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Unlocking How Google Sets OKRs

For years, Google has made headlines for being a key leader in so many things – innovation, revenues, growth and expansion, people management, and leadership. There’s no wonder why so many people love to seek work opportunities at Google, thinking that by the time they leave the company and start a tech business on their own, they would be able to manage their own companies like Google does.

Google is not only known for its innovative products and services. The company is also known for their work practices. Speaking of which, one of the most popular management frameworks that Google use is the Objectives and Key Results (OKR).

It’s a goal-setting methodology that has played a key role in the company’s rapid success. In fact, when it was introduced to the company by John Doerr, Google has only about 30 employees. The company was really small and new. In addition to these brilliant employees, they had nothing but ambitious dreams.

Larry Page, the CEO of Google, used this powerful tool to support his goal of growing the company 10X. That was a highly ambitious goal, almost impossible to achieve. But through OKR, the company was able to find its path towards their ultimate goal, and even exceeded it!

So how does OKR work? Learning how Google sets OKRs is one of the best things you can do to drive growth, productivity, and engagement in your company.

But before that, let’s have a quick discussion about OKRs.

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. Objectives basically state the “WHAT” – the goal of the company or where it is headed. Under each objective is a set of key results which basically determine whether the company has achieved its objectives or not.

The key results must be specific and scalable. They shouldn’t be misconstrued as “tasks”. They aren’t simply a “to do” list that talks about what a company, team or person has to do. Rather, they should be the results of these smaller tasks.

How to Set OKR Like Google

Google believes that the power of OKRs is far-reaching and transformative. And more importantly, they help improve performance.

Check out these tips in order for you to set OKR like Google:

Limit your objectives.

Having too many objectives is counterintuitive. You don’t want to spread yourself thin. It hinders your team from focusing and keeps your employees distracted. In Google, each employee – from the CEO down to the level-one employees, objectives don’t go above 5 items. There should also be a maximum of four key results under each objective.

OKRs need to be measurable.

It is very important that your OKRs are measurable. In Google, OKRs are graded using the scale of 0-1. However, getting a perfect “1” is not the goal. In fact, if you get this score, you’re not nailing it. At Google, it means you are setting goals that are too easy. You’re just sandbagging it.

The best score would be between 0.6 to 0.7. When setting goal, Google encourages teams to go out of their comfort zone. If achieving such objectives make you feel a little uneasy, you are on the right track.

OKRs have to be visible.

One of the key features of OKRs is that they drive transparency and accountability. More importantly, they drive collaboration between teams. At Google, everyone knows what everybody’s OKRs are. They can access it anytime through a centralised database. Even bottom team members can see what Larry Page is working on, and vice versa. This way, teams and individual employees will know what help to offer and when.

50% of organisational objectives need to come from bottom-up.

In Google, managers don’t tell their members what to do. The company believes that giving employees accountability on their contributions drives engagement. Google has a unique and effective hiring process that lets them choose the best, smartest people. Being confident in their capabilities, Google believes that employees have different perspectives on what the business needs. OKR-setting in Google is multi-directional and puts more emphasis on employees’ feedback.

OKRs can be personal.

Your OKRs may not be purely reflective of the organisational goals. Especially when it comes to team-member levels, managers encourage their employees to set a goal for themselves, whether it’s adopting a new time management habit or pursuing their passion.

They should benefit your employees.

There’s no doubt that OKRs bring tremendous OKR benefits to your organisation as a whole. However, it should also help your employees. This framework encourages discipline by encouraging people to set challenging goals and work hard to achieve them. It teaches them to focus and get less distracted when working on their goals.

Managers need to work closely with their team members.

In Google, managers conduct 1-on-1 coaching sessions or check-ins with their team members not only to monitor their progress but also to guide them. Through coaching sessions, both the manager and the member can openly discuss what the latter wants to do and what the company wants him to do. This also ensures alignment.

OKRs are not performance measures.

OKRs are not scorecards that can be used as the basis for a salary increase or promotion. While OKRs help managers assess how much an employee contributes to the overall goal of the company, they should not be used as performance measures. However, OKRs can be used as a basis for recognition. This drives even more engagement as employees would feel appreciated for their hard work.

OKRs need to be cascaded properly.

Cascade OKRs by mapping them across organisational teams and structures. As the leader, you want to make sure that each of your teams and business units has the competencies and resources they need to achieve their objectives.

Google aligns their employees with the organisational goals through the SMART model. It is important for managers to guide their members, in the form of coaching and in-depth training, in order to set them up for success.

Are you ready to take your company to the next level? Be sure to follow these best practices from Google. For more insights, check out the Google OKR video that was watched over 250,000 times!

That was way beyond what’s considered ‘viral’ in business videos. Also, don’t forget to take our Organisational Mastery Quiz to further uncover the areas that you can improve to help your teams perform at their very best.

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If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company´s Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

The post Unlocking How Google Sets OKRs appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

Understanding the OKR Basics to Fully Unleash Your Company’s Potential

Understanding the OKR Basics

In his new book entitled Measure What Matters, American Investor and venture capitalist John Doerr talks about how focusing on the objectives and key results (OKR) can significantly boost the performance of any team.

Doerr studied electrical engineering. He joined Intel in 1974 and later moved to a venture capital firm. He made a fortune by investing on Amazon, Google, Symantec and Intuit.

Doerr has been one of the great minds behind the continued success of Google. In 1999, he made a whopping £11.8m-investment in exchange for a 12% stake at the company. He made such a huge investment after feeling impressed by the drive and passion of Google’s co-founders – Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

While they were really good at the industry they’ve chosen, Doerr knew Page and Brin lacked management experience. In an effort to steer the growth of Google, he gathered all employees of people – composed of 30 strong-minded individuals – and presented a pitch about a management tool that has become widely popular since then: Objectives & Key Results.

In his book, Doerr described how OKRs, combined with the company’s Larry Page’s ambitious goal of going 10X bigger, transformed Google. There were also insights and contributions from some of the most successful people in the business world, such as Bill Gates and Susan Wojcick (CEO of YouTube). Each of them shared how OKR helped transform their companies and empowered their people.

If any of these companies and business leaders inspire you and would like to emulate their achievements through your company, you’re in for a treat. The discussion below showcases the potential impact of OKR to your company.

OKR Basics: Eliminating Fuzzy Thinking

Doerr defines OKRs as a collaborative OKR approach to goal-setting. It can be applied to your company as a whole, in teams, and even in individual level.  However, he notes that OKRs are not a miraculous fix.

OKR cannot replace your sound judgement, strong leadership, and workplace culture in your company. OKRs can be used to guide your company to strengthen further these corporate fundamentals and guide you towards growth and success.

OKR as a Survival Tool

According to Doerr, OKRs are a survival tool that smaller start-ups can benefit from in order to guide their company in the same direction. In the tech industry, in particular, new companies must be able to move and grow fast before they lose money on capital.

Having a structured set of goals give companies like yours a “yardstick” for success. OKRs are specific and give them a clear vision of the path they want to take.

Medium-sized companies that are rapidly scaling can greatly benefit from OKRs too. Through OKRs, individuals can easily clarify expectations. They are able to answer important questions, such as what they need to do to get things done fast, who will work on it, and how to keep your employees aligned with your company goals.

In large companies, Doerr points out that OKRs serve as a neon-lit road sign. This framework helps eliminate barriers and nourish connections between teams, departments, and individual contributors. Furthermore, OKRS keep even the most successful companies achieve more by encouraging “stretch goals”.

Quality Over Quantity

Another OKR basic is the principle that quality is more significant than quantity. Thus, setting fewer goals in a specific time period is much better and highly encouraged than setting many goals. The ideal number of objectives is between 3 and 5. According to Doerr, having too many objectives can just distract people from focusing on the most important things.

It was a problem experienced by MyFitnessPal – a successful health and fitness app. Before they implemented OKRs, they were used to setting too many goals. They were trying to get a lot of things done that they had a hard time prioritising. When they started setting fewer OKRs, they were able to focus on things that create more impact.

Scaling As Fundamentals to OKRs

Simply writing down your goals, say for a quarter, already increases your chance of achieving them. And by monitoring its progress and sharing it with your department heads, you even have more odds of succeeding. This is what OKRs are about.

In fact, in one study, it was found that people who recorded their goals, tracked them on a weekly basis and reported their progress to a friend were 43% more likely to achieve their objectives than those who simply thought about their goals and didn’t share them.

OKRs was first used in the 1970s by Intel. It has since been applied by many organisations and even the government of the United States (when it made its stretch goal of setting foot on the moon). With OKRs in place, managers became mentors and coaches. There began a more emphasis on data than assumptions.

Undoubtedly, OKRS are highly effective, proven tool that drives companies to excellence. And if it worked for Google, Intel and other companies, it will work for your team too!

Eliminating Hierarchy

Another interesting Objective and Key Results concept is the abandonment of organisational hierarchy. Most companies follow the “rule of 7” wherein managers are limited to a maximum of 7 team members. However, the fewer the ratio of manager and direct reports, the more hierarchical the organisation becomes.

Having more team members allow for a flatter organisational chart, greater frontline autonomy, and a better environment for creative collaboration that all lead to the next company breakthrough.

Setting Ambitious Goals

Larry Page was very ambitious with his goal of growing Google by tenfold. But with the use of OKRs, he and his team were able to set challenging yet achievable objectives, and measurable key results that led to the realisation of their ultimate goal.

One great example of innovation powered by OKR is the Gmail. The major problem with earlier web-based emailing systems was that they had very low storage. The ability to archive data was just out of the picture. During the development of Gmail, the developers thought about doing an enormous upgrade, with the goal of offering 100MB of storage per user.

By 2004, Google didn’t offer 100MB of storage. Rather, they provided a full 1GB! That’s more like 500 times that of their competitors. That changed the digital communication industry. Google made another historic mark.

All these lessons from Google may not sound replicable but the OKR framework can help your company stretch these limitations that you feel. Remember that it’s designed to keep pushing your teams forward. You may not land on the moon anytime sooner but if you’re breaking all the company performance records, it’s kinda like landing on the moon already : )

If you want to know more about this type of strategies and framework in optimising your company performance, we created an Organisational Mastery Quiz to unravel aspects of your company performance that can still be improved beyond your expectations. It’s less than 5 minutes to answer all the questions.

ORGANISATIONAL MASTERY SCORECARD

We have developed a free assessment in the form of a Scorecard to help you establish which areas of business you need to focus on to achieve your particular Organisational Mastery.

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If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company´s Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

The post Understanding the OKR Basics to Fully Unleash Your Company’s Potential appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

The Basic Tenets of Objective and Key Results Implementation

Objective and Key Results Implementation – to be able to effectively implement Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), it is important to understand how this whole process starts.

The following diagram demonstrates how your organisational vision is connected to every team and individual contributors in your team, from the annual down to the quarterly OKRs.

Vision

Mission Statement

Long-Term Goals

Short-Term Goals (done every year)

Objectives and Key Results (done every quarter)

Why Your Company Vision Matters

One of the reasons why OKRs are very popular these days is that they are focused on execution. A lot of other goal-setting framework help organisations define the “WHAT” but do not help answer the “HOW” which basically talks about how the objectives or goals will be achieved. But for the organisation to get started working on its goals, they should first determine the “WHY”.

It is essential for every team member to understand the purpose behind every company initiatives, processes, and actions. When a company is able to identify what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they should execute their roles, they are able to achieve transparency. More importantly, they become truly aware of what success really is and how they can achieve it.

How to Define a Company Vision

As the leader who has to set your company OKRs, you will have to begin by thinking about the “end” in mind. Like how you see your company a few years from now.

The way you set your goals should be guided by what your company vision is. Your company vision must be easily stated in one sentence. It should describe what your organisation aspires to be. It’s basically your company’s ultimate dream – the end result of all your efforts.

Often, company vision statements are mistaken for a company tagline. While a vision can sound witty and unforgettable, it is meant for your team and culture. It is not meant to sell products. Thus, it is not needed that you create a vision statement that is appealing to everyone. Rather, it should be huge and ambitious.

Sure, it might take years for your organisation to achieve such vision. It is not easy, but it’s the driving force that pushes you and your employees to work hard each day.

How to Define a Company Mission Statement

Part of objective and key results implementation is defining the mission statement of the company. You might wonder – how does your vision translate into your mission statement? What is the difference between these two? Basically, your vision describes the end result of everything you do – your efforts.

But your mission statement lays out the reason for why your company exists. Your mission statement is where you plan how your products or services will take you to realise your company vision.

For a better view, let’s make Walt Disney Company as an example. Their vision statement is “TO MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY”.

But how will they be able to make people happy? Their mission answers the question. Their mission statement is to be the world’s leading producers and providers of entertainment. They will do it through their unique brand, content, services, consumer products, and innovative experiences.

When creating your company vision and mission statement, consider these tips and suggestions:

       Determine the things you are really passionate about. What do you envision yourself at the end of this journey? By answering this question, you should be able to start your vision statement.
        Think about your skills, experience, talent, and resources. Using these things, what can you contribute to the world?
        Next, determine the main economic denominator that is essential for your company. Understand what drives your economic engine.

How to Strategically Plan for Your OKRs

Creating your company vision and mission statement is one thing. Achieving them is another. Using the “Hedgehog Concept”, you can achieve your mission statement through the following ways:

Focusing on what you are passionate about. This should help you really focus your efforts on developing a product or service that you want to offer to your target market. Strategies like market research can guide your company in identifying industry benchmarks and developing ways to ensure that your products fit your market.
Focusing on what you do best. You also want to dig deeper into the current resources of your company. That includes the skills, knowledge, and experience of your employees. You have to know your organisation, so you will determine what it’s best at. It gives you an opportunity to establish efficient internal processes and strategies to achieve your company vision.
It is also vital that you identify the economic metrics of your success. How much money should you have earned in order to say that you succeeded?

Many organisations make use of strategic planning systems that allow them to focus on the goals they set under each category. However, these tools are not made to replace OKR as your goal setting strategy. They should be considered as a “stepping stone” in your objective and key results implementation.

Annual OKRS

In some companies, annual goals are created through OKRs. It is a common practice to break down these annual OKRs further into quarterly OKRS to allow team members to focus on the execution. Take note that organisation OKRs are aspirations. In general, the key results of your company will show the main metrics that the leadership team supervises and held accountable for.

Nonetheless, many organisations commit the mistake of interchanging “tasks” with “key results”. Many people think that these two are just the same. However, they are not. Tasks are tasks – activities that employees have to do as part of their roles. Key results are indicators of success. Achieving them means achieving your objectives.

OKRs does not promote micromanaging of teams. It basically provides a framework that helps organisation determine what constitutes success, and what teams and individuals need to do to figure out how to get through their goals.

An important thing to remember when implementing objective and key results (OKRs) is that the high-level key results are assigned either to the CEO or the leadership team, or a specific department/team.

If OKRs are too narrow from the top, by the time they have been cascaded to the team members, individual contributors might end up having a to-do-list and not OKRs, and thus, will be less empowered to set their own goals.

ORGANISATIONAL MASTERY SCORECARD

We have developed a free assessment in the form of a Scorecard to help you establish which areas of business you need to focus on to achieve your particular Organisational Mastery.

Take The Test

If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company´s Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

The post The Basic Tenets of Objective and Key Results Implementation appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

Five OKR Disadvantages that May Affect the Way You Set Your OKR

OKR, a goal-setting methodology that was first used by Intel and Google, has become widely popular in the world of business. Many companies have followed the path taken by these companies and integrated the concept of OKRs in their daily operations, with the hope of achieving their company goals and growing their business. In fact, a lot have seen the benefits of OKRs, from startups to Fortune 500 companies like the Duxter.

This goal-setting framework rests on the principle that your employees have to set their individual goals and key results, and should be responsible for them. Generally, the CEO and the key leadership team will first set the OKR of the company, then the management teams or departments will follow (ensuring that their OKRs are aligned to that of the company’s). This gives employees a clear view of what they can contribute to the success of the company. As you can see, OKRs promote accountability not only among the major stakeholders but among team members too. Everyone in the company has their share of responsibility. However, just like any other management framework, there are some challenges in implementing this framework. I wouldn’t call it disadvantages but learning how to deal with these things is essential in order to get the most out of OKR.

Challenge 1: How Specific OKRs Should Be?

Many managers run into a challenge of determining how specific should employees’ OKRs be. The rule of thumb is that the more specific OKRs are, the better. One of the primary purposes of this goal-setting framework is for employees to know exactly what they need to do in order to contribute to your company’s success, and what they are held accountable for. By creating specific key results, managers can easily make expectations.

On the other hand, some people wonder – would being too specific lead to less creativity of the employee? Great question. Fortunately, for OKRs to be effective, companies need to adopt a “self-managing” approach in which employees have the freedom to decide how they are going to reach their objectives. Basically, it’s about being specific with the “WHAT” and not with the “HOW”.

Challenge 2: How Do You Measure OKRs?

One of the major characteristics of OKRs is that they are measurable. OKRs become vague when you cannot associate them with a numerical value. But it isn’t always easy for some teams, especially those in the highly technical roles, such as developers. In instances like this, however, it is advised that employees put their milestones as their key results. They should break down their objectives into different phases or stages and use them as key results. It is important to not confuse key results with tasks. Key results have to describe the milestones. Meanwhile, the steps needed to recreate the issue are what constitute their action items.

Challenge 3: Setting Challenging Yet Attainable Goals

There’s always a concern when it comes to setting “attainable” vs “challenging” goals. Striking the right balance between the two is a common issue in many companies – big or small. OKRs are meant to challenge members of the company to set ambitious goals. But that doesn’t mean that they need to set unattainable goals. There’s no room to play it safe, but they have to be realistic too. Managers bear the responsibility of encouraging team members to stretch their goals but ensure that they have the resources and support they needed. Otherwise, employees will just feel demotivated.

How do you set a challenging yet realistic goal? For example, if you’re looking at increasing the sales quota of your team members, you don’t just pick a number and say you want them to increase their sales by 90% at the end of the month. Before you determine your sales increase goal, you look at your historical data, understand the trend of your business, and then discuss with your employees why you would want to raise their quota (discuss how it will benefit the company). Listen to their feedback, suggestions, and comments. Openly discuss the potential barriers that your employees think they might encounter along the way.

Challenge 4: Keeping Your OKRs Relevant

By now, you must have a lot of OKRs in mind. But how do you keep them relevant? Experts recommend using the 70/20/10 model when deciding what to put in one’s OKRs. This means that 70% of your OKR should be related to your major duties or role, 20% on projects or initiatives that are directly related to your position, and 10% on personal projects that you are passionate about. Even though OKRs have to be focused on what an employee needs to do at a given timeframe, they should also be given the freedom to pursue their own personal projects for their personal development and growth.

Challenge 5: How Often Should You Set OKRs

For how long should set OKRs retain its validity? Well, it depends on you. Some companies prefer to set OKRs annually, quarterly, or monthly. Some prefer combining different timeframes. You could have an annual OKR and a quarterly one, similar with Google. Experiment on what works for your company and your employees. Remember, however, that setting longer OKRs might affect your team’s flexibility or ability to adapt to changes.

Even with all these challenges, OKR is still one of the most robust goal setting cum management framework that 21st-century companies can ever have. Here are some benefits the totally outweighs the challenges above.

Team Greater Engagement

Rewards and compensation aren’t the major drivers of employee engagement. Studies have shown that people become more engaged in the workplace when they have a clear understanding of their goals and how they can contribute to the company through their roles.

Better Use of Resources

Another great advantage of OKRs is that it avoids creating duplicate objectives, Since OKRs are visible to all employees, there’s a less chance of two or more teams having the same project or initiative. This results in better use of resources, which means less money, effort, and energy. This is especially beneficial for remote teams or those that are working from different geographical areas.

Better Communication, Stronger Connection

The use of OKRs strengthens the connection between departments and teams within a company. In most companies using this framework, there is a systematic approach to cascading individual and team-level objectives and key results. And since employees can see what everybody else is up to, everyone develops an understanding of other team members’ roles and find ways to support them.

Better Performance

Through OKRs, employees would have clearer expectations of what they need to accomplish. At the same time, managers can easily track the progress of their team members. This is a win-win situation, benefiting both the lead and his staff. Coaching and feedback sessions or check-ins can also be more targeted since the manager knows exactly what the employee is working on.

See? With these benefits, your company is better off adopting this framework than not having any structure at all in keeping everyone on the same page in your company. If you want to know more how to optimise the growth of your company, we would like to invite you to a proprietary quiz that we designed to uncover essential areas of improvement that your company needs. Check our Organisational Mastery Quiz. It’s essential that you take this quiz before doing any large scale management shift in your company.

ORGANISATIONAL MASTERY SCORECARD

We have developed a free assessment in the form of a Scorecard to help you establish which areas of business you need to focus on to achieve your particular Organisational Mastery.

Take The Test

If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company´s Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

The post Five OKR Disadvantages that May Affect the Way You Set Your OKR appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

How to Set OKR: A Quick Guide

Do you wish to adopt OKRs the way Google does it? Do you want to be successful like them in implementing processes and empowering your team? If yes, feel free to read on.

Whenever they set objectives, Google usually starts with their organisational OKRs. These are the high-level objectives and key results that give everyone else in the company a clear goal of what the path Google wants to take. Under each objective are three to five key results.

Remember that successful OKRs (Objective and Key Results) are not one-sided. Suggestions can come from up and down the organisational chart, producing less hierarchy. This may feel a little uncomfortable for you if you an open line of communication between you and your subordinates hasn’t been opened or has been weak for the longest time. It’s a good kind of side effect that you must endure. Growth means moving from your comfort zone.

This also promotes collaboration among your team members. Everyone can freely give an opinion. They can talk about what they think are the best ways to reach the company OKRs and how they, within the boundaries of their roles, can contribute.

Important Tips When Setting Objectives

Limit your objectives to 3-5. Having too many objectives can cause confusion and diffusion of efforts.
Use aspirational expressions. Positivity goes a long way. Avoid expressions that don’t push for new achievements, such as “maintain our current market value”, “keeping hiring”, “continue implementing this…”
Use tangible terms for your objectives. Your OKRs should be clear and easy to comprehend. According to research, setting specific goals can lead to more chances of succeeding.

Essential Tips for Creating Key Results:

Write down 3-5 key results per objective.
The key results should be measurable. Once achieved, each of them will advance the objective.
KRs should describe outcomes, not the tasks. If your key results start with words like “participate”, “analyse”, or “consult”, they are mere activities or tasks, not measurable results. Each milestone should include some proof of completion, and it should be available.

OKRs that involve clear goals and measured properly can help your company achieve greater heights. At the same time, it can help you focus on what matters the most. Poorly written OKRs, on the other hand, can create confusion, poor strategies, and prevent your team from advancing. They also undermine the internal metrics and make your company goals harder to achieve.

Traps to Avoid When Using OKRs

When setting your OKRs, try to avoid these traps:

Poor cascading process for stretched goals.

OKRs allow your company to stretch goals. But these challenging goals require careful communication to avoid any confusion between your managers and teams, especially that in most cases, some teams depend on the work delivered by other teams to achieve their own OKRs too. If a big part of your OKRs is affected by another team, make sure you communicate properly and work hand in hand.

Creating “business as usual” OKRs that don’t make impact.

These types of OKRs are those that you can achieve without changing anything in your system or challenging the status quo. How do you know you’re making business-as-usual OKRs? A good way to check is to rank your team’s current work and the new projects you wish to create. If your OKRs require just the same amount of effort with your current team initiatives, then you’re doing it wrong. You have to drop low-priority efforts and change your OKRs. Sometimes, you will find that some of your objectives remain the same every quarter. That’s fine if that is always a high priority. However, your key results should evolve, so they push your teams to become more efficient and innovate.

Sandbagging

When your company is hitting the OKRs perfectly each time, your team is sandbagging it. It means you are not stretching your managers and entire teams, hoarding resources, or not going beyond your zones. Avoid low-value objectives. OKRs should deliver value to your business. Otherwise, there’s no point of spending efforts and resources on them. Even if you achieve them, they won’t make a significant impact to your company. Your OKR should focus on the tangible benefits that set the mark higher.

Insufficient key results

The success of achieving the objectives of your company lies in the key results. If the KRs of a given objective are insufficient to fully achieve the said objective, then it won’t work. This greatly causes a delay on both the allocating resources and completing your objectives on time.

Even though strategies differ from team to team (and even among individuals), it can be helpful to help your team familiarise with the organisational OKRs first, and then help them align their OKR with your company’s OKR. Next, you have to decide how many team OKRs will work for your company. For example, check if you need to create OKRs per department, function, and sub-group.

For team-level OKRs, take note they should not always reflect the company’s OKRs. Nonetheless, they should still be aligned and reflective of these high-level goals, or at least one or a few of them.

What’s the best way to set your team OKRs? A very good approach is to meet with all team leaders in goal setting. In Google, leaders gather together and list down their priorities for the coming quarter, within the context of the company.

When determining these goals for the coming quarter, you need to pay attention to your company OKRs and check whether your team priorities are connected to the key results of your company.

Furthermore, assess if your team priorities will likely help your company achieve its major goals, if there are some things missing that you think your team should be working on, and if there are more than three priorities.

Also, remember that OKRs are not a checklist. They aren’t designed to serve as a master list of the tasks that your team has to work on each quarter. If your team looks at their OKRs as a shared to-do list, they might get confused between what they want to do and what the entire team needs to achieve. Make use of OKRs to assess the impact you want to see and let them come up with ways or methods to achieve this goal and measure the impact.

Understanding how to set OKR should not be a complicated process. With this guideline, you should be able to effectively set your team OKRs in not time.

If you want to go deeper into the rabbit hole in optimising your team’s performance, we created an Organisational Mastery Quiz. This is composed of 30 questions that will reveal exactly where you have to work on aside from setting your company’s OKR. It’s not a set of long-winded questions so this should only take you five minutes the most.

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If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company´s Products and Services pages. We provide Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

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OKR Guidelines: How to Set and Reach Your Goals

OKR Guidelines

First introduced in the mid-1980s, OKRs is a goal-setting methodology is still being used today by many companies, including Google and Intel. It was developed by Andy Grove of Intel and Gary Kennedy of Oracle. Fast forward to the present, OKR has become a solid framework being implemented by leading companies worldwide. If you want to greatly accelerate the growth of your company, it makes sense to follow suit whatever strategy these other successful companies do, right?

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) seems to be a very effective management tool that many organisations swear by and wouldn’t really trade for other goal-setting strategies.

But what makes OKRs so powerful? And how can you apply it to your team in order to boost the growth of your company?

When applied consistently, OKRs can significantly improve your chance of achieving your goals and produce top-performing employees who are highly engaged and motivated.

OKR Best Practices

Set fewer objectives at a time.

When setting goals, it’s easy to get carried away and list down as many objectives as possible. Having too many objectives can lead to confusion and lack of focus among your employees. The ideal number of objectives per OKR is between 3 and 6. Remember that OKRs are short-term (usually three-six months). Thus, you will have some other time to work on other goals. Prioritise the most important objectives. Having a lot on your list can lead to burnout among your employees, and fewer accomplishments.

Quarterly OKRs works best for most companies.

Compared to other time periods, setting OKRs quarterly is ideal because three months is not long enough to prevent changes from taking place, and not too short to not achieve any significant result.

Annual OKRs are important too.

Apart from the quarterly OKRs, it would be beneficial for your team to have yearly OKRs. These should be comprised of high-level goals or objectives and must reflect your company mission and vision. Your quarterly OKRs should be aligned with your annual OKRs.

Each objective should have Key Results.

Once you determined your objectives, the next step is to identify the KRs for each. These are measurable results that let you know whether you have achieved your objectives or not.

OKRs must be measurable.

Setting quantifiable OKRs is critical to ensure that you have a means of measuring and tracking your progress. Knowing what your goals are, and creating a process of measuring the fulfillment of these goals for your entire team help in having a clearer understanding of what works and what needs to be done. This also guides your team members to focus on things that lead to the best results.

OKRs must be time-bound.

OKRs are not meant to last. They should have a clear end date. This is not only to instil a sense of urgency but more importantly to stop postponing important tasks, set a due date on measuring results, and focusing on high-priority tasks on a timely manner. Having a deadline allows your team to accomplish more and work harder.

The best OKRs are almost achievable.

A 100% score on OKR does not indicate success. It means that your team has played it safe by setting easily achievable objectives. Proponents of OKR suggest finding the middle ground – the sweet spot between the impossible and the achievable. Thus, a score of 60 or 70% is considered very good.

Objectives are based on historical data.

You don’t just create objectives out of the blue. Apart from ensuring that your goals are aligned to the overall mission and vision of your company, they should also be based on facts. When setting OKRs, you should take into account historical data and trends. This way, you could effectively set up ambitious yet achievable goals that motivate and challenge your team.

The best OKRs are inspiring.

While your OKRs are challenging, they should inspire and motivate your team members too in a way that they are willing to push themselves to their limits and work hard to contribute to the company’s success. You can inspire your people by creating OKRs that support the big picture (organisational goals), that clearly benefit your employees, and have definite, actionable steps.

It follows a clear mission.

When creating your objectives, it is important to think about the specific reason why you want to achieve it. It’s important that your OKRs are aligned with the mission of your company. Ask yourself – does it help the company grow? Does it help improve customers’ lives? And does it help the rest of your team grow?

Each team member should have an OKR.

For an OKR to be effective, it needs to be created and owned by an individual then reviewed by the manager. Both should keep track of the team member’s OKRs to ensure that the objectives set are being achieved. Having ambiguous objectives with no stakeholders is never helpful and can simply lead to poor accomplishments. Setting multi-level goals in an organisation is essential to the effectiveness of OKRs.

Individual level – OKR is owned by an employee
Team level – OKR is owned by a team (employees plus their manager)
Company level – owned by the key leadership or management team and the CEO – You

As the manager or leader in you company, it is vital for you to seek approval from your team members in order for your OKRs to be effective. You want to solicit their feedback and suggestions and empower them to contribute more to the success of your team. Companies that set their OKRs in public have the highest success rates because individual objectives and key results are being reviewed by both their managers and peers.

OKR experts agree that better performance is seen on teams that set goals with cross-functional contributors. “Goals that are public for the entire company to see get 10.4% more check-ins than private goals.” Says CEO Kris Duggan of BetterWorks.

Forget about hierarchy. One research found that employees view their manager’s goals 20% more often than their own. This means that people value transparency and accountability and expect that their management team will also reciprocate.

Imagine a company working in harmony achieving unified goals. That’s what OKR can do for your company. If you want to know how you can better transform your company from a not-so impressive workforce into a high-performing driven team, take this quiz to understand the areas you can still improve.

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How OKR Works: A Beginner’s Guide

How OKR works?

OKR is a phenomenal goal setting framework that many companies swear by. It’s easy and simple. Very straightforward and is results-driven. Google, Intel, Amazon, Spotify and many other leading brands have been using it for many years. They deem it an effective tool that drives productivity, accountability, and engagement among employees from top to bottom. If you feel a massive disconnect between executives and teams in your company, OKR is a simple yet efficient mechanism  to fine tune this problem. As a leader, one of your roles is to keep everyone on the same page and this can be a really challenging responsibility if you don’t have a system to rely on.

Beginner’s Guide to How OKR Works

Would OKR work for your company? It’s a proven, sustainable concept that has worked for many companies worldwide. So it’s more likely to work for your company too if properly implemented!

However, as with any organisational tools, one of the biggest challenges when it comes to adopting this powerful framework is getting started. How do you start? Where do you start? How do you cascade it to your team? How do you know it’s working? Fortunately, there are vital steps that will allow you to successfully work OKRs.

In this article, you will see a checklist which you can use it as a quick, accessible reference to write your own Objectives and Key Results.

Does the way you write an OKR really matter? That’s what many company leaders ask. After all, isn’t OKR just any other goal setting methodology practised across companies in various industries today?

Well, the answer is yes. The way you craft your OKRs is essential. The reason is that OKRs are not just goals. They also provide a framework for strategy and execution. They also serve as a communication tool for conveying strategy to your entire team. It happens all the time – in some companies, good strategies often end up in the trash bin because they weren’t executed properly. Furthermore, putting more efforts on writing OKRs as a team can open the doors to innovative goals that can be achieved.

Before writing your OKRs, you must be familiarised with its two major components. The first component talks about your goals, and the other one is focused on key results.

How to Write an Objective

There are a few qualities of great objectives. First, they should be qualitative goals. They aren’t blurry or ambiguous, and should give a clear answer to the question “What”. Second, your objectives should be aligned with the company goals as well as your corporate strategy.

Creating objectives can be a tough task. Companies that have implemented OKRs sure know how tempting it can be to set up a multitude of objectives at every possible level. Below are the key questions that you should be able to answer to create effective objectives.

Is your objective high-level?

Is it inspiring?
Does it help you achieve the goals of your organisation?
Is your objective indispensable?
Is it time-boxed?

If your answer to all these questions are a big “YES”, you’re doing really well.

How to Write Key Results

The key results serve as the backbone of any OKR. Without specific, measurable key results, it will be difficult for anyone in your company to materialise their objectives. Basically, key results are quantitative indicators of whether the objectives have been achieved. They aren’t KPIs, as many people think. The key results are the specific steps that you should take in order to reach your objectives. They should be measurable. Otherwise, they are not considered KRs. Generally, KRs should adhere to the SMART guideline. They should be Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Is your KR a result, not just an activity or task?
Does it help you achieve a specific objective?
Is it time-bound?
Does it belong to either a stretch or an operational type of goal?
Is it important enough to appear in the top 5 KRs for the objective?

OKR Templates & Examples

Before proceeding with the following template and examples, bear in mind that there is no one-size fits all approach for all possible uses and cases. Use the sample below only as a guideline for wording your OKR. You can change this anytime.

Sample Template:

We plan to succeed in _________(OBJECTIVE)_____________ , as measured by _____KR____, _____KR______ and ____________. We plan to achieve this by ____DATE_____.

Check out the following examples of OKRs:

Example #1

Objective: Increase employee engagement

Key Results:

Implement at least three engagement activities per department.
Reduce attrition rate from 10 to 5%.
Increase eNPS from 75% to 92%.

Example #2

Increase production by 40%.

Key Results:

Hire 20 more staff.
Provide incentives to most productive employees.
Rearrange staffing schedule.

Example #3

Objective: Improve the new marketing process

Key results :

Develop personal relationship with 8 potential customers
Increase lead generation by 10%
Launch 3 webinars in two months

More Tips on Writing Good OKRs

Keep your OKR simple and specific. Many executives think that they need to contribute to every departmental objective, so they often end up spreading themselves too thin. Make sure to prioritise your objectives according to what your business needs.
Cascade your objectives. It is important to let your team members and the rest of the company know about your objectives. This way, your employees will have a clear idea of what your goals are and how they can contribute to the realisation of these goals.
Your KRs should be measurable. Whether you want to increase your revenues by $10,000 in one quarter, write 10 blogs for the month, measuring your key results should tell you when you have achieved your goals.
Do not worry about stretch goals. The best objectives are difficult to achieve. But they are not possible. You want to encourage your team members to create stretch goals (ambitious) goals from time to time. It can be frustrating for them when they are unable to achieve those goals. However, by encouraging them, they could reach great milestones. By continuous feedback and coaching, you can help your team members reach their goals.

The success of your OKR process greatly depends on how you write them. The guidelines mentioned in this post, together with the examples and additional tips, should help you create powerful OKRs that will greatly aid in achieving your company goals.

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How OKR at Google Works and Approach You Can Learn From Them

Google is probably the largest (and richest) multinational technology company in the world today. Everybody knows Google and the name has been part of many people’s daily lives. But apart from being the search engine as we know it, Google has so many technology products and services (some of it, the company has acquired or purchased over the years).

What’s its secret? There’s probably plenty. But there’s one that you can adopt right now as a leader in your company. It’s OKRs.

OKR has been used by Google even before it was just a small, thriving company. One of its investors in the name of John Doerr, introduced it to the company as a way of setting goals and achieving them. OKR stands for Objectives & Key Results.

This framework originally came from Intel (which Doerr has been part of). It’s a simple structure designed to help companies, teams and individuals set challenging goals and achieve them through measurable actions. OKR is not only applied to team management. It can also be helpful in your personal life.

How OKRs work at Google

Want to adopt OKRs the way Google does it? Here are the steps:

Set an objective. The objectives you will set for your company should be clear, specific and measurable. It shouldn’t be ambiguous. For example, saying that you want to improve your sales department is not a clear objective. Rather, you say “I want to improve our annual sales by 30%.” Next, set a number of “key results” which should all be measurable. These are the qualifiers that would tell you that your team has achieved their objective.

At Google, employees have 4-6 OKRs per quarter. Going more than this threshold is not healthy and productive as you won’t be able to focus. They also have OKRs at a company level, team level, management level, and personal level. Everyone works together to ensure that their company is on track in terms of hitting their targets.

Google does OKRs on an annual basis too. The yearly OKRs are the umbrella objectives where the rest of the team and individual OKRs can be patterned from. Even so, these OKRs are not set in stone. It evolves as the year goes by, and therefore adaptable to changes.

OKR at Google: An Actual Example

Klau’s OKRs are a great example of how this framework can be applied to your company. His OKR looked like this (not copied in verbatim):

Objective: Improve Blogger’s Reputation

Key Results:

    Speak at three events to re-establish Blogger’s leadership in the industry.
    Coordinate Blogger’s 10th anniversary with massive PR efforts.
    Personally reach out to Blogger users.
    Eliminate music blog takedowns and fix the DMCA process
    Set-up Blogger on Twitter and personally update discussions regarding the product.

OKR Best Practices

In Google, measuring OKRs take only a couple of minutes. They put more effort in achieving their individual goals, not worrying about their grades.

After each quarter, employees grade their key results through specific, quantifiable set of scales. Contrary to what you might think, achieving a perfect score of “1” is not the goal. You must aim for a score of 0.6-0.7. As Google puts it, if you’re getting a “1”, you are not crushing it. You’re just sandbagging it. On the other hand, a score of 0.4 suggests that an employee needs to take a deeper look at how they’re doing. It could mean reviewing the key results or making changes in existing processes to achieve the set objectives. If they have a low score, employees need to ask themselves – what can we do differently to achieve the goal?

This is one of the best components of OKRs. Basically, there is always a room for changing things, adjusting key results, and improving processes along the way. This is vital for any company especially in a world as dynamic as today’s business arena.

Furthermore, their OKRs are accessible to everyone, from the head down to the frontline employees. It’s part of their internal profile. Not only can anyone see what others goals are, but they also can see their scores. This might seem intimidating, but at Google, this practice helps everyone understand what anyone else is working on. For instance, when Rick Klau of Google Ventures was working on the homepage of YouTube, his OKRs were visible to his team and everyone else in Google. They could check out his OKRs, see what he’s up to, and either shape or pattern their own goals, and get guidance on how they could set up their OKRs for the next quarter.

Are OKRs Used to Support Promotion?

While OKRs are a great way to assess an employee’s performance at work, it is not used to determine promotions. At Google, OKRs are used by employees to understand and keep track of what they have accomplished. According to Klau, if he was up for a promotion, he will use his OKRs as an easy, quick system that lets him personally understand what he has done for the company.

OKRs can be powerful criteria for promotion. It’s up to you if you want to include it for your company promotion process. Imagine how your team will take this framework seriously if OKRs would be included in advancing their career.

Conclusion

OKR is a great framework that your company can adopt.  Regardless if your company is big or small, it has a lot of advantages worth emulating. This is not only clearly demonstrated by Google but also by other non-tech companies.

Goal setting shouldn’t be a complicated process. OKRs do sound simple and straightforward indeed. And that makes it really appealing to many companies. It makes it easy on everyone – from key executives and managers down to individual contributors. What’s more, it promotes transparency and efficiency. As everyone knows what everybody else is doing, everyone within your company has a deep sense of responsibility of keeping track of their goals and working on their key results. Of course, individual OKRs are best done under the guidance of their supervisors or managers who should be able to give constant, timely feedback and coaching.

Companies that implement OKR have their own processes and guidelines. It is important to experiment on what techniques work best for your company. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to implementing OKRs.

Have you tried establishing OKRs in your company? How did it benefit your team? What are the best practices that you can share?

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Seven OKR Best Practices to Guide Your Team

OKR (Objective and Key Result) is a promising framework for keeping your team aligned with the long term vision and mission of your company. If you’ve been planning to implement this for company but uncertain of the ways to fully maximise its implementation, below are some of the guidelines and best practices for adopting OKR.

Before writing anything for your company, you have to understand the nature of OKR. This framework has two essential characteristics. These are:

The Structure

There are two major questions that have to be answered when creating OKRs for your company:

Where do we want to take our company (what are our goals?)
How will we get there? (what are the steps we need to take? Must be measurable)

These two guiding questions must be used by your entire team in writing their OKR. From your key leadership teams down to the team members, answering these two questions creates a cascading interplay of objectives that keep the entire company aligned and aware of what the path the company is aiming for.

Philosophy

There are a few characteristics that set OKRs apart from other goal-setting strategies. First of all, OKRs consist of ambitious goals. Achieving all the goals set by your team or employee means that they are playing it safe or setting low goals. While goals are ambitious, OKRs are attainable. Second, key results should be measurable. They are tied to tangible milestones that are used to track the team or employee’s progress. Third, OKRs are geared towards transparency. Each person’s OKR is visible to other members of the organisation. Lastly, OKRs are also designed to improve performance, and not merely to evaluate the employee.

OKR was developed by Andy Grove of Intel and was passed down to John Doerr who introduced the idea to Google. Until today, OKRs are widely used by big and small companies in supporting the growth of their organisations.

How OKRs Benefit Your Team

OKRs benefit a company in plenty of ways.

It keeps your company aligned.

OKRs connect you, your team members and the rest of your workforce to the company objectives, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and moving in the same direction.

It helps you focus on what’s really important.

OKRs help you concentrate on measurable key actions, not just your everyday tasks. These are impactful steps that are critical to achieving your company objectives.

It drives transparency.

Instilling a transparent culture is essential to today’s modern companies. Through OKRs, employees know and understand what everybody else is doing and how each of their roles is making an impact on the company.

It EMPOWERS your people.

Along with transparency, OKRs instil accountability and a sense of responsibility. The increased visibility of everyone’s course of actions and objectives give them a sense that they need to make the best decision to create an impact on the company.

It measures progress.

A goal that is not measured remains a goal. Through OKRs, team members can accurately measure how everybody (from departments to teams and individuals) is  doing in terms of achieving their goals.

Higher goals mean more significant accomplishments.

OKR is a framework that challenges your employees to surpass their limits and set ambitious goals. This lead to groundbreaking accomplishments and remarkable results.

OKRs as Practised Today

Companies that use OKRs have created a solid system of cascading OKRs from top to bottom. Basically, each key result cascades to the next level as an objective for that team or individual. For example, the key result of the VP Marketing office of getting 10,000 new customers by the end of the quarter will become the objective of the teams or individuals under it, such as the Product, Marketing & Engineering departments.

In some companies, OKRs are cascaded in a directional approach. Thus, the leadership group allows individual teams to contribute by asking them of their aspirational goals, along with their personal development goals that don’t strictly fall into the company’s objectives.

Writing OKRs: Best Practices

Below are the best practices many companies follow when writing OKRs.

For Objectives:

Each team, department or individual should have 3-5 objectives.
Objectives should be achieved in a certain timeframe (e.g. after one year or one quarter). It is not an ongoing task.
Objectives must be ambitious. In Google, a 70% success rate is considered a remarkable performance.

For Key Results:

There are 3 key results per objective.
Key results are measurable.
They are the steps needed to achieve an objective. Thus, achieving the key results means achieving your objectives.
They describe outcomes rather than activities.

Getting Started with OKRs

Implementing OKRs in your team is easy. The following process helps you transition from traditional goal-setting to OKRs in roughly six weeks before the start of another year or quarter.

Identifying Your Team Objectives and Key Results

The first step in setting up an OKR is to identify three to five primary objectives of your team in the coming year or quarter. Basically, it should come from the high-level vision and mission of your company. Once you named your objectives, your team should identify the key results or the steps needed to accomplish these goals. For example, if one of your objectives is to increase your sales by 100%, a key result could be hiring 3 account executives.

Deciding on How Your Team will Organise OKRs

Monitoring OKRs can be challenging. Established companies like Google make use of internal tools designed by their own data analysts and engineers, while others make use of standard methods like spreadsheets. Whatever tools you decide to use, your team has to identify a systematic process to roll out the OKRs to your team members. Otherwise, it can get very disorganised, and your employees or team members may not appreciate the value that comes out of it.

Collaborating with Team Leads in Drafting Objectives

Once the primary OKRs of your company has been established, the next step is to gather all departmental heads and cascade the importance of OKRs, and how each of their own OKRs will benefit each department and the company as a whole. Set up a meeting with all heads or executives involved and together, create a process of rolling out OKRs.

Cascading OKRs to the Rest of the Company

Once the leads of various teams or departments have been onboarded, it’s time to do the same to the team members. Team leads will take care of cascading the new process to their respective teams, and will see to it that everyone understands what has to be done.

Writing Individual OKRs

After the meeting, the leads or managers talk to the team members to kick off the OKR writing process. In this process, the manager and the team member works hand in hand. During their initial check-in, the team member outlines what he or she wants to work on and compare it with what the manager expects of him or her. It is important, however, that the individual’s OKRs are aligned with the OKRs of the team and the company. At the end of the check-in, the immediate superior and the team member should achieve a compromise. The immediate superior should empower his members to make their own decisions and goals, but at the same time, ensure that these are aligned with the values and goals of the company.

Calibration

After the first cycle of OKRs, it is crucial for your company to step back and take a look at how the individual OKRs may have changed any of the team or high-level company OKRs. If you feel good about your team’s OKRs and the results, it’s time that you present it before a company-wide meeting, collaborating with other teams heads to finalise the direction of your company for the next year or quarter.

Monitoring of Individual OKRs

As each employee or team member has an OKR, the manager must check on their progress and see to it that the key results are being executed. OKRs are also a great way to measure team members’ performance and instil a sense of accountability among them.

With the steps and best practices above, you can easily adopt the OKR framework to your company. Some executives can implement this on their own and others would need some guidance. Feel free to reach out to us. If you think this won’t help your company you might want to try our Organisational Mastery Quiz. It will help you reveal the real transformation needed by your company. Try it. It won’t take 5 mins.

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How to Fully Maximise the OKR Benefits for Your Company

Maybe you’ve heard about OKR in an executives-only grapevine. You heard other guys saying they’re having lesser headaches with their teams. Maybe you heard that everyone in Company A is breaking their performance score after many years of stalling the company’s growth. The culprit behind, OKRs. Of course, as the leader of your company, you want the same results.

So would your company benefit from adopting OKR? Below are some of its major advantages. The best thing about it is you don’t have to be in a specific industry for your company to reap these OKR benefits. It works for everyone.

It is an agile system.

Unlike traditional goal setting methods, OKRs are preferably reviewed in short-term basis. The short cycles allow for faster adjustments and enable your company to adapt to change. Having an agile system gives room for innovation, and reduces risk and waste.

OKRs promote collaboration

One key characteristic of OKRs is it ensures alignment among your teams and employees. Having shared OKRs promotes collaboration which leads the way to better problem-solving. At the same time, it solves problems with interdependencies and unites competing initiatives. Imagine how it will put everyone in your company in sync?