What causes OKRs to rollout in your organization and how can you ensure you are on the right track?

We are passionate about helping companies achieve high growth by focusing on top priorities, managing performance in an agile manner, and creating collaborative ways of working-all while increasing the Joy Of Performing.

In the previous edition, we looked into why companies are apprehensive in adopting OKRs. What are their concerns? If you haven’t checked our previous newsletter yet, click here. Read it for more on this subject.

In this edition, we’ll talk about what causes those concerns and how we can nullify them.

So to start with, Are you an organization looking for innovation? Do you feel the need to embrace goal-oriented culture in your organization? Well, OKR is just the right tool for you. OKR is a platform that will keep your employees aligned along with helping businesses to grow faster. Business leaders have been using OKRs to have agility within their organizations. They prioritize outcome-rich culture with the help of focused employees having ambitions for a successful business. OKR is known to lessen the gap between strategy and execution.

However, OKR indeed tends to fail if not done properly. It is not just about adopting a culture but executing it appropriately will make a difference. Let’s talk about these reasons.

What causes OKRs rollout in an organization?

As John Doerr states, “OKRs are a shared language for execution. They clarify expectations on:

What do we need to get done (and fast), and who’s working on it?

They keep employees aligned, vertically and horizontally.”

The secret ingredients behind a successful OKR are, that it should be significant, concrete towards what is to be achieved, action and outcome-oriented, without forgetting to be inspirational.

But unfortunately, not all companies can implement OKRs in the right way. Hence, that leads to failure in OKR. Here are some reasons that lead OKRs to fail in an organization:

• First, the obvious reason is not setting the OKR correctly. We know that objective is the goal that you want to achieve in the coming period, while key results are the way you can track progress towards the goals. However, if these objectives and key results are not set properly it happens to fail OKR as a whole. If objectives are not created based on what you want to achieve, it might lead to unaligned employees, while if you don’t develop measurable KRs employees might end up wasting your time.
• The second reason can be setting OKRs for late in the future. Well the purpose of OKR is to help set goals for the present to have a better future. The goal set is to be something accomplished within a certain period. Large companies tend to set OKRs for long-run projects which often leads to not aligning them with what your company needs.
• The third major reason is neglecting regular check-in. You see, regular check-ins are a way to know what is happening in the company, discuss the issues being faced, develop the solution to those problems, etc. There are always certain kinds of distractions that lead you away from the goal. Regular check-ins ensure you come back right on track.

These were some of the major reasons that cause OKR to fail, among many others like setting OKRs and not focusing on them, not knowing your current baseline and not optimizing for that, and not being able to convince teams to be positive about using OKR system, hence not having success in OKRs. To have a successful OKR implemented culture in your workplace, your OKR should be attainable and well-defined. Also, OKR promotes a teamwork culture, so prioritize transparency within your organization for a better approach.

How can you ensure you are on the right track?

This question is in continuity with the first half of the newsletter. The reasons that lead to the failure of OKR are also the ways to ensure you are on the right track if you work on the success of your OKR. However, there are significant practices to ensure you are on the right track.

These practices have two major essential elements: The Structure and The Philosophy.

THE STRUCTURE

You should consider the following two questions when following the best practices for OKR. These questions are:

1. Which place do you want to take your company to? (goals)
2. How can you accomplish the same? (Metrics to measure success)

Working on these two questions will enable you to create the structure of your OKR. Along with cascading the objectives that keep the whole organization to be aligned and acquainted with which direction the company is taking or will be.

THE PHILOSOPHY

The goals created should be measurable, so that progress can be tracked which is the major aim of OKR setup. Also, OKR should be as transparent as possible. Every individual’s OKR should be visible to each team member, to have clarity towards where you are heading. The aim is to track employees’ performance along with improving it.

To ensure you are on the right track the following practices might help.

1. Align teams with the organization’s objectives
2. Get an OKR champion
3. Transparency in OKRs
4. Provide knowledge about the OKR process to the employees along with allowing them to participate in setting it
5. Create 3–4 objectives rather than too many
6. Regular check-ins are a must

Understanding how to set and implement OKRs through best practices assures company-wide adoption and transparency about the organizational goals. At JOP, our experts offer OKR services and hold your hand throughout the rollout across your organization. We’re invested in your growth and will be your partners through this process — we’ve seen the issues and can use these learnings to ensure your JOP champions know how to deal with issues.

We will help you have a successful OKR implemented culture at your workplace, do you have it in you? If you’re intrigued, get on a consultation call with us today!

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.