Committing to actionable and ambitious goals is essential to an agile people operation system’s success as it ensures that your employees are aligned to your company’s vision, values, and culture. So, what approach should you incorporate to set motivating and meaningful goals that are easy to track? Use OKRs.
OKRs mean Objectives and Key Results, an agile framework that enables organizations, departments, and teams to maintain pace and direction. The framework has played a significant role in helping Amazon scale its team and collectively achieve its objectives.
Other sites like this, including Uber and Google, have ripped big from the implementation of OKRs.
People operation teams and HR are increasingly adopting the framework to respond to the continuous changes experienced in every organization.
Here, you will find tricks and tips to establish unique OKRs for professional success in your business.
What Are OKRs?
You can utilize approaches in your business to connect a series of actionable steps to an audacious goal. Notably, the framework has the following elements.
- An objective that determines your ultimate destination and what you want.
An objective is defined by key characteristics that should guide you in determining whether it is viable.
- The objective must be qualitative as it uses simple communication to clarify the expected result or the endpoint.
- You should settle at less than four objectives for each department as too many would result in a lack of focus on the priorities.
- Your objectives’ language should describe progress and not a language that shows to maintain the status or provide usual descriptions.
For instance, you should use words like “Boost,” “improve” and “increase” rather than “sustain”, “keep” or “continue.”
- Key results include the means to get to your destination. Mostly the key results are simple steps that you and your team members need to take to reach your goal on time.
The Key results should be
- Quantitative, meaning that you should measure and specify each result. ‘
- They should also be Outcome-oriented describing the expected result of the employees’ activities. Note that the OKRs framework is not a performance review or a to-do list.
- Ensure that there are at least three significant results for every objective.
StaffCircle’s performance management software brings together multiple systems under a single platform to save time, improve efficiency and maximize productivity for better employee performance.
How Will OKRs Benefit Sites Like This?
Through the framework, your business will achieve;
- Improved communication through intra and inter-team interaction using a consistent language that describes needs, goals, and progress.
- Employee engagement as they easily understand what you need them to do and how it relates to the general organizational objectives.
- Focused execution that prioritizes departments’ and employees’ daily activities on tasks that could significantly impact performance and success.
- Strategic alignment that puts individuals and teams in line with the company values, vision, and strategy.
It is okay not to reach a100% of your OKRs as it shows that you have set high value and ambitious strategies. Treat the OKRs that you fail to achieve as a learning opportunity and understand what improvements are needed. The continuous learning approach creates a strong foundation for professional success.
