Do you also experience coming up with a prominent idea to help your organization grow only to become uncomfortably lost in all the modes to make it happen and then forget to track results? Then you must have realized by now that when it comes to organizing multiple people in the company for achieving the bigger picture, setting direction becomes paramount. To help bridge the gap between dreams and reality, organizations with all sorts of goals have been using OKR programs for ages.
Setting goals is a pivotal component for any organization aiming to thrive — both in the short term and the long term. The best way to attain your organizational goals is to adopt a proven goal-setting system. However, the problem is that a lot of organizations tend to “set and forget.” Meaning, a lot of focus goes into establishing goals, but not so much into achieving them. The evangelizer of OKRs, John Doerr says in his book Measure What Matters — Ideas are easy but the execution is everything. This is where objectives and key results (OKRs) come into the picture. How do they help the organization, is what you wonder? Stay hooked in till the end to find out!
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Objectives and key results, or OKRs are rapidly gaining momentum amongst business leaders looking to bridge the gap between strategy and execution. Allowing you to lay emphasis on the outcome rather than the process, OKRs have been known to be a more competent way to focus on what matters the most and embrace the strategic intent. It is the OKR program that helps your organization to turn good ideas into great execution. Moreover, it aids you to drive your organization towards continued success, remaining a benchmark even in calamities.
So, what are OKRs?
The majority of the goal-setting methodology helps in fixing the destination but hardly provides any solution for measuring the progress but OKRs are an exception to this. As described in Measure What Matters, it’s a collaborative goal-setting tool that enables you to set ambitious, challenging goals with measurable results. By serving as a magical wand, it enables you to do it all — track progress, create alignment and encourage engagement around measurable goals.
OKRs present you with this rhythm that reminds you over and over again that even in the chaos, you can still do the things that really count for your business. No wonder these have been the go-to solution for industry giants such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Adobe, Intel, and Netflix who are the most renowned name in the never-ending list of high-performing organizations. It serves as a powerful goal-setting method that allows you to focus on the impact the work is having, rather than micromanaging the specific work that teams are doing on the daily basis.
Leaders develop OKRs by establishing objectives that are quantified by key results/metrics. Each objective consists of 2–5 key results that your team will work towards achieving. The idea behind using the OKR framework is to establish ambitious but realistic goals. These goals have to drive change within your organization and focus on enhancing the system as a whole. So it’s not about maintaining business as usual but about aligning everyone to work towards something more eminent.
Why does your organization need OKRs?
As it is widely known, traditionally organizations used to set high-level organizational goals at the initial point of the year, which was followed by everyone forgetting about them within a month. What this can lead your organization to is passive management. It can get tough for you and your managers to measure and track the progress and goals of your employees.
Following the outdated and vastly binned approach of goal-setting will give you a hard time understanding which team of yours are overachieving, underachieving, and achieving their objectives. Think about how can you even align different teams and individuals and even cascade goals to the organizational level goals? The result is what any leader doesn’t want even in their worst nightmares — organizational teams pulling apart and feeling disconnected left, right, and center. There will be little to no clarity amongst your employees about how their action connects to what matters the most for the organization. Without OKRs, it is impossible to build a sustainable, future-oriented, and measurable business model that will steer your organization towards the desired objectives.
For combatting such never-ending organizational issues, organizations add more to their problems by attempting to set goals in Excel or even Google docs. It does more harm than any good as the process gets even more static and organizations fail to manage and track progress with such an approach. The goals won’t be available and visible to your employees will end up chasing invisible goals. To avoid heps of hurdles, organizations have realized that by hook or by crook, they have to adopt the OKR programs and OKR tools if they want their organization to attain its desired objectives.
Let’s take a quick glance at a few more reasons as to why organizations your organization need OKRs:
1. Giving clear direction to each team and individual
With the help of OKRs, objectives drive the work that is done and not the other way around. When your teams and individuals have clarity of their goals and how they align with the organizational goals, they will be more committed to the goals that matter the most to the organization.
2. Align and connect employees to the organizational goals
You have to make your employees aware of how the work done by them matters to the overall mission of the organization. When you share goals throughout the organization, you foster the much-needed transparency needed for every employee to feel affiliated and invested in the business.
3. Skyrocket the productivity
When the daily work of your organizational teams revolves around the core goals of the business, their productivity will soar like never before. OKR enables your employees to remain focused on the bigger picture so they devote their time to what matters the most to the business.
No matter how much you try to run away from it — your organization needs OKRs. Well, they don’t only if you want your organization to remain average and remain to be a part of the crowd, do you? Contact us now for equipping your organization with the 3 three magical letters- O K R!
Originally published at https://www.getjop.com on February 25, 2022.