What are OKRs

Goals and objectives are the backbones of how a company succeeds. They represent the most crucial aspects of a company's strategy. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a popular strategic planning method that helps teams and companies set goals, make progress, and drive results.

Large organisations like Netflix, Amazon, and Google all have adopted OKR planning and have been able to achieve their planned outcomes

Benefits of OKRs

1. OKRs help you to write down precisely what are your short-term and long-term goals that you want to achieve in a given time period and at the same time.
2. Every OKR has specific measurement criteria that helps you measure the success of your actions.
3. OKRs give you the flexibility to change your direction based on your interim measurements and outcome analysis. For example, if you have planned to measure the outcome at the end of each quarter and if you identify that the outcomes are not as expected, you have the freedom to modify the OKRs and reset to another direction to achieve the goals

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How to write OKRs

OKRs can be written at the individual level, team level, or at organisation level. The structure of an OKR contains an objective written at the start and about 3 to 5 or 6 supporting key result areas against each objective. Key results describe the various checkpoints that are measurable and help you analyse the achievements.

For individuals, it refers to what is the goal for an individual person. Example:

Objective: Learn skills to become a full-stack developer by Sep 2022.

Key Result Areas

• Join a training institute.
• Practice coding skills for 4 hrs every day..
• Create a project with new skills.
• Build a portfolio.

For teams, it refers to what significant goals they want to achieve. Example of OKR for recruitment team:

Objective: Reduce the overall lead time to interview by 30%.

Key Result Areas

• Manage all candidatures in the application tracking system.
• Agree on a pre-decided interview panel for each job profile.
• Confirm interview session within 4 hrs of acceptance by candidate.
• Conduct an interview within 48hrs with the candidate.
  

For an Organisation, OKRs define the directions and objectives the company wants to achieve.

Objective: Achieve Sales Turnover of $1M in the current financial year.

Key Result Areas

• Automate online lead generation activities.
• Increase leads by 30% month on month as compared to last financial year.
• Hire 3 senior sales representatives with 10-15yrs experience in enterprise sales.
• Generate a minimum $500,000 value worth of pipeline month on month.
• Get closures worth $100,000 month on month.

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OKR Visibility and Transparency

OKRs are not just for the senior management of the company. OKRs are planned in collaboration with the execution teams, making it extremely important that the OKRs are shared across the board.

1. Visibility of OKRs enables a sense of ownership at both individual and team levels.
2. It aligns all teams and individuals towards the goals set and moves in the direction of achieving the key results.
3. OKRs bring transparency within the execution by different teams and build a collaborative environment since everyone contributes in the direction of the goals defined.

Conclusion

Planning OKRs is a great start to visualise and track the progress of your objectives. OKRs have been in practice since the 1970s and have grown in popularity over the years. Google was introduced to OKRs in 1999 which became a part of their culture. OKRs bring agility to teams and make the employees push themselves and perform better. They offer flexibility and freedom to pick the direction and speed at which the objectives need to be achieved. The most significant aspect of OKRs is that they give you clear measurement guidelines in terms of your targets vs achievements. The best part is OKRs can be applied to any large, small, short term or long term goals. Now that you know what an OKR is let’s have some fun! Write in the comments your key results for the objective: Road trip to the beach!

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