How to achieve results in organization with OKR (objective, key results framework) (2023)

Micromanagement, undertow, the silo effect and lack of trust can happen with any organization. It does not matter if the organization is small and growing or is stable and experienced. There is always a possibility for these inefficiencies. Miscommunication in projects is the most common factor of failures according to founder’s feedback. In the past several years, a system of goal setting and achievement has become more apparent.

Due to this, OKR is becoming more and more popular. It helps synchronize how every team member understands their business’s purpose and realize their role’s contribution in those processes. The pain point for many managers is management and coordination. A clear system that defines how to distribute tasks and prioritize them saves many hours and nerve cells.

Approach for organizational management OKR (Objectives and Key Results) was introduced first time in Intel. From 1999, when Google started to use it, many companies in different fields and scales such as LinkedIn, GE, Salesforce, Netflix, GoPro, Facebook, Amazon, Walmart, Target, The Guardian, Dun and Bradstreet and ING Bank also implemented it.

Goal setting

The main OKR’s idea is a structural goal setting in a company. Like the hierarchical nature of pyramid structures, OKR starts from an ambitious and big pictured objective. This objective is measured by several metrics, called Key Results. They should help answer the question: Is the goal achieved or not? The same approach cascades to all departments, teams, and specific specialists at the bottom of the pyramid. The idea is to organize all management logic in a transparent way that everyone can understand their role in the achievement of a common goal and will be motivated by this challenge.

To stretch a goal is significant to OKR philosophy. It creates healthy tension for growing all aspects of an organization. Setting such ambitions goals allows to focus on main objective and achieve more. At the same time, goals should still be realistic, otherwise no one will believe that the goals were possible. Key Results input measures success criteria for employees and teams.

An annual goal can be split into months or quarters based on how long the goal will take to complete. This is done for better control and perception of dynamics in long-term, even long-distance, business relationships. Also, smaller time periods are effective regarding realistic calibration of Objectives and KR during continuous progress. Employees, teams, and departments plan their strategy to achieve OKR independently. They can chunk common period into smaller pieces for easier self-control and build a transparent and specific schedule. The recommended numbers of Key Results to Objective is no more than 3 to 1.

Good example: Strengthen the position in a premium segment.

Bad: To maintain the position on a market.

Formula: I achieve (Objective), what can be measured by (Key Results)

Prioritization

OKR teaches how to extract a key result and prioritize. According to Paretto rules, 20% of our activity brings 80% of results, it is better to focus particularly on that 20% and leave or delegate the remaining 80%. It also minimizes the risk that someone accidentally strays from the main goal. This is important because you do not want an employee to put all effort and resources in something that can look important but actually does not correlate with the main agreed objective.

To check how clear and cohesive the OKR is in every part of an organization, you can follow a goal that a random employee is tasked with. Ask yourself, “Does the employee maintain consistent logic from the bottom to top and does this employees work correlate with the organizational objective. This is easier said than done, as contradictions appear between employees, departments, and top-managers all the time. This is especially apparent if the segment in question was guided before by their own expectations and ideas. The most difficult part of prioritization is to say no. Even in 80% of cases, it is required to refuse good ideas to save time for the objectives and key results.

OKR helps to solve this problem and prioritize without conflict. This framework makes all goals public and transparent. You should be able to call a top goal and ask an employee how they think their goals correlates with the organizational goals. Transparency increases motivation by directly attributing personal contribution to the big success. Meanwhile, control of task completing is decentralizing because the quality of everyone commitment is evident on a peer level.

OKR IMPLEMENTATION CHECKLIST:

• Are the goals of departments/individuals connected with the company’s goals?

• Are key results (metrics) directly linked to priorities?

• Does everyone on the team have three priorities or less?

• Are all objectives agreed upon and clearly defined?

• Are all employees aware of their metricsand understand them?

How we approach OKR framework in a digital agency

At the end of 2017, I read Christina R Wodtke’s book, “Radical Focus.” This business novel explains how to deal with a crisis in a start-up team. Many ideas were similar to the situations in our company and reflect my questions. For example, when you announce a common goal in a meeting, but in a few days, forgets the common goal and, instead, works towards their own individual goal. Before the start of the new year, we decided to start implementing this framework. First of all, our expectation was to sync effort in order of common understanding, specific role, and personal commitment. Secondly, we want to make planning and outcome control transparent and clear.

The getbob agency has around 20 people working for it. This agency has a range of teams that have a few projects for every client. We do not have a single product, which is why we had to adapt the system to better suit our needs. As this year’s goal and strategy were outlined, we started to assign quarter tasks and KPI’s (financial results, productivity, quality of production based on clients’ feedback). The OKR framework was announced during the first company meeting of the year as an experiment. We explained that we decided to take this path because it shows great outcomes in inspiring companies like Uber, Google, … etc. We created a shared Google Spreadsheet for cascading weekly focus tasks and projects, highlighting important work for every member of the team. In the same columns, we added a block for short reports (you can find out more about OKR structure in handbook).

The employee had to formulate their priorities and add them in the file for coordination with the team lead. The most difficult issue that we have ran into is how to get team members to laser their focus. OKR isn’t a to-do list, it’s an identification of the main things. It is very hard to keep a list of 5–6 tasks without losing focus. The panic of time pressure as well can make it very difficult to make a quick decision, figure out what to do first and figure out what needs time (the same idea is translated in one of the most inspiring and modern time-management book “Make time”). We try to implement a rule that states, “no more than 3 focuses for a week.” We did this because people tended to add many focuses that were not the most important for the business. The second part of OKR is a focus defining. It should be aligned with the company’s goals instead of just highlighting process.For example, “Continue to do great design,” instead of, “Creating 3 pics for social media that should get more than 1000 likes.”, which is more clear and relevant.

To exchange information, we initiated regular “briefings” — a 30-minute general meeting held on Mondays to set the company’s priorities for the current week and check them against the goals of individual employees. Initially, the CEO analyzed the tasks coming from below and outlined goals, but that did not involve the staff very much. That’s why we came to a joint discussion, each project team stated its priorities, and they were then recorded on the board. Besides that, we organized voting, a rating on a 1 to 10 scale, on how much we believe that we willachieve our quarter Key Results. Also, every team member shows a card with red, yellow and green color regarding three topics — team mood, level of utilization and clients’ mood. This helps to manage rapidly grab potential threats.

One more OKR element is the celebration of achievements on every Friday. The advertising sphere is quite stressful. Projects sometimes are being prepared for six months before the launch and there is a problem of professional burnout as well. Micro-tracking of one’s achievements (i.e. fixation of the way to the goal step by step) helps to encourage the corporate spirit and self-esteem on the way to campaign launch. We tried to spend these 30–40 minutes at the end of the week in a totally informal way. For example, we’ve ordered pizza to the office, provided beer, and got to share a meal with co-workers while chatting and joking.

We had kept using the experimental modefor several quarters and decided to make this system permanent. Metrics for the next period were adjusted on a basis of the previous results. The management and employeeswere gradually learning to choose the most essential ones, building personal development plans based on OKR.

Because of OKR efficiency, it became more evident for a manager, what team is doing.We attained a structural framework for sharing information, projects’ status and new traditions through the process of implementing OKR.An annual anonymous surveyof employee satisfaction shows that employees who understand how their contribution influences on the main goal, we increased the potentially considered period of work for the company has increased as well as the desire to grow professionally. With an understanding of priorities, conflicts are going to be resolved easily especially regarding the allocation of resources between projects.

ANTON TATARINOVICH, marketing manager at SplitMetrics:

We have integrated the OKR system to plan quarterly goals for both the company as a whole and for each department — from development and support to sales and marketing ones. The goals were presented at the general meeting — they are transparent and available to all employees on the corporate intranet. The system implies a strict prioritization of tasks, and such prioritization has become one of the difficulties. The thing is that each department processes a large number of requests — both planned and spontaneous — in each unit of time, and every request seems important and essential. It was not an easy task to identify the directions of activities that gave the maximum “spin-off” and refuse a large number of other activities, and mainly — to bring this approach to every employee.

We now hold weekly meetings with management to discuss progress towards achieving OKR and current issues. We have decided to move in stages, so we are now trying to gather as much feedback as possible to make the next quarter more structured and efficient.

Despite the difficulties, with the integration of OKR we became more focused on prioritizing tasks and discarding all the unnecessary.

We have also brought transparency into the work of all departments. OKR became a point of synchronization of this work — now all our employees have a better understanding of what we are working on, who is involved in the work and what tasks they are engaged in.

Advices that I can provide for teams that plan to implement OKRs:

1. Prioritize goalsl sharply. It’s challenging to choose 1 or 2 main goals, but strongly recommended. Otherwise you will spread attention.

2. Engage all members of setting OKRs. If not you can face a situation when only CEO is interested in implementation, but heads of departments don’t understand why they need this and continue to work as before.

3. Track process transparently. Don’t make it complicated. It’s enough to organize meetings weekly or bi-weekly.

4. Split to phases. It’s OK that your first try to set OKR can fail. By this practice you can start to think what is really important and learn how to maintain focus and grow your business results.

ANNA USOVA, content-manager at actiTIME:

In the recent past, I worked as a marketing specialist at Wrike. This company was established in 2006 and has more than 500 specialists all over the world. Wrike integrated the OKR method in 2016. As the company was growing very actively at this time, we needed to coordinate the work of individual teams and groups better and thus to accelerate product development and market expansion. At the end of the year, the company’s top management set forth from 3 to 5 annual goals and the key metrics to measure them. These goals were discussed at the final all-hands meeting at the end of the year, so that all employees had an understanding where the company was going and how their current work was related to strategic objectives. Basing on these general objectives, the head of each department formulated more specific goals for the department.

Of course, those goals weren’t 100% in line. For example, if on the global level the main company’s goal was growth of new clients, specific objectives of technical support were different. Then, at the beginning of the year, separate teams held internal meetings to determine their own team’s and individual annual objectives and metrics. Thus every team and employee decided independently on tactic level how and with a help of which tools they will achieve global goal. Such approach leaves space for proactivity and initiatives from the bottom. Teams that work closely with each other (i.e. content marketing and acquisition) used to discuss and synchronize their OKRs. Quarter goals were set using the same work process.

Regarding reporting, Wrike uses agile-methodology with weekly meetings. On those we discussed pipeline of tasks and aligned results with OKRs usually once a month. In the end of quarter, results were presented on a final all-hands meeting. Taking in account that objectives should be highly ambitious and rarely can be achieved fully, we were satisfied with result of 70–80%. OKR’s tracking was organized in our own product — Wrike project management software. We created a hierarchy of tasks and subtasks from global level to specific teams and positions. It’s easy to understand priorities of colleges when you can surf from high overview to individuals. In those tickets we posted final results and marked the percentages of performance.

The most difficult part of setting OKRs was to set objectives and key results the right way. There are specific requirements that not every goal can fit. Someone created goals within their routine tasks whereas OKR assumes achievement of radically new results. Some folks set sleek goals without measured results (i.e. increase brand awareness). We needed one year to learn how to execute framework properly. In my opinion, the OKR system helps to reach a proper balance between the coordination of the company’s global priorities and a personal initiative. Every employee is involved in the planning process; they are not just waiting for some tasks from the management. Another positive thing — it increases transparency. It becomes clear what tasks the colleagues are working on this quarter and what basis they use to prioritize their tasks (if there is a conflict among several tasks from different people).

OKRs also make visible what was achieved quarterly or annually apart from the usual routine, and it increases satisfaction from the work.

Some tips for establishing the OKR process:

1. Find the right tracking tools that make your OKRs accessible for every employee. These can be task or project management systems or Google Spreadsheets.

2. Organize a briefing for department’s heads and explain how to formulate OKR. They should share this knowledge further with their team. Otherwise people might not get the idea behind the OKRs right.

3. Don’t forget to track performance and discuss results. If some goals weren’t achieved, learn why without blaming anyone.

4. Encourage personal initiative. Sometimes employee can’t understand what a manager wants from them. If goals are created only by team leaders without team engagement, all game becomes a pure formality.