Hi Flavio,

SLA and goals are... objectives to be achieved.

You may define metrics related to the concerned role to have information about these objectives, i.e.:
• % of emails replied within 24hours from receipt
• monthly sales

The accountability of the role is the ongoing action requested to contribute to reach the goal, i.e.:
• improving our response time to customer
• increasing our products attractiveness

Very helpful having a look on this smart article written by Olivier Compagne about "Writing Roles’ Accountabilities in Holacracy".

Hope that helps. Regards.

Jean-Michel Gode, thank you for your reply.

In that way, I assume I can put a metric like "=Sales/Breakeven" , so every time this metric is asked, the role has to give a percentage of sales compared to the breakeven point. Right?

Best regards.

I think so, yes.

I am also curious to understand how, beyond the psychological effect of openly saying "yes, i failed to reach my key metric" in front of your coworkers, Holacracy may help solving the situation of a Role filler never reaching the goal, especially when other Role fillers succeed doing the exact same accountability with sufficient metrics (otherwise, of course maybe the metric KPI is too demanding and should be re-evaluated, and there Holacracy can help understand that).

This also seem to go back to the hot "firing decision" topic.

Hi Flavio,

I think you're on the right track here, having the role equally accountable to report on metrics and more detail provided in the required metric, to help the person truly understand what is required here.

The attention to "not meeting metrics" should be enough to encourage better performance by this individual/create more tension among others who see this as not being met, sufficient that it will move towards further resolution of the item in coming weeks.

In our experience, employee discomfort among peers in not meeting metrics has usually driven a higher focus by the individual to meet the metrics. 

Good Luck

@Flavio,

Back to your question on the first place and to add on the answers you received

1) SLA (Service Level Agreement) - Is it possible to add a SLA on a role? E.g. a role has to reply e-mails within 24 hours from the receipt. It´s not that we want to put SLA on every role, but we have some SLAs with our clients, and we have to honor that. How to do this?

You may use accountability for setting expectations like :

"Reporting gross revenue for licensed services delivered in any given month by the 15th of the following month"

Or "Replying client inquiries within 24 hours"

An accountability is defined in the Constitution as "... ongoing activities of the Org. that the Role will enact" Art. 1.1 - you may add constraints on the ongoing activity.

@Bernard and @Tracey,

Thank you for your reply. It was very helpful.