Every growing business needs to have a strategy in place to identify meaningful goals and how to meet them. One of the hardest things to scale is communication in all aspects, which plays a crucial role in discussing your strategy and executing it. A great way to navigate this is by using OKRs or Objectives and Key Results.
This goal-setting system is an excellent method for holding your team accountable, aligning everyone with a shared target, and create motivation for your team to feel excited about working towards fulfilling it. The big shot companies like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn even use OKRs to set their goals and meet them.
The Definition of OKR
Although OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Your Objective is a single sentence that drives you to feel enthusiastic about what you’re working towards or a time-bound goal that you want to hit. It’s usually a little vague but feasible within a time frame, like a quarter. If your objective looks like it will take four years to complete, you’ll want to scrap it and come up with a new one.
Meanwhile, your Key Results are the measurable things that will allow you to meet your goal. Where your objective is qualitative, your key results are quantitative. It removes all the fuzziness, enabling you to put your plan into numbers. If your goal is to be the leader in your industry, you’ll have to define what exactly that is.
The Benefits of OKR
OKRs have plenty of benefits that move a business closer to achieving their goals. Here are five of them:
1. Increased Alignment
One of the most significant benefits of the OKR system is that it cascades goals down through an organisation. The entity as a whole sets its OKRs, and each department and team will follow suit to create their respective OKRs that move the organisation closer to its goals. These OKRs must be aligned with that of the organisation.
The system allows everyone to move towards a shared vision, which helps everyone understand the role they play in meeting the goal. That way, everyone is moving forward together, instead of separately and at different rates.
2. Accountability
Objectives and Key Results work together for a company to meet its goals, and key results take the vagueness out of the equation by specifying the targets an organisation must reach. When each employee knows precisely what others expect them to do and the results they need to produce, it motivates them to produce quality results. The set-up is also useful for keeping engagement levels at healthy amounts, as they’re driven to do their part and stay accountable.
3. More Transparency
Another benefit of the OKR system is that everyone’s OKRs are public and viewable by everyone, which means that it’s easier to hold people accountable. Such business-wide transparency will make it even easier for new employees that want a more detailed understanding of what everyone does in the company.
4. Motivation and Empowerment
When employees see that the organisation has developed OKRs to keep everyone on track towards success, they’ll feel encouraged to do the same. Everyone wants to contribute something significant to the company, and through creating their own OKRs, they feel responsible and empowered to do an excellent job.
5. Improved Focus
Your employees need goals to motivate them to continue working. Otherwise, they’ll occupy themselves with tasks and activities that are irrelevant to your company’s vision and end-goals, effectively wasting everyone’s time.
With OKRs, your team will be working on tasks that will propel your organisation forward. You’ll be moving closer to success and the goals you created to measure it.
Conclusion
If you want to grow your business, there are plenty of things you’ll have to keep in mind, and using OKRs is one of them. It’s a simple way to streamline work and align everyone towards a shared objective while having a concrete way to measure results. By having this goal-setting system in your company, you’ll uplift your own leadership capability and inspire your employees to work actively towards success.
SKILLFIRE helps bold companies grow by creating a clear strategy with OKR, building high impact teams in the process. Through our Change Accelerator program, organisations will embrace powerful change management practices that will create an incredible leadership team and culture.
Contact us today to learn more about what we can do for you!