The Ultimate Guide to OKRs

As mentioned before, OKR is for ambitious and result-driven organizations that are hungry for growth. It streamlines your existing organization such that your employees can focus and collaborate better. Hence, an impact on business style and cultural integrity could be gradually experienced as one runs the OKR program.

Implementing OKRs correctly will lead to an organization that is prepared to achieve new heights, for which the people, from higher management to trainees, need to be conditioned.

For this OKR guide, we cover here the business and cultural impact OKRs tend to have on companies using OKRs along with a checklist to implement OKRs successfully.

How does OKR impact Culture?

The major impact of having a great organizational culture is on employee performance. OKR is the tool that can help you steer the wheel towards creating a high-performance company culture that people would love to work since:

1. OKR drives Organizational Alignment

Before you implement OKR, you need to bring everyone on the same page to benefit from this exercise. It can be done by ensuring transparency, understanding every team member’s role and how their work impacts each other. This creates a sense of accountability that can be steered to the overall vision using OKR alignment, eventually translating to a company that marches together.

2. OKR drives Organizational Transparency

Since everyone is well aware of each other’s objectives and projects that are being undertaken to achieve the key results, employees can trust each other and management while they feel assured everyone is heading in the same direction. This also improves decision-making as one can quickly adapt and help each other when things are going wrong.

3. OKR drives Employee Accountability

Employees, due to OKRs, can visualize how their lack of work ethics or misalignment is impacting teamwork in groups. When you turn these visuals into tangible outcomes, employees will be extra cautious to ensure they give their best to achieve the key results assigned to avoid any event of failure. This nurtures accountability for their tasks as no one wants to be the bad apple in an organizational team setting.

4. OKR drives Employee Empowerment

OKR improves commitment and drives performance - you have defined ambitious goals, mentioned Projects, or tasks one needs to finish to level up. With this, employees can visualize their progress and even compete with peers as they move forward towards achieving their key results. When you couple this with generous rewards, employees feel empowered and appreciated, driving them to take additional steps to succeed.

When the culture within your organization gets adapted to OKR, as a leader, you will be able to see the ROI in terms of business results. Let’s see how in the next section.

How does OKR impact Business?

When your employees are motivated to achieve ambitious goals, one can naturally see the results in your business KPIs across revenues, sales, partnerships, etc. This transformation is possible since:

1. OKR drives Prioritization

Whether a startup or a corporate, prioritizing is difficult when one is aiming to conquer new business territories. As one brainstorms the next steps or goes through the heaps of employee feedback, OKR goalposts help in segregating the needle from a haystack.

2. OKR tracks Growth

OKR is the outline of a company’s growth story. Since tracking progress and measuring outcomes is a key aspect of OKR, everyone can see the tangible value one is creating for their organization. Teams can refer to their growth metrics charts and make quick decisions in the event of exponential growth or slippages.

3. OKR drives Productivity

OKR helps clarify the roadmap and improve teamwork since it is a collaboration-focused tool. Teams understand the value of sharing resources and supporting each other when one team is overworked or slacking. This collaborative behaviour improves the overall productivity of the organization.

4. OKR improves Focus

Every key result expects employees to drive Projects that would help them achieve the necessary outcomes. This leads to a razor-sharp focus where each team member knows what is expected out of them. When employee expectations are communicated well, they will expend their best efforts in the tasks assigned to them.

Checklist for aligning the organization for OKR

Now that you know how impactful OKR is for your organization, it’s time for you to take the first step towards embracing OKR as the way of work for your company. Here’s a 5 step checklist to tick before you read this OKR guide further to understand implementing OKR.

1. Define your Vision, Mission, and Organization strategy

Define the ultimate objective and the purpose your organization serves. It’s important to be clear as to what is your mission and what you stand for. Ensure the key strategic objectives align to your purpose and effectively serve customer needs.

*Learn more about framing the Vision, Mission, and Strategy for your company*

2. Redesign your Business Review exercises to fit OKRs

Using OKRs shapes how the business strategy is executed. The most effective implementation of OKRs can be experienced when they are included in the language of business reviews and progress meetings. Deciding the frequency of OKRs reviews, communicating organization and team goals, etc are actions that will need to be planned for.

3. Prepare for bi-directional alignment

It’s important to ensure that your organization’s strategic priorities and subsequent OKRs are clearly articulated and communicated to help teams design their immediate goals. At Superbeings, we enable organizations to communicate and translate their OKRs to the team level and let team members contribute towards setting their own OKRs.

*Here’s an article that dives deeper into bi-directional alignment*

4. Gather and distribute relevant resources

OKR would require learning some new tricks to improve the existing ways of working in your company. By writing down your OKR strategy as guides and optimizing available resources, one can achieve better communication and execution of the OKR program.

*Read more about pre-requisites to OKR in this article*

5. Nurture OKR as an ownership activity and not ‘administrative work’

Your employees and team leaders need to understand that OKR is not an exercise restricted to the halls of the corporate office or the leadership team but is the way of work for the company. Drive sensitization, design reward systems, conduct learning and development workshops to bring a sense of ownership and clarity with your employees.

In the end, Leaders must champion OKRs, incorporate them in day-to-day interactions and maintain a clear line of communication on the need and value of OKRs.

OKRs must be a unifying force that energizes employees to perform their best.