OKR: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO DEVELOP YOUR ORGANIZATION

OKRs are great for every industry and discipline. Whether talking about small, medium, or large companies or non-profits organisations, OKRs work the same for setting goals throughout many company levels.

WHY OKRs?

OKRs clarify and align the vision around the organisation’s objectives. It challenges co-workers to find their way to attain the goals allowing more teams autonomy and self-organisation.

As a result, it fosters more challenged and motivated workers aligned around shared objectives. It makes it possible for teams to achieve more than they thought they would.

OKRs contributes considerably to create a value-oriented working culture within organizations.

WHAT IS OKRs?

The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method is a management technique that consists of bringing together all the team members, or/and several teams, or/and the whole organisation to collaborate to achieve challenging, ambitious, shared, and measurable goals.

This method defines the significant goals that determine what the individuals, teams or the organisation aims to achieve, while key results show whether they can get there. This tool enables alignments on a high-level strategy. It fosters an ambitious and determined team(s) to accomplish the company’s mission, the results of which must be measurable.

OKRs origins and success stories?

Created in the 1950s by Peter Drucker, the method was known, at first, as MOB – Management by Objectives. In the early 70s, Andrew Grove adopted it for a strategic change at his company.

In 1975, he presented the OKRs theory at a conference. John Doerr, one of Google’s early investors, was very interested in his talk. He introduced it to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who decided to apply it at Google in 1999.

OKRs are, until now, within the operations of Google and many other companies, such as Twitter, Spotify, and LinkedIn.

The essential points to set up the OKR method:

By practicing the OKR method, the company sets ambitious and achievable goals.

OKR practice, hence, answers two fundamental questions:

• What are you going to accomplish? So it clarifies and aligns around a common goals

• How do you get there? So it challenges self-organising teams to explore different lines of actions to achieve the goals.

How to succeed with OKRs?

What are the key success factors that will help us to succeed while implementing OKRs and what are the pitfalls to avoid?

Setting ambitious goals collaboratively:

As it is teamwork, all members work together to determine the goals to be achieved and the strategy and techniques needed to get there. All must mutually agree, not dictating.

By this method, you can help your teams and push them to learn new ways of working, gain many skills and upgrade themselves. Indeed, the goals to set should create a spirit of challenge among the team members to motivate them to do their best and achieve remarkable results.

Anti-patterns to avoid while establishing goals:

• Dictating objectives. (It needs to be set collaboratively)
• Establishing easy objectives. (It needs to be challenging)
• Diverging, too many goals to focus on. (It needs to be concise and clear)
• Not making the objective SMART. (It needs to be Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant and TimeBounded)
• Set Output oriented objectives rather than outcomes-oriented objectives.

Maintaining autonomy:

Co-workers self-organize to define several initiatives that contribute to the achievement of the set objectives, usually after a quarter, such is the case with many companies that apply this technique.

As OKRs could be applied at an individual level, a team level, or an organizational level.

Each collaborator, team, or department could define its tasks, lines of actions, or initiatives that suit him the most in order to contribute to the achievement of the objectives.

Anti-patterns to avoid at this phase:

• Dictating the way or the how to. (You could inspire the way)

Measuring regularly:

While working with OKRs, we need to regularly supervise our progress and ensure that the strategy is running smoothly toward our challenging objectives. This fosters our commitment and motivation to achieve the goals set.

It is recommended to use some Tasks Management tools like Jira to regularly follow up the progress of your teams toward your organization strategic objectives. You could modify as you go along the objectives and the initiatives to eventually achieve the most important wanted results according the new market needs.

Anti-patterns to avoid at this phase:

• Not measuring key results regularly.
• Inattention to results achieve.
• No transparency (Restricted dashboards, tuning and adjusting key results and stats reports)
• No inspect and adapt process, no test and learn process.

Communicating constantly:

It is essential to communicate with each other in the different stages of the mission to achieve our goals; this is a golden rule.

Members and teams should share with each other the ups and downs encountered while performing their tasks, what they tested, what they learned, as well as sharing any information that will be useful and that can help others in their work.

Communication about work allows everyone to closely follow what is happening in the company.

Anti-patterns to avoid at this phase:

• Not sharing the learnings among the teams and the organizations
• Not adjusting the strategy after the learning

Don’t forget to celebrate success with your team!

To keep the energy rubbing on the teams, celebrate success stories. It is really

Your turn now :

Have you ever tried to practice the OKR method in your company? Any pitfalls or advice to share with us?

In case you need any help with OKR implementation or on making your organization well energized and more responsive to the markets, feel free to contact us

MORE YOU KNOW, MORE YOU GROW :

To know more about this practice, you could find more details here: management30: OKRs

If you need any further help on making your organization well energized and more responsive to the markets, you can also contact us

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