What is OKR, and why is it a critical part of the corporate world?

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are an easy goal-setting framework that benefits teams to accomplish all the goals, starting from Long-term to Short-term goals. It is an effective way to smoothly achieve the company’s objectives while also tracking teams and employees’ progress.

To simplify, The Objectives will help you find the answer for “What” you want to achieve whereas the Key results will help you with the “How” to achieve.

OKR has driven the world’s leading companies like Netflix, Walmart, Twitter, and Spotify into massive success that they enjoy today. But there is more to it. Let us learn how OKR is possibly this powerful of a tool for companies.

Why do companies implement OKRs?

As it is already known that all organizations regardless of their size have certain Goals and Objectives in their vision and mission statement. Unfortunately, it becomes extremely difficult to achieve these highly set goals. Sometimes it is due to lack of proper management or difficulty to prioritize tasks or even just lack of clear focus.

Hence, to overcome such problems, companies resort to incorporating goal-setting tools like OKRs. With OKRs, goals become clearer, more agile, and easier to track. Employees have a clear pathway to follow and become much more motivated to accomplish their goals.

Start OKRs with the company level and from there comes a clear understanding of, how to create a team and individual objective. With this, we have a clear goal-setting and you can visualize how to reach there too.

The main benefit of using OKR is, it helps you to keep your focus for that particular quarter and ensure that the team travels towards a specific direction that delivers the key business value.

Most organizations prefer OKRs quarterly. Quarterly gives us ample time to learn and reflect. With the learnings, the OKRs can be changed or adjusted accordingly. It is just the other side of retrospective review, where you can be agile in correcting and refocusing.

Benefits of using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

The top 6 benefits of using OKRs in any organization are;

Focus

Keep OKRs simple to make others understand them. Keeping 3 to 5 objectives makes it highly focused and helps prioritize goals. It also saves time and maintains focus on plans and execution. There is no room for procrastination this way, and one achieves goals in an organized and focused manner.

Alignment

The main reason organizations opt for OKR is alignment, it makes teams travel in a highly aligned way and eliminates silos. Using shared OKRs enhances teamwork and improves collaboration between teams and boosts engagement. Even in is not working in a shared objective it still is possible to get aligned to the bigger overarching objective, more importantly, it makes sure that everybody is on the same journey to achieve the overall goals.

Transparency

OKR tracks progress and makes progress accessible to team members. This enables awareness and ensures consistency. Since alignment is ensured and everyone is traveling in the same direction and with transparency, it helps to share experiences and support team members to travel that extra mile.

Effective Communication

Since there is a give-and-take feedback system, there is always room for development. It encourages to discuss problems and solutions as well. Hence, participation among teams as well as individuals increases along with improved decision-making. Overall, it allows the organization to be built on trust and learning.

Autonomy and Flexibility

Schedules and resources can be adjusted by individuals. They can hand-pick the ways of achieving their OKRs. This motivates employees to achieve their goals both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Stretching

The very important factor of OKR is “Stretching”. OKRs allow you to stretch and think out of the box. This makes your moonshot objectives achievable. OKRs challenge organizations to create more aspirational objectives and strive further.

When all the previous said points are implemented correctly in an organization, it automatically means that they are functioning well and traveling towards massive success.

How to Adopt OKRs to Your Organization Successfully?

Now that you are aware of the multitude of benefits that OKRs will bring to your company, ask yourself the following questions:

“Can I/we write good OKRs”
“Will I/we be able to explain the roles each employee plays in the OKR?”
“Do we have the desire to successfully implement the OKRs?” etc.

It is extremely necessary to have answers to these questions as one is supposed to be fully informed, confident, and committed before adopting OKRs, otherwise, you would not be utilizing OKRs to their full potential.

After setting these OKRs, it is equally important to have frequent check-ins to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Once these are in place, OKRs serve their full purpose in running your organization effortlessly.

Examples of How OKR Benefits Almost Every Team

As mentioned earlier, Objectives are Key Results go hand in hand. Let us put it this way, the Objectives(s) are your Coffee, and Key results are the ingredients to making a perfect cup of coffee.

Let us look into a few examples.

OKR for Marketing:

With well-defined marketing OKRs, your organization can achieve great product leadership, strengthen your brand, and set a high reputation in the market.

Objective: Increasing brand awareness

Key Results 1: Delivering blog content for the audience weekly.

Key Results 2: Putting out content on social media platforms.

Read more about Marketing OKR Examples

OKR for Sales:

Writing good sales OKRs can help create an excellent sales team. OKRs give structure and stretch goals. It helps strategize goals and priorities while also paving the way for individuality.

Objective: Increase annual revenue

Key Results 1: Enhancing customer acquisition to 20%

Key Results 2: Increasing annual renewals from 70% to 85%

Read more about Sales OKR Examples

Conclusion

Given the OKR benefits above, it seems that Objectives and Key Results are best suited for highly aspiring organizations. Datalligence’s OKR platform is an agile goal-setting framework that helps inconsistent progress tracking. We help create company objectives as well as align team objectives with individual objectives. Our OKR framework helps initiate feedback, OKR retrospective inside the platform. It also allows you to share success and celebrate achievement within the tool. Check out our tool for a trial version.

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So far Ramya P C has created 25 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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