OKRs are specific, measurable goals that you set with your team and use to track your progress towards your company’s overall goals.
They take the place of regular status updates to help keep you on track towards your big picture vision, and they also help you see how each part of your business contributes towards achieving those goals.
If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to using OKRs, this post shares seven tips for aligning your company and team with effective OKRs.
1) Have an Implementation Plan
It’s one thing to create objectives; it’s another to ensure that they’re actually used on a daily basis. A good implementation plan lays out not only what objectives will be created, but how you plan to achieve them.
That way, there aren’t any surprises later down the line when employees can’t do what they thought they were supposed to.
Create Key Result Areas (KRAs) : It seems like a no-brainer, but creating clear KRAs is critical to making sure your employees understand exactly what their responsibilities are. These should be reviewed with employees throughout each quarter so that each of you is on the same page when it comes time for review time.
2) Define Goals That Motivate, and align with company goals
It’s tempting to set goals based on what’s going on in your life or your day-to-day responsibilities at work. Unfortunately, that often leads to goals that aren’t too meaningful, get forgotten about, or fall off people’s radar as other priorities come into play.
It’s worth taking a moment to step back from day-to-day pressures and think about how you might use OKRs to drive alignment with company goals—and just as importantly, how those company goals can be aligned with individual employee needs.
You might even choose one goal related to you day job or position but try setting another goal around personal development so that you can experience a sense of progression each week. The possibilities are endless!
3) Use Three Levels of Goals
As you start building your first set of OKRs, think about how best to represent three levels of goals. Make sure that each level has a distinctive feel—for example, goals on one level may relate to tasks that need to be accomplished within a certain time frame, while goals on another level may focus more on overarching company-wide objectives that can be completed over time.
For instance, your quarterly OKR to drive 10% year-over-year revenue growth might drive specific quarterly goals related to customer acquisition in different regions of your business.
In order to hit these targets (your quarterly goal), you might have company-wide initiatives focused on growing new markets or targeting specific audiences.
4) Focus on Execution
One of my favourite things about using OKRs is that it helps put a spotlight on execution. As executives, we always want to make things happen in our organisations, but achieving something meaningful is far more difficult than creating a clever vision statement or writing up an aspirational set of objectives.
Strong execution is essential to success. When you make progress toward your goals, celebrate small wins that can help build momentum throughout your organisation as people feel like they are making progress every day.
This will increase buy-in on your overall vision and help others around you rally behind you when needed. If there isn’t strong buy-in at every level of your organisation, then there’s no way you’ll ever achieve anything truly meaningful.
5) Don’t Forget About Quarterly Checkups
It’s easy to get caught up in goal-setting and forget that goals should be reviewed, updated, or reworked on a regular basis.
In his best-selling book Good to Great, author Jim Collins writes that one of the keys to turning a good company into a great one is through effective goal-setting and review processes.
Start by asking yourself: what are your short-, medium-, and long-term goals? How can you incorporate quarterly checkups into your workflow?
6) Embrace Accountability
Teams that embrace OKRs as a whole tend to succeed. It’s crucial to give your employees ownership over their goals, so they feel like they have a say in how they get there.
Encourage them to have open conversations about what goals are too lofty, or which ones don’t seem feasible at all. As an employee, you should be constantly thinking about whether your overall company goal is something you can contribute towards.
Ultimately, teams with strong alignment between individual employees and company-wide goals achieve better results than other teams. A key component of achieving alignment is creating cross-functional collaboration among teams and employees.
7) Take Advantage of Technology
Online platforms make it easy to generate, share, and track objectives. For example, performance management platform
BambooHR lets employees set objectives based on their team’s OKR plan. Each employee can then gamify his or her experience by tracking goals using a high-score leaderboard.
You can also share metrics publicly with your entire company so that everyone can see how well each other is doing. When individuals align their personal objectives with their company’s overall strategy, they feel more motivated at work—and ultimately, more productive.
They should also be able to access any resources they need (or may forget to include) in their mission statement immediately through one central location.