Sustaining performance has become a roadblock in many organizations. During the pandemic working from home has changed how we work, for both employees and companies. Employees succumbed to fatigue, and mental health issues and overall wellness were at stake. and constantly sitting in front of their computers started to affect their mental health and performance. Organizations operate to create products, achieve profitability, and grow in terms of operation and scale with time. So, tracking company performance is vital for any organization that does not want to remain static. 

At the organizational level, some sectors saw demand whereas others saw a dip in the demand. Companies that saw a dip in demand needed to explore new avenues, venture, and figure out what went wrong to stay in the market to see profitability during the crises. Companies that saw their demand increase needed to stay relevant and scale their business quickly to grab the market. 

So achieving consistent performance becomes a huge monumental task for the employee and also for the organization that faces bringing out the best. 

To see how objectives and key results (OKR) can help sustain performance in your company, First, we shall see in detail the wonders of OKR. 

What is OKR?

OKR is a goal-setting and goal-alignment framework that helps organizations, teams, and individuals to help define measurable goals and track their objectives. While keeping track of employees’ objectives, OKRs also help to align employees’ goals and objectives with company objectives to ensure that all the efforts don’t go wasted. By aligning themselves with company objectives employees understand that achieving success is not an individual performance but a team performance. 

When used in this way, OKRs can help teams concentrate on aspirational goals and achieve more than they had originally anticipated, even if they fall short of the stated goal. Teams and individuals can use OKRs to prioritize their work, step outside their comfort zones, and learn from their successes and failures. OKR helps Companies Bridge the gap between strategy and execution and move from an output- to an outcome-based approach to work. 

With the help of OKRs, Managers and higher authorities can have a view of each employee’s performance and evaluate based on their performance. It also gives a chance to the managers to have an overlook on the team to see if they face any obstacles or roadblocks. OKR is a simple yet powerful tool for setting business targets, measuring progress, and achieving greater targets and success. 

Key for sustaining performance in your company

During and after the pandemic, the major roadblock that most organizations face is issues in sustaining performance.  

Now lets us see how OKR can solve this challenge: OKR is the perfect tool for achieving sustained and improving performance. OKR is a goal-setting framework that enables organizations to 

1. Employee Awareness:  

OKRs are a collaboration tool. Every employee must be aware and understand that all the contributions will be pooled into the goals of the organization as one.  As John Heywood’s said, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. Ultimately, all objectives – individual or organizational are designed with organizational success in mind. Having employees self-report on their development to OKR software and growing as one is usually the most effective strategy. 

By aligning their objectives with company objectives employees are often able to understand their performance and evaluate themself. An additional advantage is that you can see how your staff members’ efforts contribute to the success of the business as a whole. 

2. Two-way communication and constant feedback:

Two-way communication is one of the reasons employees feel left out that has not bought to light. Miscommunications, one-way communication, and no proper feedback make the employees feel demotivated, affecting their performance toward their goals. 

Regular check-ins and meetings must be conducted to proactively identify and resolve issues long before they become a performance crisis.  

Using Datalligence OKR software to do regular check-ins help increase focus and productivity. 

3. Transparency: 

Visibility is crucial. The goals set by the organization must be transparent and understandable by all the employees to ensure proper flow. Employees at all levels of an organization need to have some degree of knowledge of what is happening. 

OKRs help in maintaining transparency while progressing towards the goals by constantly updating the progress made by every employee. Also, they make it possible to calculate the risks involved with the key results. 

4. Focusing on the task at hand:  

OKR helps employees focus on objectives rather than day-to-day tasks, which will increase the focus on the larger picture. This unwavering focus on objectives leads to sustained performance. 

5. Ownership of their performance:

OKRs set holistic goals and enable teams to deliver key measurable results that lead to their achievement. This enables teams and individuals to motivate themselves to innovate and find new ways to achieve their goals and objective. This also helps the managers to track the performance level of each employee and help them assess performance level. Using OKR each employee will understand accountability. 

Is OKR a Performance Management tool? 

OKR and performance management are both fundamentally different. While performance management focuses on assessing the performance of each employee and reviewing employees at the individual level, while OKR doesn’t assess and review performance. OKR acts as a goal-setting framework and aligns goals that push the employees and organization to achieve their big goals. 

While performance management is only used for assessing performance, OKR is used for goal setting and helps managers assess employees’ performance levels. 

The key difference between OKR and Performance Management

Performance management software-Datalligence

Conclusion: 

OKRs are not a replacement for performance management rather OKRs are a step above in the sense of goal setting and goal aligning. OKR pushes the entire organization towards achieving its big set of goals and side by side it also helps, assess each performance to evaluate them. The fundamental idea behind OKRs is to establish inspiring goals and measurable key results. So, through efficient implementation, an organization can achieve performance with OKRs. Talk to our coaches to start your free trial.

About Admin DAI

This author has not yet filled in any details.
So far Admin DAI has created 52 blog entries.

ROI in simple terms is the profit that is returned on your investment. Companies’ investment in marketing, sales, and R&D to see the profit return. While companies’ managers can create OKRs as well as for the adoption of OKR software but they are unable to decode how to use OKR to see ROI.

Unless the companies can decode how returns can be achieved using goal setting framework it becomes difficult to sustain the adoption and get long-term leadership buy-in.

In this blog, we shall see how ROI and OKR are Complimentary. But before that let us see about OKRs.

What is OKR?

OKRs or Objective Key Results are a simple yet powerful goal-setting frame goal-settings alignment framework that helps employees to have a whole new perspective on how goals are attained and for what purpose. OKRs are all about transparency which helps employees align their goals and objective goals to meet the company’s needs.

Utilizing OKRs also helps the managers to have a holistic view of each employee to understand their challenges and gaps while executing the organizational goal and also to see which employees are performing well. In order to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable outcomes, teams, and individuals use this collaborative goal-setting methodology. Using OKRs, you can monitor progress toward measurable goals while fostering alignment and engagement.

How does OKR help in ROI?

Most fast-growing organizations have competing priorities and goals that need to be achieved. But without prioritizing those goals or objectives, the expected outcome may not be achieved. Therefore, simply setting goals by adopting a top-down approach without supporting parameters can lead to confusion and incompetence. OKRs help drives away this ambiguity by linking measurable key results for each objective and facilitating a collaborative approach to achieving goals.

Here are the top three benefits of implementing OKRs effectively:

1. Enhance clarity and concentration:

For an efficient ROI, the employees must focus on what needs to be accomplished and what work is out of scope. OKR enables employees and managers to focus better and helps them concentrate on the task at hand. OKR helps in having

  • Better Clarity
  • Helps them to focus on the long-term goal
  • Provides a clear vision

Utilizing OKR will create focus and in turn, the ROIs will improve clarity, which is impeding the creation of a high-performance culture.

2. Systematic alignment:

Without proper and strategic alignment on where and which goals should employee focus on, there will be an overlapping of responsibilities and a lack of clarity on expectations from each employee. OKRs help teams decode what is expected of each team member and their respective contribution to achieving the shared goals by ensuring organization-wide goal visibility. As a result, alignment and collaboration will improve. This directly contributes to the ROI.

For Example: Assume that your current new customer acquisition revenue is $12M with the current methods and practices.

After adopting OKRs since the focus and prioritization increase, each person will be contributing more than they do currently, which will increase the revenue by $1 to $2M. This is one example of how OKR delivers ROI.

With proper and strategic alignment leaders, employees will also have clarity on what to focus on, which can lead to productivity.

3. Engaged Workforce:

The third benefit of implementing OKR is greater engagement among the employees. Employees get involved during the OKR progress and feel engaged when they contribute. This greater involvement and participation lead to deeper levels of engagement and ownership of key results which drive impact.

Since the OKRs help in alignment, Teams aren’t wasting time and valuable resources on works that don’t need immediate attention and focus all their time on their objective.

Eliminating the task which is not a priority directly contributes to higher productivity and ROI

How does OKR software make a difference?

1. Helping goals be documented

A recent study has shown by documenting their goals daily can improve their odds of success by 42% when they are physically recorded. By utilizing OKR software, goals can be physically documented daily or weekly thus increasing the chances of being achieved. Documenting goals can also be used as a reference in the future for any performance evaluation.

2. Organizational Alignment

A recent study has shown us that revenue grows 58% faster and is 72% more profitable than unaligned companies. When an organization is aligned, there is a shared understanding of the purpose and of the strategies, goals, and tactics that will make the organization successful. Organizational alignment energizes the organization, enables people to take action, and empowers people to work towards a shared goal. Further, when there is alignment, people have the autonomy to make decisions by themselves and trust each other to make the right decisions.

3. Performance Evaluation

Having your performance evaluated by the managers boost the employees and pushes them to achieve more. A recent study states, “Companies that set performance goals quarterly generate 31% greater returns from their performance process than those who do it annually. Having your performance evaluated helps the employees to improve their performance.

Conclusion:

The adoption of intelligent OKR software is not only desirable but also essential for organizational success. Using the right tool has a direct business impact that can be quantified using the ROI parameters mentioned in this article.

If you’re considering implementing the right OKR software in your company, call us.

Go to Top