OKRs
7
min read
For any scaling organization, there are two primary objectives — creating an empowering culture and driving business performance. While hitting revenue targets boosts the bottomline, sustainability of a fast growing organization depends on the strength of its work culture.
Thus every leader is faced with two primary challenges —
- How to align these two priorities?
- How to achieve business goals while strengthening the team culture at the same time?
In this article, we will discuss the “how to” of doing exactly that.
It’s no secret that a focus on your OKRs or Objectives and Key Results is critical to business success. However, many high growth organizations have claimed that achieving team alignment and ensuring growth with team OKRs is tricky, especially in uncertain and complex times like we are facing today.
This article seeks to help you master the art of goal alignment across teams to have a collective understanding and commitment towards team OKRs (and hence the key business goals). We will quickly navigate the critical role team OKRs are expected to play in the new normal and expert answers to key questions that you might have around unlocking success with OKRs in your teams.
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Why do you need team OKRs?
Let’s start with a quick recap of what OKRs exactly mean. OKRs or Objectives and Key Results form a systematic approach for organizations to set strategic goals and objectives that everyone works together to achieve, along with a few key results which seek to measure the level of achievement of the objectives.
Put simply, objectives are what you seek to achieve as an organization while key results help you set benchmarks to visualize what success will look like for each objective.
While team OKRs have been an important tool for augmenting employee experience and strategic goal alignment for quite some time, their relevance has increased considerably in the last two years, with the unleashing of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Therefore, team OKRs are key to fast growing organizations for navigating in a VUCA world and ensure business continuity.
Here are the top reasons why you must use OKRs for your team, not individuals:
- To ensure organizational and individual alignment. Team OKRs can help you avoid conflicting individual and organizational objectives and bring everyone on the same page.
- To create clarity on organizational priorities. Especially in uncertain and dynamic conditions, team OKRs ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of what they are working towards for effective collaboration.
- Facilitate the path ahead. You can leverage team OKRs to help everyone understand what success will look like and how it will be measured. This way goals become easier to achieve when there is an anticipated result in sight.
- Simplify tracking of success. OKRs can enable you to track progress on goals and facilitate a culture of accountability.
- Maintain business continuity. Your team members can view team OKRs as their ultimate destination and keep moving towards them even in times of uncertainty and ambiguity and maintain business as usual.
SUPER TIP — Check out our free OKR templates to set, implement, track and grade the OKRs you have for your teams
7 questions you must ask to align goals with team OKRs
If you find yourself convinced about the need to focus on OKRs this year, you need to pause and gauge the best practices to align all your team members. Team OKRs can only function effectively if everyone collaboratively works towards achieving them.
Therefore, as someone leading the culture, you need to ensure that all your team members are rowing in the same direction with strategically aligned team OKRs.
Based on our association with different hypergrowth organizations, we have answered the top seven questions that can facilitate effective goal alignment using team OKRs.
1. What was the verdict from last year?
You should start the process by taking a pause and reflecting on the year gone by. Marching straight ahead with the new OKRs may prevent you from celebrating what went well as well as learning from what could have been better. There are a few steps you can follow here.
First, evaluate the achievement of the key objectives against the key results that you had set in the beginning of the previous year. Here, you can leverage the best practices for OKR grading to measure how well you have been able to perform on your OKR spectrum.
Second, try to do a deeper study to gauge what went well and what were the major challenges that prevented you from achieving your objectives. Within this research, focus on aspects like resources, teamwork, etc.
Third, delve deep into how aligned your team was on key goals and how it impacted their achievement. For instance, do a comparative analysis on OKRs that everyone was aligned to vs those which attracted only a few. This will help you build a case for whether or not efforts towards team alignment on team OKRs are needed.
Fourth, understand if any business priorities have changed and what things you can do in a different manner to avoid the challenges you faced last time. Try to get a comprehensive understanding on the cross team dynamics from last year and get a pulse on the overall team bonding and level of collaboration and overall alignment.
2. What should be the new team OKRs?
Once you have reflected upon the year gone by, you need to create a plan of action for creating new OKRs for the coming period. Here, it is important to have a balance between annual and quarterly OKRs.
An ideal approach would be to start with setting annual goals or objectives that you would like to achieve over the course of the year. Once everyone is aligned on the annual OKRs, you can break them into milestone linked objectives and create quarterly or monthly team OKRs.
The importance of having annual and quarterly OKRs lies in the need for flexibility and agility in an uncertain ecosystem as well as the changing circumstances for fast growing organizations.
Following are a few practices which can help you align your team members on annual and quarterly team OKR setting:
2.a) Setting quarterly team OKRs
- Focus on priorities which are time sensitive
- Give equal importance to priorities for each department/ team
- Conduct team wise discussion to set quarterly OKRs for each team
- Communicate the relevance of each quarterly OKR to the annual plan
- Create a strict timeline for each quarter to avoid spillage and overlap
2. b) Setting annual team OKRs
- Ensure alignment with organizational vision
- Identify contribution areas for each team
- Communicate the organizational impact that you seek to achieve
- Don’t break your annual team OKRs into quarter, let that happen organically every three months
- Provide room for flexibility in case of market changes
SUPER TIP — It is always better to use a dedicated OKR tool to keep track of all annual and quarterly goals in one place instead of using the limited features of Google Sheet. Wondering what features to look for in an OKR tool? Check this out!
You can also book a free demo with SuperBeings to see how you can apply these principles of setting team OKRs directly in your team.
3. How to set team OKRs?
Once you have decided the frequency of the OKRs you wish to follow, you would want to jump into setting the team OKRs. As a fast growing organization, it is important to incorporate diverse views and thoughts. This suggests that you should steer away from a completely hierarchical and top-down approach where the leadership sets OKRs for all teams, which team members are supposed to execute and work towards.
Here, you need to adopt an approach of collective brainstorming when it comes to setting OKRs for your team. You need to engage and involve your team members in setting OKRs which they are expected to achieve.
You need to give each team the freedom to set their own OKRs and conduct some common and collective sessions where all OKRs can be converged and aligned with the organizational vision. Furthermore, a spirit of collective setting will add accountability, ownership and commitment leading to greater goal alignment within and across teams.
SUPER TIP — Sign up for our free 10 day OKR email course and learn all about writing the best team OKRs (includes step-by-step guides for setting goals for different teams)
4. What are the potential challenges?
You need to be cognizant of the potential challenges which might prevent you from setting effective team OKRs. Once you are able to identify and mitigate these challenges, you will find your team members working harmoniously towards the OKRs. Some of the top challenges include:
4.a) Lack of team buy in
It is common for fast growing organizations, especially the ones that are introducing OKRs for the first time to face employee resistance. Your team members might have a hard time acknowledging the relevance and value of OKRs. Here, you need to create a business case for OKRs and convince your team members of the potential impact they can create.
4.b) Inability to collaborate
You are bound to find some team members against the idea of setting OKRs with those from other teams. Since you will only have a few OKRs at an organizational level, each team will push their case and this is likely to hinder organization-wide goal alignment.
The best way to mitigate this challenge is to create a distinction between organizational and team OKRs. While the former should exclusively be the ones that directly impact organizational growth, the latter ones could be focused more on team progress with incremental impact on the organization.
5. Should you set long term OKRs for the team?
Finally, you need to answer the question whether or not you should set long term OKRs. While it is important to have a long term vision for your organization, setting long term team OKRs may not be the best move.
As a fast growing organization, your priorities are likely to keep changing and committing to OKRs for a long term might prevent the flexibility and agility you need to transform and adapt.
At the same time, the longer the run of the OKRs or the more future oriented they are, the harder it will be to facilitate agreement. Since your team members will have different versions of what they expect the organization to evolve into in the course of 5-7 years, having alignment on OKRs for that long might be an overkill.
Instead of going for long term OKRs, you can experiment with a larger vision for the next few years which can then be broken down into annual and subsequently quarterly measurable OKRs.
6. How to facilitate goal alignment and team agreement around OKRs: Best practices
While our entire discussion has revolved around this theme, there are certain practices which you can directly leverage to facilitate goal alignment with team OKRs:
- Keep the OKRs limited in number. The greater the number of OKRs you seek to set, the greater will be discussion and disagreements.
- Constantly reiterate the importance of collective action to unlock the complete potential of OKRs
- Adopt an effective OKR tool or platform to ensure that everyone has an understanding of the bigger picture.
7. How to get started with an OKR tool?
If you are new to the OKR journey, you should consider collaborating with tools like SuperBeings to make OKRs simple and highly effective.
- An OKR tool lets your team members get visibility into how their work is impacting the bottomline and overall organizational growth. There’s simply no better motivation for employees than realizing their work is important.
- Furthermore, you can effectively track and measure OKR progress with SuperBeings and identify any risks or instances of team misalignment preemptively.
- Finally, using a dedicated OKR tool to create organization-wide visibility of team OKRs prevents the risk of priority goals being ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and keeps everyone focused on what matters most throughout the year.
Get ready to make OKRs a force multiplier with team alignment powered by SuperBeings. Book a free SuperBeings demo today and see live OKRs in action.
