Are you struggling with the current strategies in your company? Or are you looking for a replacement for the traditional approaches that are proving ineffective? The best way to yield results in your company is to incorporate the Objectives Key Results (OKRs) strategy.
The simple management framework will keep everyone in your company engaged and make progress towards the overall objectives.
Andy Grove first introduced the OKRs framework in the 70s, but it’s John Doerr who popularized it through his seminal leadership book titled “Measure What Matters.”
Soon after John’s book, the framework revolutionized management thinking among leading companies such as Twitter and Amazon. Thereafter, it became a widely accepted practice even in small businesses. Visit profit.co to learn more about ways to apply OKRs in your business.
So, How Does OKRs Work?
It is every company’s main objective to improve performance and profitability in every department. For that reason, it has become common for companies to set departmental and individual objectives. However, the top-down approaches easily lead to confusion, and employees get stuck.
The Objectives Key Results has become widely accepted to help companies achieve their goals through measurable and specific actions. Therefore, the objectives should be time-bound, actionable, and ambitious.
Find a comprehensive breakdown of OKRs elements below.
Objectives
These are strategic priorities that the company determines. Ensure that the objectives you come up with demonstrate inspirational goals. Besides, the objectives should be precise for every department and individual in the company. Notably, the qualitative objectives you set for every quarter should not exceed five.
Key Results
These are the crucial deliverables that are aligned to each objective. The results help the manager measure departmental and individual progress. Ensure that the key results you develop are achievable and quantifiable. While your key results can be binary or numerical, you should base them on performance, growth, revenue or engagement.
The following is a clear example of how OKRs might look in practice.
Objective 1
- Improve employee engagement and satisfaction
Key Results
- Implement the OKRs strategy for all departments and teams by 1st May.
- Conduct Fun-Fridays every week and invite an external speaker to meet the employees.
- Maintain an average weekly satisfaction score of at least 4.5 points.
Objective 2
- Increase the recurring revenue in the company
Key Results
- Reduce churn to less than 2% every month
- Maintain an average subscription of at least $300 every month
- Increase monthly subscription shares to 90%
Objective 3
- Incorporate and implement the user-testing process
Key Results
- Review at least 20 video interviews every month from a user testing website.
- Conduct at least 10 face-to-face testing sessions every week.
- Ensure that at least 75% of the people interviewed are from the company’s core target group.
Key OKRs Principles
The following are some of the leading principles you should follow in your organization as a goal management framework.
Clarity and alignment
OKRs should be transparent to every employee and manager. The clarity helps every stakeholder in the company read from the same page and understand what is expected of them.
With an aligned framework, all teams will be moving in the same direction and striving to achieve common outcomes.
Collaboration
The OKRs strategy’s essence is to make every employee feel engaged and have a strategic role to play in achieving the organizational goals. The fact that every stakeholder is aligned in the same direction towards the common objective, having effective teamwork is the only way you can yield positive results.
Top-down and bottom up
The OKRs strategy is mostly set at the top level where priorities are established, and every department is allocated the most achievable objectives and key results.
This way, every department, and employee establish their tactical OKRs to contribute to the organizational strategy, making the entire process effective, efficient, and engaging.
Simple and supple
The best way to get the best out of the OKRs strategy is to set it monthly or quarterly. This strategy enables the manager to track the progress in every department and make necessary changes and improvements.
Notably, having a user-friendly framework makes the entire process quicker. Therefore, ensure that you communicate with your team and dedicate resources to the business of achieving your objectives.
Why Should I Visit Profit.Co?
Companies such as LinkedIn and Google attribute their success to the commitment to using OKRS. Besides, there are many more companies recording profits and increased engagement by following in the footsteps.
OKRs software has been available online, where you only need to learn and apply the type that fits your organization. Just visit proft.co and learn the best framework that will steer your company’s performance and profitability.
The following are the main benefits of using the OKRs framework with consistency and conviction.
It keeps your team ambitious to achieve more
Results from companies using the OKRs in most of their operations show that it is much unlikely to achieve a 100% achievement. These results are contrary to the traditional approaches where companies expect 100 % accomplishments.
Through OKRs, you set ambitious and bold goals that make every employee feel inspired. Therefore, you should consider it a great stride even when you only reach 65% of your target.
They are frequently updated
In most cases, your company is likely to experience a changing market or environment. Therefore, you need a framework that is easy to change and update according to critical requirements.
The OKRs are implemented on a quarterly basis meaning that you can do the necessary review after every quarter, which could be a month or so.
Enhanced engagement
Allowing departments and individual employees to develop their objectives and key results that align with the overall organizational objectives means that they own the initiative and feel part of it.
Besides, the managers engage with employees to ensure that they are progressing well in their objectives and clearly understand the expected outcome.
It is inspiring and liberating when every person in the company knows that their activities are clear and aligned to the overall objectives. The OKRs framework helps produces ambitious results that can be tracked across the quarters.
