quarterly, with short progress updates on goals monthly and on projects weekly. Its ‘not this, that’ table goes further for focus: 2–3 ranked goals with clear milestones instead of lots of vague goals. Treat those as starting points and test them with one department first.

Is Revolut People available in the UK, Ireland, Benelux, the Nordics and the Baltics?

Yes. Revolut People is available to businesses with a registered entity in the UK, the EEA or the US, which covers Ireland, the Benelux, Nordic and Baltic countries.