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Guide to OKR Workshop and Best Practices

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A few years ago, scientists at the Dominican University of California found that people who made lists of their goals sent those lists to friends, and tracked their progress had a nearly twofold higher likelihood of accomplishing those goals than their less organized peers. 

A similar system is effective, in our opinion! You can achieve comparable outcomes by implementing the well-liked Objectives and Key Results methodology (OKRs) in your company. But first, make sure that everybody is on board.

It’s likely that you, as an OKR champion or someone in a leadership role at the company, will want to lead an efficient OKR workshop, so let’s begin with one quarter.

We’ve got you covered if you’re stressed out about leading your first OKR review session because of the impending “end-of-quarter crunch”!

What is an OKR Workshop

OKRs are generally set on quarterly basics. And it’s the end of the quarter. Your internal stakeholders have a question that they keep asking as the current quarter draws to a close. You made your initial plans three months ago.

What are we going to do next?

An OKR workshop is a collaborative session conducted within an organization scheduled for reviewing old OKRs and drafting new ones. The purpose of the OKR workshop is to gather all the key stakeholders and set meaningful objectives and define measurable key results. OKRs workshops are also conducted to review old OKRs and review any roadblocks that may arise in the future. The workshop also allows for an open-ended discussion and feedback from all the employees and ensures that there is clarity and buy-in from all the participants.

It is a big job if that sounds like it. You’ll be an expert once you start holding these brainstorming sessions regularly, so don’t worry!

If you have doubts about conducting an OKR workshop, Read our latest blog on How to conduct an OKR Workshop

How to run an engaging OKR workshop

Don’t worry if you’re facilitating an OKR session for the first time. You can pull this off like a pro because we’ve divided the workshop planning phase into a number of parts.

Before the OKR Workshop

With any sound plan, you probably take some time to validate the strategy, specify the project’s parameters, and establish a few short-term benchmarks.

Similarly to this, your OKR workshop will have effects on the entire company, so you should have a strategy in place before the meeting. Here is a detailed step-by-step guide:

1. Clarify the company vision and goal

At the beginning of the year, the organization would have communicated the vision and goal for their annual year and where they’d like to allocate their resources this year.

So, before you start the workshop, It might be a good idea to talk to the employees that the annual goals still stand. That way, If there is any change in the vision or goal for the annual year, Objectives can be changed and it can save time and avoid confusion. 

2. Talk to your Employees

Don’t forget to collect input from various team members from each department as you plan the agenda for your OKR workshop. The opinions of the team should be considered during this discussion. After all, they are carrying out the daily tasks necessary to achieve those strategic objectives.

Make sure you give teams a chance to independently review their OKRs from the previous quarter. posing the following inquiries:

  • What issues did we concentrate on?
  • What did we discover?
  • What succeeded?
  • What could be done better or how might we approach this differently?
  • What unanswered questions are there left?

This allows teams to enter the session with details and data and provide context to others on what happened and what they worked on.

3. Compile Existing data and make them presentable

Now you have spoken to your team and gathered their honest opinions, it is time to pull out your company data from the current quarter and decided how out present it.

Tools like Datalligence – OKR software can help you present your data in a more holistic view during the meeting. Using Datalligence- OKR software can help present your data more visually and appealingly.

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