In this article, we go through the definition of employee engagement, its importance for the organization’s bottom line, and the top tips on engaging employees effectively.

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is the emotional commitment and excitement workers have for their job and  environment. Engaged employees are concerned about their work and the organization’s success and believe their contributions matter. Given its obvious connections to satisfaction and morale, employee engagement is crucial to an organization’s success. 

Understanding Employee Engagement

The vast majority of CEOs agree that a company’s most valuable asset is its workforce. In reality, though, it is only true when the vast majority of employees are fully committed to their job. If not, they either contribute little or actively harm the company.

There are 3 levels of employee engagement:

• Physical: The individual skill sets of the employees correspond with the complexity of the assignment.
  
• Emotional: Employees are inspired and challenged when doing their job, and when they’re finished, they feel successful.
  
• Cognitive: employees are completely immersed in their work.

When employees are engaged on all these levels, their work involvement is at its peak, and they start to develop an emotional bond with it. Employees who are engaged exhibit more dedication to the company’s objectives, feel that their job is essential, that their managers value and support them, and that they are directly responsible for the company’s success. 

Why is Employee Engagement Important?

Workforce engagement motivates people to put in more effort and resolve problems, progress and develop more quickly, get along better with colleagues, and stay in the company for a longer period of time. 

Here are the top five benefits of employee engagement:

High employee retention: Uninterested and disengaged employees may leave their employer abruptly and frequently. By emphasizing employee engagement, you can achieve high employee retention because people will be more invested and determined to stick around if they like their job, the other employees, and the company.

Enhanced productivity: Employees who are engaged put in more effort because they enjoy in their role and are confident in their contribution to the organization.  

Improved customer service: Customer satisfaction is an essential component of any profitable organization. Strong employee engagement enhances your business’s client service, which is beneficial for customer retention, upsells, and recommendations. When they are content and interested in their work, employees would likely exceed expectations to guarantee customers have a positive experience.

Higher profitability: Sales in highly engaged companies are typically 21% higher than those in disengaged organizations. It makes the perfect reason that the company’s sales and earnings would rise when keeping the right people, enhancing efficiency, and improving customer service. 

Better adoption of company initiatives: Engaged workforce is more likely to partake in new business-boosting activities that your organization launches. They’ll enthusiastically join because they appreciate what your business is trying to do, which will result in high adoption rates and sustained engagement. 

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels

How To Improve Employee Engagement  

If you’re planning on enhancing employee engagement in your company, here are some tips to consider:

Embrace the Bottom-Up Concept

Start with the lowest levels of your organization’s staff when making any important decisions. You can encourage employees to express their thoughts and concerns through the use of questionnaires and surveys. This approach will make them feel more valued and respected. 

Promote Two-Way Communication

Keeping the workforce in the dark won’t help your employee engagement initiative. Companies that behave secretively and only share information with those who must know are likely to have lower employee engagement rates. You should encourage employees to voice their issues in order to prevent them from feeling unheard or unimportant. Communication should be two-way. Top company executives adhere to an open-door approach and refrain from taking advantage of “top-secret” knowledge.

Encourage Active Participation

A company is a community, and each member contributes to it by carrying out a specified duty. At the same time, you should uphold a certain degree of impartiality and equality where everyone believes they are vital to the company’s community. Any engagement-promoting action, from planning a yearly event to as simple as taking your employees out to dinner, can aid in fostering this sense of community among your employees. 

Give Recognition

Recognition is one of the top drivers of employee engagement so try to establish an environment that values recognition and offers rewards and incentives for good work. Keep in mind the commendations should be consistent with the organization’s mission, business outcomes, and guiding principles.

Prioritize Professional Development

To support the organization’s growth long term, you should nurture and develop every human resource you hire. By conducting bespoke training sessions or funding further education for the employees, you are directly investing in your business’s future and fostering employee loyalty.

Hire Qualified Managers

Managers are a crucial part of any employee engagement program because they act as a liaison between boardroom participants and the workforce. The management style of the particular manager determines whether they feel safe, ignored, or angry. 

How To Measure Employee Engagement 

Understanding how to measure employee engagement is an important part of any engagement-boosting strategy. Here are four easy methods that can help you:

Use a Pulse Survey

Employee pulse surveys are a fantastic way to measure employee engagement since they provide quick, reliable, and helpful information. They are brief and very focused. The purpose of these employee surveys is to continuously learn what employees think about important topics such as communication and relationships with coworkers, job-related duties, and the workplace in general.

Conduct Employee Lifecycle Surveys

You can gather input from workers during the most important points in their time spent working for your company by conducting employee lifecycle surveys. Here are a few examples:

• New-hire surveys — How do recent hires feel about their onboarding? Do they see themselves in your company long-term? Asking the right questions can help you get the information you need to engage new employees now but also in a later period of their tenure.
  
• Stay interviews — Employing interviews with tenured members is a fantastic approach to getting employee feedback and learning what motivates or demotivates them. What keeps employees in your organization? Is there something that could cause them to leave? What steps can be taken to stop it?  

• Exit interviews — What led the worker to leave your company? How did the remaining staff fare after the turnover? How can you prevent this from happening in the future? You may make your engagement efforts more strategic by using the information you learn from exit experience.
  

Schedule Regular One on One Meetings

Meeting with staff members one-on-one regularly is another excellent technique to gauge engagement. This approach has the benefit of being face-to-face — you’ll be able to learn more specific information about each concern raised, but also build relationships and ensure that each employee feels like they are making progress toward their goals. 

Measure the Turnover Rate

The turnover rate reveals the proportion of employees who departed your company over a specific time frame. Employees frequently change employment when they feel unchallenged, see no room for advancement, or have a bad work experience. Therefore, a high employee turnover rate may be a sign of low engagement. When used with exit interviews, this tactic could help you uncover the underlying problems affecting engagement levels. 

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

The Bottom Line  

Engaged workers are the backbone of a successful company. Businesses are better positioned for success when their workforce is agile and go the extra mile to enhance workflows that increase productivity. If you’re ready to leverage your company’s employee engagement, Focus can help you build an engaged community that stays in sync and ensures each goal is met.

The post Employee Engagement Definition: What It Is And How To Improve It appeared first on Focus.

However, many of us still need to gain basic knowledge of task management techniques or task management as a whole. The most common misconception is that task management is merely related to a simple to-do list. What you may not know is that successful task management involves diligent planning, reporting, analyzing, and assessing. 

In this article, we’ll shed light on what company task management actually entails and its significance for your company.

What Is Task Management 

Task management is establishing, prioritizing, assigning, and overseeing tasks to make sure they are finished by the deadlines set. At its core, task management dissects a specific project or method of operation into several smaller tasks. It involves making decisions to account for changes that may happen in real-time, directing the workflow, removing bottlenecks, and managing the task’s budget, scope, time, and resources. Company task management is a fantastic technique to improve both team and individual productivity and enhance task completion. 

Difference Between Task Management and Project Management  

Project management refers to the practice of overseeing a project through its stages of planning, application, tracking, and concluding stages. Project managers typically oversee several ongoing projects with varying priorities but always have the big picture in mind. Repeated tasks are less common in project management, and the process of strategic project planning is usually more thorough.

On the other hand, task management is breaking down a project into specific tasks. The tasks could be given deadlines, assigned to people, and organized by priority. Task management involves overseeing a task from inception to completion and calls for micro-focus. 

Successful project mаnagement depends on efficient task management as it helps get through with projects on time and in the right order.

Why Is Task Management Important for Companies  

Starting work on tasks as you go is inefficient and counterproductive. For instance, you could accidentally focus on tasks with low priority and postpone essential or time-bound tasks which likely have to rush last minute. Or, you’ll flip between projects too often, making little-to-no advancement on each one.

Therefore, task management is crucial for companies. It gives a clear picture of the work you and your team need to complete and organizes it so you can identify what tasks to tackle first. Using task management, you can see what you are working on now and what is coming up. It also helps you identify your priority tasks, determine how much time is needed for each one, and what’s the best approach to schedule your workload.

Photo by airfocus on Unsplash

Benefits of Task Management Software

Task management software is the easiest way to implement an effective task management system within your organization. This digital platform offers the best task management solution, assisting both individuals and teams in handling their duties. There’s a wide range of features these tools offer, the most common being task scheduling and task assignment, task customization and organization, time tracking, task tracking, task progress tracking, and accurate reports.

Let’s discuss some of the benefits related to implementing online task management software in your company:

Subdivision of Projects Into More Manageable Assignments and Task Dependencies

Larger projects can be intimidating. They demand extensive planning and flawless execution since even small delays or errors can have a big impact. To make it simpler to handle, taѕk management programs like Focus let you break down complex projects and establish dependent and subordinate tasks.

Automation of Repeatable Tasks

Some activities, such as a quarterly meeting or a monthly report, take place at set times each year. Utilizing automation and project templates, the best task mаnagement tool will create specific tasks at a specific time, according to the demands of the project manager, as opposed to setting up each of them manually.

Remote Teams Support

Тask management is crucial for enhancing team collaboration and providing better support. All team members will be able to see task boards where they can find all their tasks assigned, so they won’t need to nag their task managers or fellow team members looking for basic information. This is specifically important for hybrid or fully remote teams where members have diverse work schedules and time zones. 

More Effective Communication and Effective Collaboration Across Teams

You can instill a collaborative culture and dramatically improve communication between teams in your company by choosing the appropriate task management platform. In-task comments are one of the key elements that help teams work effectively together. Job conversations will take place where the work is being done, or in context when adding comments to tasks. Therefore, the necessity to hop between tabs and apps to access general information, updates, or modifications is eliminated. This would result in increased productivity and, more importantly, a happy team. 

Task Prioritization

Although it may seem obvious that some tasks are more important than others, it’s common to lose track of the task priority levels when so much is to be finished. For example, you begin your workday in the morning and occasionally get sidetracked by finishing minor, low-priority tasks, postponing the major ones for another day. Inadequate management may result in missed deadlines or tasks needing to be completed properly. With simple task management software, you can manage and prioritize your critical tasks in one centralized space so that everyone can focus on the most important ones first and meet them effectively.

Enhanced Performance Level  

Task management helps with the delegation of tasks and coordination of team members to work towards a common goal from one centralized dashboard. For instance, if the project manager observes that a certain action is delaying the schedule of the project or causing a disparity in the activities that follow, they will encourage the project participants to be more effective and productive, thus creating a stimulating environment.

Streamlined Workflow

You’ll rarely have the luxury of focusing on one task at a given time. Most of the time you’ll likely be juggling several tasks at once which could easily lead to chaos. Getting your duties organized to streamline the entire task managemеnt workflow will significantly increase the entire team’s efficiency and help you achieve your goals.

Better Time Management

Task management lessens time wasting, which is a crucial factor in most workplace mistakes. By reducing the time wasted on assignments and their completion, there will be more time for your team to focus on other key projects. Moreover, setting deadlines using task management makes it possible for you to complete assignments on schedule. Additionally, it frees up more time for you to spend on yourself rather than spending it on pointless duties.

Creative Problem-Solving

To manage many of our daily tasks and perform at our highest levels, we require creativity. Task management gives us the knowledge we need to handle problems promptly and creatively. People are able to break up difficult jobs into manageable pieces and solve them fast depending on the situation.

Photo by airfocus on Unsplash 

The Bottom Line 

Every project is built on individual tasks that help translate intentions into accomplishments. Task managemеnt helps you structure the responsibilities to produce the best results. You’ll be able to break down complex tasks, prioritize, delegate, and collaborate effectively.But while it may seem simple, task management is complex process that requires a skilled manager and the right tools, ideally a specialist task manager tool. Focus is a comprehensive task tool with intuitive features that gives you a dedicated space to set to-do task lists and actionable items, connect daily operations to strategic objectives, and measure your project progress in real-time, thus enhancing team alignment and focus.

The post What Is Task Management and Why Do Companies Need It appeared first on Focus.

To help you out, we’ve compiled the most important information about successfully implementing the method, along with some relevant OKR examples.

What Are OKRs?

The OKRs definition portrays them as a means of creating measurable goals and bringing everyone in an organization together behind a common mission. In the 1970s, John Doerr created this strategy for the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers. He used OKRs to help them grow into one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, and then he scaled it across Google. Nowadays, businesses of all sizes use OKRs.

Each OKR’s objective is a broad goal with no deadline, such as “launch product X successfully.” The Key Results explain what you’ll need in order to accomplish that objective and how you’ll know when you’ve completed it. For example, the “launch product X successfully” objective could include Key Results such as “have 300 people registered for the beta” or “generate $10,000 in revenue by September.”

Why Are OKRs Important? 

The OKR method helps you in the process of turning good ideas into excellent implementation. You can articulate your goals, set priorities, identify opportunities, and track and measure progress. Moreover, you can use OKRs to align strategies to business goals and compare success across teams. They can also create a culture of continuous improvement and serve as an accountability tool.

Implementing OKRs

There are many approaches to goal management, so you should prepare ahead and think about how you’ll put the OKR framework into action. The usual way is to have the executive team create company-level OKRs. Then they would employ a cascading method, requiring the department heads to link their team OKRs to the overall business goals and then cascade to the next level. 

However, this traditional top-down model comes with specific challenges, such as the risk of slowing down the progress. So, when it comes to successfully implementing OKRs, collaboration at every point of the process is essential. 

Keep employees engaged and motivated and let them have a clear vision of why they should set and try to accomplish the particular OKRs. Try to invite them to the brainstorming sessions and set ambitious goals together. Everyone will be able to visualize where the organization is moving and align their OKRs in the same direction. This approach will streamline the goal-setting process and enhance employee satisfaction. 

Moreover, remember that the OKRs framework emphasizes simplicity and prioritization. A general rule of thumb is to set one or two organizational goals. Get each team to focus on up to three objectives, each with three to four key results. This will ensure that your team’s efforts and initiatives move effectively and in the same direction.  

Finally, set up a system of weekly alignment meetings where you’ll review the OKRs and communicate the results. A productive check-in includes constructive feedback, accountability, reporting significant progress, crafting strategic plans, and developing an action plan.

Top OKR Examples

Good objectives and key results keep the team focused on the essential issues and encourage weekly discussions. When your team creates OKRs, they should also have some ideas or plans on how to get them accomplished. Here are some OKR examples to consider to inspire your next brainstorming sessions.

Company OKR Examples

Company Objective 1: Grow our global business.

Key Results: 

• Hit a global sales target of $200 million.
• Achieve 100% YoY sales growth in the X geography.
• Increase the average deal size by 30% using upsells.
• Enhance customer service to reduce churn to less than 7% annually.

Company Objective 2:  Build an excellent corporate culture. 

Key results: 

• Launch an ongoing two-way closed-loop feedback process.
• Maintain a weekly Staff Pulse Score of at least 8.
• Celebrate any type of progress every week.
• Launch a monthly all-hands open Q&A meeting.

Sales Department OKR Examples

Sales Team Objective 1: Improve the team’s sales performance.  

Key Results: 

• Maintain a sales pipeline of qualified leads valued at least $300,000 per quarter.
• Boost close rate from 20% to 23%.
• Boost scheduled calls per sales agent from one to two per week.
• Grow the average deal size from $10,000 to $12,000.  

Sales Team Objective 2: Create higher-quality leads.

Key Results: 

• Generate the list of lead metrics and scripted questions to collect in CRM.
• Ensure at least 70% of leads completed obligatory Q&A filled in.
• Automate the data collection from the backend to CRM.
• Redesign the user engagement form by introducing two new screening questions. 

Marketing Team OKR Examples

Marketing Team Objective 1: Increase our reach and brand awareness outside of X geography.

Key Results: 

• Generate one new thought leadership article weekly.
• Increase newsletter signups by 100 per week.
• Boost website traffic by 15% from the X geography. 

Marketing Team Objective 2: Improve customer retention and customer lifetime value (CLV).

Key Results:

• Share 20 customer case studies by September 15.
• Boost email newsletter open rates from 30% to 50%.
• Improve positive mentions from 60 to 90.

Content Marketing Team OKR Examples

Content Marketing Objective 1: Improve our SEO.

Key Results: 

• Get 5 inbound links from relevant websites every quarter.
• Improve the internal on-page optimization and improve 15 pages every quarter.
• Enhance our website loading speed.
• Create two recent blog posts a week optimized around strategic keywords.

Content Marketing Objective 2: Create helpful and informative blog articles.

Key Results:

• Interview 100 industry thought leaders.
• Drive 500,000 organic traffic visitors to the blog by March 10.
• Earn 300 PDF downloads by the end of Q1.

Customer Success Team OKR Examples

Customer Success Objective 1: Retain our customers, reducing churn where factors are in our control.

Key Results: 

• Conduct post-engagement debriefs for all contracts above $50,000.
• Develop a program to conduct account reviews.
• Achieve average customer retention of 75% annually. 

Customer Success Objective 2: Expand customer support coverage to Spanish and Italian to improve customer satisfaction and enhance customer acquisition.

Key Results: 

• Hire and onboard four native speakers of each language for phone support by September.
• Expand the automated online support pipeline to each language by September.
• Develop an in-house translation tool to aid non-speakers in simple problem solutions by January. 

Engineering Team OKR Examples

Engineering Team Objective 1: Launch new product architecture.

Key Results: 

• Have the engineering team contribute X story points.
• Design 4 tests with QA.
• Complete data migration.

Engineering Team Objective 2: Build a top-notch engineering team.

Key Results: 

• Offer a $200 reward for referrals. 
• Hire three referred engineers by the end of Q1.
• Maintain a 2:1 onsite interview-hire ratio.

Engineering Team Objective 3: Improve the response rate for critical bugs in testing.

Key Results:

• Hire four engineers by April 10.
• Improve response time from 15 to less than 10 minutes.
• Monitor non-essential meetings every two weeks to determine if necessary.

Finance Department OKR Examples

Financial Department Objective 1: Improve the annual budget approval process

Key Results: 

• Have a meeting with every VP.
• Review budget proposals before mid-Q1.
• Complete the final budget by February.

Financial Department Objective 2: Improve the financial reporting process.

Key Results: 

• Hire a new bookkeeper.
• Implement the cloud-based version of Xero.
• Close our financials within one week of a quarter.

How To Write Your OKRs 

A good company objective describes what you’d like to achieve. It should be broad enough to allow teams to design team objectives yet specific enough to ensure everyone knows where they’re going. Before finalizing high-level goals, leadership should solicit feedback from the teams and clarify expectations.

Team objectives should provide the team with purpose, urgency, and focus. Remember that team objectives aren’t projects; they’re problems to solve or improvement possibilities to explore. Ultimately, they should align with the company goal.  

In addition to writing an objective, you also need to write key results. While an objective is an issue to solve or an improvement opportunity to investigate, key results are the measurable outcome required to achieve a specific objective. They contain a metric with a target value and measure the progress towards achieving the objective. Ideally, each team would identify two to four key results for each objective. 

The Bottom Line

OKR bridges the gap between goal formulation and execution, allowing firms to shift from an output-based to an outcome-based approach to work. The OKR framework aids leaders and their teams prioritize, align, and evaluate their efforts. 

Linking company and team objectives to key results helps team members see how their everyday work fits into the broader picture and where they should focus their efforts to improve. Hopefully, these OKRs examples will facilitate the implementation and ensure success.

The post Best Examples On How To Successfully Implement OKRs appeared first on Focus.

Feedback at Focus

You asked – we delivered. You can send feedback to your teammates and managers. The feedback feature is designed to spark creativity, put out potential fires, and help teammates show up as their best selves.

You can either give feedback to a teammate in free form or follow questions at Focus. It doesn’t matter which way do you prefer more. The most important is delivering value to people you are working together. 

How to send feedback?

Just choose a teammate in the People section. Go to feedback and then click on the Give Feedback button. 

Also, you can choose the privacy of feedback. Everyone can see public feedback. However, private feedback is hidden from everyone. Only the teammate you sent feedback and admin will be able to see it.

Also, you can ask for feedback from your teammate by clicking the Ask feedback button. In this case, Focus sends a notification to the teammate.

Other updates at Focus

Privacy at Weekly Plans and Weekly Updates

By default, all weekly update answers are public. Everyone can see it. However, if you want to make answers private when only authors and admins can read answers, then use the Privacy feature in weekly updates settings.

Go to Settings > Weekly Updates Campaign and make Private answers active clicking on the checkbox.

Same works for weekly plans.

Privacy at OKRs

More privacy.

You asked us about privacy at OKRs several times. We have it now. 

You can specify privacy when you are creating OKRs.

There are 3 levels of privacy at OKRs:

• Public. Everyone can see an OKR.
• Team. Only your team, owners of key results, and admin can see an OKR.
• Private. Only you, owners of key results, and admin can see an OKR.

Cheers!

Best,
Anton

The post Feedback and more  appeared first on Focus.

The challenge we see with current updates is the lack of connection between weekly action items and OKRs. Yeah, we have the questions about the main OKR next week. However, it doesn’t really show what you did for specific OKR last week.

So, OKR-based updates solve this problem.

IMPORTANT! OKR-based updates work only on the web platform. If you want to use the Focus bot for Slack, you should run classic weekly updates. Yeah, it’s still possible to use classic weekly updates.

How it works

To show you how OKR-based updates work, I want to mention how classic updates work.

You can see in the picture above how the classic update works. We have 3 questions, which help to align the team on a weekly basis. 

The questions:

• What did you accomplish last week?
• What is your key insight of this week?
• How was your experience at work this week?

About OKR-based approach

The OKR approach is based not only on weekly updates but on weekly plans too. 

Everything starts on a weekly plan now. 

Answering what you are going to do this week, you should choose OKRs and specify action items for each OKR.

It’s time to work now. 

At the end of the week, you run a weekly update. And you have here your weekly OKRs and action items you have mentioned on the last weekly plan.

Also, you can add something that you haven’t mentioned on the weekly plan.

You should only choose it is completed or not. If it’s not completed, the system asks you for details.

However, the main goal of the weekly update is specifying OKR you were working on last week and connecting it with action items.

It allows seeing the detailed traction on your progress. How much the OKRs were moved for the last week, what you accomplished, what wasn’t accomplished, and why.

It gives you a better understanding of what you should improve and how strong you are following your OKRs.

How to set OKR-based updates?

If you want to use OKR-based updates, drop us a message via support@usefocus.co. We will set everything up for you.

Cheers!

Best,
Anton

The post OKR-based updates appeared first on Focus.

A new feature is coming. I’m excited to announce the 1:1 meetings at Focus. The 1:1 meetings help employees to grow and develop strong relationships with people.

“You spend so much time finding great people, it’s worth it to help them grow to be the best they can be.”

JUSTIN ROSENSTEIN, (Co-Founder, Asana)

You can use 1:1 meetings in Focus now.

The 1:1 meetings consist of the 7 main pieces in Focus:

• Monthly focus – help to keep eyes on the most important goal this month
• Talking points – things you want to talk about at the meeting
• Action items – todos that are synchronized with the Task menu
• #1 thing to achieve next week – the main focus for the next week
• Notes – for feedback or any ideas
• Follow up – for expanding your meeting outcomes
• And private feedback – only you see these notes.

To create your first 1:1, choose a teammate for the meeting and fill fields you want to talk about. 

The 1:1 meetings are available on the Pro + Culture plan.

Let me know what you thing about 1:1 meetings.

The post 1:1 meetings at Focus appeared first on Focus.

Last two weeks, we updated a bunch of things, and it’s time to show you what you can do at Focus.

The new OKR Tree

We rebuilt the OKR tree. The tree had only 3 levels of objectives before – the company’s OKRs, teams, and individuals. However, customers asked us to add more levels because they have more complex structures. For example, company’s OKRs -> departments’ OKRs -> teams’ OKRs -> individuals’ OKRs. 

So, it’s possible to do now. No more limits at the OKR three now. To build the tree, you should specify a parent OKR in OKR settings.

Date filter in OKRs

We added date filters to objectives. It’s possible to sort OKRs based on the time range of the OKR’s due in date. It allows you to see objectives for the current quarter by default and focus on them. 

OKR notifications on Slack

We added more data in notifications in Slack. The Focus bot will send notifications when someone updates OKRs. It’s possible to see previous metrics and the progress that the team has.

You can set OKR notifications in Slack here. And this is the guide on how to install and set the Focus bot.

Updates in pricing

We updated the pricing model in September. Here are 2 changes:

1) Annual plans. There is a 20% discount for annual plans now. 
2) Free plan. The focus plan with OKRs is free for individuals now.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers!

The post The new OKR tree, date filter, and notifications at Slack appeared first on Focus.

You can use the new Slack bot for 3 things now: 

• Run check-ins or other campaigns (daily check-ins, weekly updates, weekly plans, or your custom campaigns)
• Get OKR notifications and updates in Slack
• Run Icebreakers in Slack

How to install the new Focus bot?

1. Delete current Slack bot in your Slack workspace (Settings & administration > Manage apps > click on the bot “focus v1” and click “Remove bot” button in the bot settings). 
2. Install the new bot (button will be here)

About the bot Settings

After installation, you can set bot for your team. You can specify members for check-ins (by default, the bot will send the check-ins to everyone), change time, or choose a public channel for results delivery. If you choose a public channel, please add the bot to this channel. 

Check your campaign settings here.

If you create Objectives at Focus, the Focus bot will send notifications when someone updates OKRs (Objective and Key Results). It helps to sync the team and focus on the most important things. To use it, please specify a public channel for OKRs notifications and add the Focus bot to the channel.

Also, the bot can remind users who didn’t update their OKRs last week or last 2 weeks. 

You can edit OKR settings here.

Let me know what you think about the new bot.

Check our Guide for Slack

The post Focus bot 2.0 for Slack appeared first on Focus.

We added Weekly Plans at Focus. 

It helps your team to plan the week. We got few requests from users that it’s not enough to run Weekly Updates to sync a team. It’s better to plan the week on Mondays and then run weekly updates on Fridays. 

That’s why we built the new feature. Weekly plans have the same principle as weekly updates. People will get notifications to plan their week.

By default, Focus asks 3 questions:

• What are you going to do this week?
• What is one thing you can do this week to get the best outcome?
• What is your main OKR next week?
  

You can change, add, or remove questions in Settings > Weekly plans. The last question is connected with the list of OKRs (like it was in weekly updates before). 

How to activate weekly plans

If you are a new user, then weekly plans work by default in your account. 

If you are an existing user who already runs a weekly updates campaign, you need to turn on Weekly Plans in Settings. Just click on status, which is Disabled for you.

And check the timezone in weekly plans settings. Also, if you want to ask a question about OKRs in weekly plans, not updates, then you need to do few actions more:

Also, Focus asks the question about the main OKR for the next week in Weekly Plans now, not Updates. If you want to return workflow and use the questions where people can choose OKRs from the list, then you should do few actions:

1. Deactivate OKR question in Weekly Plans. To do that, click on the checklist to change status. Then confirm the form by clicking on the button Submit to save these settings.
   

2. Activate OKR questions in weekly updates. Just go to weekly updates settings and activate it. And remove Question 3 “What are you going to do next week?” in weekly updates. You have it in weekly plans now. Don’t forget to click on the button Submit.

That’s all.

Now you can use weekly plans together with weekly updates. 

Also, we made the left menu simpler. All check-ins, updates, and plans are located in Check-ins & Plans section. You can choose Daily Check-ins, Weekly Updates, or Weekly Plans on the top menu.

Cheers! 

Anton Cherkasov,

Founder at Focus

The post New Feature: Weekly Plans appeared first on Focus.

Quick update. 

We added more details about OKRs. Now you can get all information about the objective or key result. To do that, you need to click on a specific objective or key result.

Also, you can update it, specify the current status, comment, and even make notes.

By the way, notes are a great thing to see how your traction is going on during the time. 

And you can update the whole objective or specific key result.

Cheers! 

Anton Cherkasov,
Founder at Focus

The post OKR details appeared first on Focus.