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A Better Way to Manage OKRs

Objectives and key results (OKR) are a great way to clearly state your business goals, measure progress toward them, and inspire employee engagement.

By Carlos FoxPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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Objectives and key results (OKR) are a great way to clearly state your business goals, measure progress toward them, and inspire employee engagement. Benefits of OKR methodology include transparency, boosted focus, and better alignment with goals. OKRs can be broken down into a few main parts.

Objectives

These are the things you want your business to accomplish. They might be short-term goals (aimed to be completed by next quarter) or long term goals (such as for the end of the year). It's probably best to have a couple of each. Your overall company objective, for example, could be to increase sales by 10% this quarter. This is a clear, measurable goal with an understandable timeframe. You could even set a stretch goal of 15% and offer bonuses if this objective is reached. The more ambitious goals you undertake, the more you'll need to focus your efforts.

Key Results

These show your progress toward your objective. They can be measured by key performance indicators (KPIs). If halfway through the quarter, you had increased sales by 6%, you would be well on your way to achieving your objective. Key results have to be specific and measurable to be reliable metrics of progress.

Initiatives

These describe the steps you intend to take to reach your key results. In our OKR example, initiatives would describe specifically how you intend to increase sales by the end of the quarter. It could be through altering marketing strategies, existing customer outreach, finding new sales leads, etc.

The OKR process is beneficial over many other management techniques because it outlines a clear company strategy and moves all team members toward the same goals simultaneously, rather than treating each goal in isolation. Here are some tips on how to schedule and manage good OKRs.

Set OKRs Consistently

You won't need just one set of OKRs for your entire business. The overall organization will need its own OKRs, yes, but so will individual teams. Company OKRs are typically set once a year, while individual OKRs for teams are set on a quarterly or monthly basis. Yearly and quarterly OKRs should be set consistently so teams can have regular updates on their objectives while always supporting the entire organization.

It's also a good idea to set consistent numbers of objectives. Many companies follow the rule of three, meaning that there are three high-level objectives in each set of OKRs and three measurable key results for each one.

Track Progress and Adjust Accordingly

Naturally, OKRs are useless if you aren't keeping track of progress, but that won't be good enough on its own. Progress can be used to measure whether a goal was reasonable or not in the first place. If you quickly achieve your goals, then they were too easy, and you can set more ambitious goals. If you're struggling to reach 30% of your goals, then they were likely too challenging. You should ideally be able to reach about 70% of your goals. If you're hitting this number, it means your goal is realistically attainable, and your team may even be able to exceed it.

Establish a Clear Hierarchy

To align your OKRs smoothly, you'll need to make sure the hierarchy is understood. Senior management staff will generally be responsible for the overall company objectives and key results. Team leads and their employees will be responsible for departmental OKRs. Establishing this clearly in the beginning and holding each team accountable for their OKRs will be vital for your overall success.

This can be made easier with an OKR program that's able to record and localize OKRs for teams and individuals. An OKR program can also measure your key results with ease and automatically generate reports to show your progress. These OKR tools can even integrate with existing programs and apps to make everyone's jobs a bit easier.

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