How to set and track OKRs

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. It is a management methodology popularized by John Doer back in 1999 at Google, ever since various other companies have adopted OKR like Linkedin, Twitter, Jira, etc.

OKR is meant to create engagement and ensure alignment with your company employees. This ensures a synchronized mindset and a streamlined process. Most companies leave their employees in the dark, letting them work for goals that are not clearly stated or explained. With OKR, you bring clarity to your employees by offering them full transparency on the company goals and objectives.

It doesn’t stop there!

With OKR, you can measure your goals through the achievement of the key results that you have set. The whole methodology of OKR makes sense because if you want to achieve your goals, it is only practical for your staff and employees to know about them. Companies that work with OKR set their goals on a quarterly or long-term basis or, in some cases monthly basis.

OKRs tools-Datalligence

A quick example.

Objective: Generate higher Sales Qualified Leads

Key Results:

  1. Understand requirements of Market Qualified Leads
  2. Generate 100 Marketing Qualified Leads from Google Ads
  3. Generate 75 Marketing Qualified Leads from Organic Search
  4. Optimize results to generate 100 Sales Qualified Leads

Benefits of using OKRs

  • A clear focus on the goal
  • Teams are aligned
  • Measure progress
  • Increase transparency
  • Create accountability

Why tracking OKRs is important?

OKRs bring a cultural shift to the organization. Creating a goal-oriented culture can be a daunting exercise for everyone. It is essential to have the following before the start.

  1. Executive buy-in – Leaders should be bought in with the idea of driving the goal and how that will make the goals transparent across the organization.
  2. OKR Champion – It’s important to have a dedicated OKR champion to drive the entire process and track check-ins and progress. OKR champions will own the entire program and the success. They will facilitate the training and also share the best practices. Champions will also be responsible for the execution of OKRs along with the key stakeholders.

Empower managers

  • Allow managers to assign OKRs and approve team OKRs
  • Create visibility on the team progress
  • Increase Focus by showing the impact of alignment
  • Facilitate Recognition and feedback within the team

How to plan OKR tracking?

Before starting the planning, as mentioned above ensure the executive buy-in and the OKR champion is available to start planning. Planning Cadence is another important factor before starting to track. Company-level OKRs will be the starting point for the teams to start.

OKR Tracking Checklist:

  1. Executive buy-in
  2. OKR champion
  3. Decide Key stakeholders
  4. Define cadence
  5. Company OKRs
  6. Team OKRs
  7. Individual OKRS

Why do you need software to track OKRs?

Most ambitious companies at the beginning of their experiment with OKR seem to practice using excel and spreadsheets. Google, the company that was built on OKR, provides powerful free online tools such as Google Docs and Google Sheets for helping out these companies. With various OKR tracking templates found online, companies may embrace this activity. But they later realize that manual tracking of OKR is not practical. It is not only time-consuming and requires more human resources, but it is also prone to errors on various levels.

Managing multiple spreadsheets is a cumbersome task. OKRs are made to improve engagement, alignment, and accountability. Cross-functionality with multiple teams is nearly impossible with spreadsheets. OKRs are meant to be adopted by agile teams for seamless planning and execution, but when done manually, goals are not always at the forefront of your employees, thus disabling your employees in insight and transparency, which is not agile.

If you are a company that found implementing OKR manually through spreadsheets, PowerPoint, Google docs and Google sheets, etc., tiresome, you are not alone. Manual OKR is a time-consuming and nearly impossible prospect. This is why using dedicated OKR platforms like Datalligence is the right approach.

OKR Software’s uses three main steps in practicing the OKR:

  • Setting goals and key results that have been defined.
  • Tracking the progression of these goals.
  • Measuring the outcome.

Let’s walk through the process of OKR tracking

How to Track Goals and Objectives in OKR?

Once you successfully define your goal, you should be able to track it regularly to achieve it. With Datalligence, you can track your goal, objective and key results. You can establish alignment by creating objectives for teams and individual goals for each day or an extended period. You can track their progress, get an OKR status report each day, and engage with employees on their goal completion using the goal inspection.

How to Measure OKR?

Aim for the moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

Success and achievement do not only mean completion of 100% of the goal. Here is where you can allow yourself to be ambitious and set some goals that might be out of your reach so that reaching even 70% would be a huge success.

“You’ll never exceed your highest expectations” – Dan Lok (Investor, Mentor)

You can’t measure the success rate with your objective alone, but with well-defined key results, you can. If one of your key results is “Reduce website load speed by 50% as per Google page speed insight”, and you brought the load speed down by 35% than your original load speed, then the success rate is 70%.

Conclusion

OKR tracking is much more efficient and easier when done with dedicated OKR software. Manual OKR is a big load of work that consumes a lot of your time and is less efficient. If you are a company looking for an effective and efficient OKR template, maybe it is time to look for OKR software. Datalligence is OKR software that can bring alignment and engagement to your employees. Try the free trial and get a feel of all the benefits that come with Datalligence.

About Ramya P C

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So far Ramya P C has created 29 blog entries.

One moment we relax and the next moment we are on our toes.

 
New set of challenges and a different approach is required for each and there are no pre-set processes for it. It’s becoming cliched to speak and write about our challenges, nevertheless India needs to stay strong.
 

Organisations are constantly asking themselves these questions:

 
a) How are we coping with the reduced demands?
b) How to manage virtual talent pool?
c) How do we afford to operate virtually?
d) How to collaborate the team?
 
You are not alone, everyone is inventing a method that fits their needs but they are all contrasting. There are no concrete SOP’s in place so everyone just assumes.
 

a) How are we coping with the reduced demands?

 
Organisations are constantly cutting costs as their revenue is going down. Cutting cost wherever possible is the first step. Be it the hiring cost or raw material cost, organisations thrive to optimise the cost. Motivating the sales force should be a constant effort. Relationship building during this phase will be an answer to our larger agenda. Staying patient and working empathetically with our customers will still fetch us few deals and those will tend be durable.
 

b) How to manage virtual talent pool?

 
Employee morale is at an all-time low as they see their peers and seniors laid off, they look forward to their turn and fail to contribute to the present agenda. Constant interaction with the team and collaboration will keep them afloat. Quality deliverables are hard to get. Introducing gig economy and working with consultants will eventually be the right answer to the problems. Making the virtual talent pool and consultants see the same goal and achieving it should be the current need. Hence, Frameworks like OKR comes handy to help these organisations achieve this by connecting and engaging seamlessly.
 

c) How do we afford to operate virtually?

 
Digitisation is often not budgeted and can be time consuming for most organisations. Making technology affordable along with quick onboarding is what the organisations should aim for. Working with tech products which balances and prioritises the customer’s need will be the right fit. Datalligence AI’s OKR software guides you to onboard swiftly.
 

d) How to collaborate with the team?

 
With the fatigue raising high on the virtual platforms, it is highly necessary to keep wellness as our top priority. Decreased screen time and increased productivity as well as engagement is the need of the hour. Identifying HiPos are a tough task as the parameter to evaluate is changing constantly.
Setting clear objectives, measures and metrics to achieve that will solve 80% of the problem. Short term goal setting is highly recommended.
 
All things considered, it is extremely essential to stay strong and focused about the things we are capable of achieving and not stress upon the circumstances beyond our control.
 
Simplify your OKR rollout with Datalligence AI Reach out to us on https://datalligence.ai or write to us in cs@datalligence.ai to implement OKR (or) OKR based performance management.

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