So you know what OKRs are and are in need to tips to improve them. Even if you aren’t sure about OKR’s, we’ll give you the full rundown; a start to finish of everything a leader implementing OKRs needs to know! Here we have 7 essential tips for setting better OKRs.

To recap on OKRs:

OKRs are Objectives and Key Results. It’s a goal-setting framework, a methodology, an overall powerful planning strategy. It’s used by companies and startups to keep teams organized. One of the most notable companies using OKRs is Google. You can read about it on Google’s reWork initiative : reWork.

Objectives are the roadmap. It’s the qualities and the goal you want your team to reach by the end of the week, month, quarter, or year.

Key Results are the quantitative data. They define what you need to check off to reach your objective. Fulfilling all the key results means success.

An example OKR from our 20 Human Resources (HR) OKR examples article:

Objective: Create an amazing training program
Key results:
– Achieve 100% training completion rate
– Increase employee performance post-training by 30%
– Decrease new hire turnover from 30% to 10% 

In case you really are new to OKRs, here’s some Focus blog articles to get you started What are OKRs and How to set powerful OKRs.

Some other great OKR sources are Felipe Castro, Bernard Marr, and Forbes.

OKRs work wonders, but you have to learn how to set them correctly for their full effect.

Now onto the 7 tips for setting better OKRs:

1. The first tip is to be specific. Know what your goal is and provide the key results you want to see. If this happens to be your first time setting an OKR, it’s okay to be off the mark a little. Test the waters and adapt to those first results. You want to aim high but not unreasonably so in the beginning.

Less is More!

2. My second tip goes hand in hand with being specific. Less goals and less key results means that you focus will be on one area. Don’t include minute details or small items. Only include key results that exemplifies the completion of your objective.

For every objective 3-5 key results is recommended. Any more than that will loosen your concentration. Along with that, 3-5 objectives per team layout. Stay concise and stay concentrated!

Our blog provides all the tips and tricks you need to succeed so definitely check us out. You can request a free demo today!

Which leads me to my third tip.

3. There are two types of OKRs and I suggest to start off with Roofshot OKRs then transition to Moonshots. In short, roofshots are challenging, but approachable. You can expect your team to carry out roofshot OKRs to the fullest potential.

OKRs are known for being both ambitious and uncomfortable.

Moonshots, on the other hand, are a little more advanced. Like it’s name suggests, moonshots require you to “shoot for the moon”; challenge the team to ask different questions and take new, creative approaches. These OKRs seem out of your teams limits and impossible to be fulfilled to the max. It’s reserved for more developed teams that understand the OKRs.

Read my previous article about Roofshot and Moonshot OKRs for the full explanation on why you need to start off with roofshot OKRs.

4. Make sure everyone in your team is notified and understand the OKRs. Define what materials or resources you expect them to use. Should the whole team be involved or subgroups? These are things you need to think about.

Aside from weekly or monthly company meetings, your organization should also hold one on one meetings for clarification.

One on one meetings have plenty of benefits as listed in our blog. Read here for 9 one on one meeting tips.

5. Check in with your team to learn about their vision. Everyone can be handed the same prompt and write their version drastically different. Everyone should agree to the vision and OKR that you have. It’s important that your team understands why they should care and put in the effort.

Leaders should define the potential growth that their team could have through these goals. Show that it is pushing them in the right direction.

Tips 4 and 5 both echo the theme of transparency.

Let your organization know the strategies your thinking off-including why you choose certain key results to prove that you’ve reached a certain objective.

6. My sixth is to reevaluate and re calibrate. If your OKRs are not working out the first time around, you need to analyze the root of the problem. Don’t be afraid to ask your team for their feedback on the OKRs. It is their OKR as much as it is yours.

Keep an eye out for the progress your team has made and change some key results if necessary. It’s alright to readjust what your objectives and key results are. You will keep on having to transform your OKRs.

A stagnant yet long term OKR is a sign of neglect. Keep your OKRs up to date to reflect what’s important and signals success.

7. Last but not least, reviewing and evaluating your progress is important. This last tip requires you to understanding what went wrong and revise your OKR. As a leader, you should never make another OKR without looking back at the previous ones.

OKRs are great because you can build off of the older one to keep making high goals for your team. The last OKR should be the stepping stone for the next one and so on.

Now that we’ve reached the end, make sure you remember these 7 tips to setting better OKRs. Thank you for reading this blog and make sure to check out everything else that Focus has to offer.

Use Focus! We can assist and guide your team in all matters from OKRs to meetings. Our tools at Focus keep your team on track, in sync, and focused on what really matters.

Focus not only utilizes OKRs but daily check ins, a Slack bot, and more. Our team at Focus can attest to its helpfulness and benefits.

The post 7 Tips for setting better OKRs appeared first on Focus.

OKRs is a goal-setting framework that increases employee engagement while helping people to focus on the most important things.

However, one of the biggest challenges with OKR is setting the right goals. I talked with a lot of HR Professionals who proved that their OKRs are not perfect.

That’s why we gathered the best practices and created 20 OKR examples for HR teams. In this article, you will find goals for main Recruitment areas: 

• Recruiting
• Onboarding
• Training and development
• Employee relations
• Employee satisfaction
• Compensation and benefits

Before we start, a short talk about OKRs.

What is OKR?

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a system for uniting an organization across the most important goals. Companies like Google, Netflix, Twitter, and others use OKRs.

Why do they do it? 

OKRs help companies to focus on the most important goals, align the team, and increase employee engagement. 

An objective is WHAT we want to achieve. It’s an ambitious goal, which motivates and inspires the team. 

Key results are metrics that track HOW we get to the objective. Are we in the timeframe? Should we increase the velocity or change the goal? Are we going in the right direction or we lose the focus? Key results give you answers to these sorts of questions and measure the objective’s progress.

Why do OKRs increase employee engagement?

There are several reasons. First, OKRs are interesting and ambitious goals that inspire people to achieve new heights. Another reason is the method of creating goals. It’s not only a top-down process as it works with Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Setting objectives and key results is a joint process when half of the goals are created top-down and the other half bottom-up. It allows everyone to participate in the goal-setting process and be more responsible for goals that people set themselves.

If you want to know more about OKRs, you can read this article on how to set powerful OKRs. And here are OKR examples for marketing and product teams.

OKR example

Objective: Create the best workplace in the world
Key results:
– Run interviews with each of 257 employees to find areas for improvements
– Decrease new hire turnover from 20% to 5%
– Increase employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) from 50% to 90%

20 HR OKR examples

We created these objectives for inspiration to help you create your best OKRs for People Operations Teams. All OKRs include 6 main recruitment areas: recruiting, onboarding, training, and development, employee relations, employee satisfaction, compensation, and benefits.

HR OKR examples for Recruiting

Objective: Create the A-Team
Key results:
– Hire 5 A-class engineers this quarter
– Increase the quality of hire from 30% to 60%
– Maintain cost per hire at $4,000 

Objective: Make recruiting great
Key results:
– Increase employee retention rate from 80% to 95%
– Increase in hiring manager satisfaction from 30% to 60%
– Maintain cost per hire at $3,000 

Objective: Hire the best people
Key results:
– Increase the quality of hire from 40% to 80%
– Increase performance appraisal rate from 3.4 to 4.5
– Decrease first-year churn rate from 30% to 10%

Objective: Improve recruiting funnel
Key results:
– Decrease time per hire from 40 days to 20 days
– Increase application completion rate from 40% to 80%
– Increase Candidate Net Promoter Score from 50% to 80%
– Maintain cost per hire at $3,000 

HR OKR examples for Onboarding

Objective: Make great onboarding
Key results:
– Create a detailed 3-month onboarding program
– Achieve 100% training completion rate
– Achieve 90% new employee satisfaction rate

Objective: Improve the onboarding program
Key results:
– Decrease time-to-productivity from 6 weeks to 3 weeks for new hire
– Increase training completion rate from 70% to 100%
– Decrease first-year employee turnover from 30% to 10%

HR OKR examples for Training and Development

Objective: Create an amazing training program
Key results:
– Achieve 100% training completion rate
– Increase employee performance post-training by 30%
– Decrease new hire turnover from 30% to 10% 

Objective: Improve the effectiveness of the training program
Key results:
– Decrease the time to complete the course from 30 to 15 days
– Improve the average training score from 70% to 90%
– Increase the return of the investment (ROI) of the training program from 130% to 260%

Objective: Build an awesome mentorship program
Key results:
– Increase the participation rate from 30% to 60%
– Increase the talent retention rate from 80% to 95%
– Increase employee satisfaction rate from 65% to 90%
– Increase internal promotions by 50%

Objective: Make Employee Development Better
Key results:
– Increase the number of employees with an Individual Development Plan (IDP) from 50% to 100%
– Implement Continuous Performance Reviews
– Increase the number of employees who run biweekly 1 on 1 meeting from 50% to 100%
– Increase employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) from 40% to 80%

Objective: Implement Continuous Performance Management
Key results:
– 100% of employees participate in a quarterly review process
– 100% of employees run weekly updates on the pulse of morale and overall employee satisfaction
– 90% of employees run biweekly 1 on 1 meeting
– Increase employee productivity from $65 per hour of work to $100 per hour.

HR OKR examples for Employee Relations

Objective: Create an Amazing Culture
Key results:
– Reduce the number of internal complaints from 8 to 2 per month
– Increase the number of monthly recognitions coming from employees from 25 to 50
– Increase employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) from 40% to 80%

Objective: Improve Employee Relations
Key results:
– Reduce the number of employees who report they have a bad manager from 5% to 2.5%
– Increase the average employer performance score from 3.2 to 4.5
– Increase manager satisfaction rate from 65% to 90%

Objective: Build Effective Employee Appraisal Processes
Key results:
– Switch from Yearly Performance Management to Continuous Performance Management
– 100% of employees fill 360 Degree Feedback surveys
– 80% of critical objectives are achieved by the end of the year

HR OKR examples for Employee Satisfaction

Objective: Create the Amazing Culture
Key results:
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 60% to 90%
– Reduce Employee Absenteeism from 3% to 0%
– Decrease employee turnover from 30% to 10%

Objective: Boost Employee Wellbeing
Key results:
– Increase Weekly Pulse Score from 3.5 to 4.7
– Increase employee retention rate from 80% to 95%
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 60% to 90%  

Objective: Make Great Employer Branding
Key results:
– Increase candidate quality rate from 8% to 16%
– Decrease cost-per-hire from $3,000 to $1,000
– Increase employee referrals from 5% to 10%  

Objective: Increase Employee Engagement
Key results:
– Increase employee productivity by 50% 
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 70% to 95% 
– Decrease employee turnover rate from 20% to 5% 

HR OKR examples for Compensation and benefits 

Objective: Build an Effective Compensation Strategy to Retain Employees
Key results:
– Decrease % of employees below the salary band from 30% to 15% 
– Increase employee productivity by 50% 
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 70% to 95% 
– Decrease employee turnover rate from 20% to 5% 

Objective: Design Irresistible Employee Benefits Program
Key results:
– Retain benefit revenue ratio at 10% 
– Decrease the absence rate from 10% to 5% 
– Increase ROI of Employee Benefits Program from 150% to 200%

Summary

We made these OKR examples for your inspiration. You can use these examples and create your own based on it. Making your own OKR, you set goals that fit your needs much better. Current OKR examples help you to avoid the most popular OKRs mistakes that companies make. 

At Focus, we believe that using OKRs is the process of continuous improvements. OKRs can bring your team significant benefits like focus on top priorities, alignment in your organization, synchronization, and much more. For using and tracking OKRs, you can use Focus. It allows teams to keep the focus on top priorities in daily operations. Start working smarter with Focus today.

The post 20 Human Resources (HR) OKR Examples appeared first on Focus.

While speaking at many management conferences, I see that a lot of people struggle with setting OKRs (objectives and key results). The most important part I want to point out is that people often make similar OKR mistakes. 

In this article, you find the top 5 mistakes that companies make when setting OKRs and the ways on how to avoid them. If you follow these steps, you will save a lot of time for yourself and for your team in OKRs implementation. And of course, you will bring out the next level of creating an environment that values and emphasizes output.

Topics covered in this article:

• What is OKR?
• What are the obstacles that come with OKR?
• Top 5 OKR mistakes

Before we begin, I want to mention the main benefits of OKRs because it allows you to understand what you should be getting out of them. And no one can tell better about it than John Doerr, who worked with “The Father of OKR”, Andrew Grove. In his book “Measure what matters”, he describes four OKR superpowers:

• Superpower #1 — Focus and Commit to Priorities: High-performance organizations hone in on work that’s important, and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter. OKRs implore leaders to make hard choices. They’re a precision communication tool for departments, teams, and individual contributors. By dispelling confusion, OKRs give us the focus needed to win.
• Superpower #2 — Align and Connect for Teamwork: With OKR transparency, everyone’s goals—from the CEO down—are openly shared. Individuals link their objectives to the company’s game plan, identify cross-dependencies, and coordinate with other teams. By connecting each contributor to the organization’s success, top-down alignment brings meaning to work. By deepening people’s sense of ownership, bottom-up OKRs foster engagement, and innovation.
• Superpower #3 — Track for Accountability: OKRs are driven by data. They are animated by periodic check-ins, objective grading, and continuous reassessment—all in a spirit of no-judgment accountability. An endangered key result triggers action to get it back on track or to revise or replace it if warranted.
• Superpower #4 — Stretch for Amazing: OKRs motivate us to excel by doing more than we’d thought possible. By testing our limits and affording the freedom to fail, they release our most creative, ambitious selves.

Sounds good? Then let’s talk about the definition of Objectives and Key Results and what OKR mistakes teams often make using them.

What is an OKR?

OKR (Objective and Key Results) is a goal-setting method used by Google, Netflix, and many others. If you want to get a key difference between KPI and OKR then think about it as the difference between Waterfall methodology and Agile. I hope it helps ?

To clarify, OKR is a framework for setting ambitious goals that help a company focus on the most important issues. There are no hard commitments and bonuses for achievements. It also doesn’t impact the performance scores. In contrast, OKRs are ambitious, almost unachievable goals that continuously sync the progress.

OKR consists of 2 pieces: 

1. An objective is an ambitious goal, which motivates and inspires the team. It shows WHAT we should achieve.
2. Key results are metrics that measure HOW we get to the objective. Are we in the timeframe? Should we increase the velocity or change the goal? Are we going in the right direction or are we losing focus?

OKR principles 

It’s important to understand not only the shape but also OKR principles:

1. Publicity and transparency – everyone can see all OKRs. 
2. Ambitious – some OKRs should be at least 3-10 times higher than usual goals to motivate people on finding new and creative solutions. 
3. OKRs don’t impact salary or bonuses – people will not set ambitious objectives if they know that they could lose their income.
4. Constant tracking – OKR syncing should be at least bi-weekly. However, running weekly updates is a much better way of tracking OKRs. It helps a team be aligned and change initiatives if it’s necessary. 
5. The fewer objectives and key results are better – it helps to focus on the top priorities and achieve the best outcome instead of trying to complete too many goals and get the worst traction. There should be no more than 5 key results for an objective. Less is more. Also, don’t create more than 5 objectives in a quarter. 
6. 50/50 or 60/40. OKR is not a top-down goal-setting system like KPI. The exec team sets 40-50% of OKRs and employees create the other goals. It’s the mix of top-down and bottom-up goals that generally settles at around half-and-half.
7. The OKR cycle is a quarter. OKRs set clear quarters, but you can change yearly OKRs if it’s necessary. Quarterly OKRs gives you a combination of agile and clarity. On one hand, you can react pretty rapidly to the market’s changes or customers’ demands. On the other hand, you have clarity of the top priorities for the next quarter. During some major forces, like the COVID-19 pandemic, some companies move to monthly cycles to change goals faster in times of ambiguity.
8. Key results are only metrics. Sometimes companies use indicators like reference points or tools for employee motivation. In OKRs, we use key results like coordinates in a GPS tracker. It’s only about the current status, not about motivation or bonuses. They help us keep the right of way, adjust the speed, and change the tactics. It’s crucial for a team because they show everyone where we are now and where we are heading. It allows a company to be a united team that can adapt to the environment and different contexts. 

We looked at what makes OKRs powerful and what to pay attention to. Now let’s move onto tackling OKR mistakes.

OKRs are hard, but making OKR mistakes are easy

Everything sounds great and makes sense, right? OKRs are great! Then why are you reading an article about avoiding OKR mistakes? When you’re first starting to implement OKRs in a company, problems usually arise. Someone doesn’t want to achieve objectives that don’t correlate to salary, others can’t make the right and ambitious objectives or set useful key results. There are many problems that a team runs into during the first OKR cycle and it is easy to run into these common OKR mistakes.

When a company thinks about using OKRs, they should know that the company’s culture will be changed – such as emotional maturity in the workplace, employee responsibility, communication with colleagues, and feedback skills.

The good news is about the timeframe. Goals can not be achieved in one night. What you can do is implement OKRs and transform your processes and skills sprint by sprint. And the most important thing to do is to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your company and to create the right OKRs strategy based on these insights. 

Instead of a heroic two weeks sprint of OKRs settings, it’s better to implement the new framework wisely with less speed, but more effective. This approach allows OKRs to live in organizations when a founder stops spending too much attention on it.

The best approach is to establish a cross-functional team that will be responsible for OKRs implementation. Usually, the consists of the board of directors and from five to ten leaders from the organization. People from this team should get training on OKRs to properly understand how they work. Afterward, the team makes a step-by-step plan on OKR implementation and starts working on it. It’s important now to avoid those OKR mistakes that hundreds of companies have made before you. Let’s check them out.

5 most common OKR mistakes

OKR mistake #1: Too ambitious or too simple OKRs

One OKR mistakes we see companies make often is where the objectives they set are either too complex or too simple. And we did the same in the first iteration of OKRs. We set the OKR ‘Triple our sales in the quarter‘. It was a pretty ambitious objective, however, we didn’t have appropriate resources at that time to fulfill this goal. At the end of the cycle, we were exhausted as we achieved an objective of less than 10%. 

At the same time, we see many cases when companies set simple OKRs like ‘’Create the new website”, which probably is not so ambitious and hard to do. 

You should try to avoid setting very simple or very hard objectives. How do you set an ambitious, but not impossible OKR? 

Answer these 2 questions:

1. Will we achieve X in 3 months in our usual mode? If we understand that it’s achievable then it’s a simple goal. If not then it looks ambitious and we ask the next question.
2. Will we achieve X in a year? If we feel that we might do it – it will be hard, but we could achieve it in a year, then it looks like a good candidate on OKRs for a quarter. If we understand that we won’t be able to achieve it in a year, then it’s most likely your setting an impossible OKRs. 

Setting the right OKRs is the skill that a team improves step by step from quarter to quarter. Your first OKRs should not be perfect, because trying to do something ideal from the first attempt can take a lot of time and it also directly affects your enthusiasm. Feel free to set good enough OKRs to start using it early and then run an analysis, which will improve your next goals. 

Bad OKR:

Objective: x10 revenue in the next quarter
Key results: 

• Increase traffic on the website from 10,000 up to 50,000
• Increase Visitor-to-Customer conversion rate from 1% to 2%
• Achieve $10,000,000 in revenue

Why is it not a good OKR? On one hand, it’s a pretty ambitious objective and should inspire team leaders. However, there are two issues in the objective. First, the objective is not necessarily a measurable goal. Numbers in the title don’t inspire people in the team because they can think that it’s just boosted indicators. Second, the objective is too ambitious and it’s unrealistic in most cases. Increase revenue up to 10 times in a quarter – do you and your team believe in it? It’s hard to do in a year for most companies. And it’s even more difficult to achieve in a quarter. If your team won’t believe it’s possible then they will delay initiatives because employees often have a lot of tasks to do.

How can we transform this OKR and make it better?

Strong OKR:

Objective: Achieve a sales record in the next quarter
Key results: 

• Increase traffic on the website from 10,000 up to 50,000
• Increase Visitor-to-Customer conversion rate from 1% to 2%
• Achieve $10,000,000 in revenue

Now, this OKR looks pretty ambitious and we aren’t using numbers in the objective, which is really good for motivation. It’s a significant, concrete, and action-oriented objective that inspires the team. 

OKR mistake #2: Too many key results or objectives

Another OKR mistake we see is creating too many key results or objectives. In this scenario, companies lose their focus using the framework that was designed to keep them focus. Less is better.

How can you determine if there are too many OKRs? John Doerr recommends using 3 to 5 key results for an objective. The less is more. We prefer using 3 key results in many cases and set 5 results only if we don’t have another way. 

Using too many key results leads to a loss of focus on the most important things because the team will be doing a lot of different stuff. That’s why it’s better to set three or four outcomes to the goal.

Also, teams have similar mistakes with objectives. Some departments have 5 or even more objectives in a quarter. It also brings your team down a level when you are doing so many different things and wasting your attention in different areas. 

How many objectives should a team have? 

Again, John Doerr recommends 5-7 objectives for a company. We suggest setting 1-3 objectives for each level of your organization. 

OKR mistake #3: Using only top-down OKRs

This mistake often is made by autocratic leaders who think that OKR is the same as KPI. They set top-down OKRs for all teams and then it doesn’t get significant outcomes because people don’t believe in these ambitious goals and don’t understand why they should achieve them if it doesn’t correlate with bonuses. As a result, leaders think that OKRs don’tt work. 

OKR is not an autocratic top-down goal methodology. It’s all about people participating in this process. Each team thinks about its OKRs. People begin to understand the company’s objectives and how they contribute to the total outcomes, what’s the value they give to the company by their day to day operations. 

It helps everyone to see the real value of his or her works. And this is the place where the magic happens. People understand the company’s goals and know how they contribute to it. They set ambitious OKRs for their teams or for themselves. It’s a game-changer for employee engagement. 

However, you will not achieve this by highly hierarchical top-down goals. These goals are not connected to people’s views and desires. They might think, “It looks that our management wants us to work hard for achieving these ambitious goals without paying bonuses for it.” Do you think that motivates people? Top-down autocratic goals don’t encourage people to do great.

That’s why it’s crucial to build a culture where top-down goals work with bottom-up objectives. C-Suites determine a company’s OKRs. It’s high-level objectives for the whole organization. At the same time, teams start a discussion about their visions. What value they will put on the table for achieving the company’s goals. In this process, department heads talk with their people to determine the best and the most ambitious goals for them. Afterward, teams present their OKRs to the C-level management and make it public after confirmation. 

You see, everyone participates in the goal-setting. It’s not just a management game. People in teams begin to take care of the objectives because they participated in its creation. If you use OKRs only top-down then change it as soon as possible and give your people the opportunities for participation in this process. 

OKR mistake #4: Don’t track progress regularly

OKR is not a silver bullet that works after they were identified. You can’t set OKRs and forget about them until the end of the cycle.  

People are used to tracking metrics and indicators in both ways – either it was requested or before bonus pay. In OKRs, you should do it regularly at least one time per two weeks. However, weekly updates work much better in most cases. In this case, OKRs fulfill their destination, which is to be the coordinates for your organization and link strategy with tactics. 

Let’s imagine that you are going on a journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles. You turn on the GPS navigator to check the status. If you know the road, then you don’t need a GPS navigator. However, it works only for well-known goals that you’ve already done before. But if you don’t know the route and you don’t look on the navigator then each turn in the road could lead you to the wrong place where you are moving further from your way each minute. 

That’s why it’s crucial to set the specific day on the week and do weekly (or bi-weekly) OKRs updates. 

It doesn’t take a lot of time to do weekly updates. It unites your team across top priorities, which is a very important benefit for everyone. 

How can you track OKRs weekly? 

• First, you should answer this simple question, “What’re your OKR achievements this week?”. If you didn’t do anything regarding OKRs, then ask yourself why not? You should analyze this issue and take action on how to improve it for next week.
• Second, see who worked on OKRs this week – what’s about your key results? Are they changed? What’s your current status now – are you on track, behind, or at risk? Write everything down that everyone understands total progress. Keep it transparent.
• Third, are there areas for improvement? What can you or your team improve on for next week? Did you achieve any planned outcomes this week? If so, you can probably set a more ambitious goal for the next week. If not, then what were the main blockers? What can you and your team improve in the next sprint?

See, magic is here. Everyone analyzes their OKRs outcomes weekly and gets insights from it. Your team starts thinking about OKRs each week, which means that you are thinking about what matters the most, constantly. It sounds simple, but it’s so powerful. 

You can track your OKRs in sheets or in special software like Focus. You need to begin building a habit of weekly retrospectives and creating a transparent culture that values and emphasizes output. Learn more about how to run short scrum meetings in the linked article.

OKR mistake #5: Using results that a team doesn’t know how to measure

Some companies create very ambitious key results like ‘Increase NPS up to 2 times.’ However, sometimes when asking them about what’s the current NPS (Net Promoter Score) you hear silence because they don’t know it. 

And how will these teams track their progress and achievements?

In the case of NPS, it’s pretty hard to measure the score in several days. You need time to implement it on websites, newsletters, and so on. Then you should receive the data from customers. It takes time. If you have an OKR with increasing NPS by 50% this quarter and you haven’t implemented an NPS system yet, then you might have some problems with it, because you’ll be spending one or two months just setting up an NPS and receiving your first batch of data. With each weekly update, you will say something like this, ‘We haven’t had data for measuring NPS yet’. That’s why it’s better to set a key result as ‘Implement an NPS system’ and track how many initiatives you will finish for this key result. For example, if implementing an NPS system consists of 30 to-dos and you close 27 that means that you complete this key result at 90%.

When setting a key result, you should think about how it’s measured. Also, remember that they are indicators. Key results should tell a team about progress, so everyone can adjust his or her goals, accordingly.

OKR checklist

Phew, those are some big OKR mistakes, right? We gathered the most popular OKR mistakes in this article. However, it’s not all the mistakes companies make during OKRs implementation. That’s why I’d like to finish the article with a check-list that helps you to improve your OKRs. If you want to know more about OKRs, you can read this article on how to set powerful OKRs.

Check that your objectives fit these criteria:

• Objectives have a quarter cycle
• The objective is WHAT we want to achieve
• The objective helps to achieve high-level goals or other teams get value by achieving that objective
• You have 2-5 objectives per team’s level 
• 50% or more objectives set bottom-up
• Goals are divided into two types: ambitious and operational

Check-list for key results:

• 50% or more key results set bottom-up
• Key results are measurable and clearly describe achievements of objectives (at least “done/not done”, but it’s better to avoid this version)
• Track progress each week (or, at least, bi-weekly)

Summary

We looked at what makes a good OKR, what challenges you can face in your organization, and what common OKR mistakes to avoid. I hope they will help you in setting the right OKRs that will bring your team to the next level. And remember that the main mission of OKRs is to unite your company while making the focus on top priorities and transparent culture. 

Finally, I believe that identifying top priorities and consistent focus on it day-to-day is the best way for building high-performing teams. That’s why we created Focus, a tool that keeps teams on top priorities every day. Start working smarter with Focus.

The post 5 OKR Mistakes and How to Avoid Them appeared first on Focus.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a method of setting objectives and tracking key results. It aligns teams and people inside an organization and allows employees to focus on the most important goals.

Table of contents

• Why should you use OKRs?
• Definition
• How to start?
• How to create objectives
• How to create key results
• Checklist for setting OKRs
• 5 steps to set up OKRs

OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of “organizing the world’s information” perhaps even achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most. And I wanted to make sure people heard that.

Larry Page, a Co-founder at Google

Why Should You Use OKRs?

By using this method a company achieves:

1. Focusing on the top priorities – an employee understands what matters for the job and might find a better way of achieving it;
2. Aligning the team – transparent and openly shared Objectives and Key Results connect everyone in the team. The organization begins to play like one team because everyone knows the top priorities of every person or team and understands what’s going on in the company;
3. Avoiding micromanagement – a manager can concentrate on the strategic questions while building the culture of a high-performing team.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

An objective is WHAT should be achieved. It’s a big, significant, action-oriented, and ideally an inspirational goal.

Key results track HOW we achieve the objective. They are specific, measurable, time-bound, and aggressive.

Each objective has key results. There should be no more than 5 key results for an objective. Less is more. Also, don’t create more than 5 objectives in a quarter. 

Example

Objective: Launch an awesome product 
Key Results:

• Get 5,000 signups by the end of Q3 2020
• Achieve 10% visitor to trial conversion rate 
• Achieve 50% trial to customer conversion rate

OKR is the hierarchical goal-setting system where a company’s goals connect with teams’ objectives. At the same time, a team’s goals affect individuals’ initiatives or even personal OKRs.

Hierarchy might not be only vertical. For instance, some teams can set united or related goals. If you want to learn more, check out this article: What is OKR and why everyone talks about it.

How to Start?

Creating OKRs is an open process and everyone participates in it. There 3 types of communication:

• Top-down – company’s goals transform into teams’ and employees’ OKRs. This scenario calls on creating goals based on the company’s needs.
• Side-by-side – different teams cooperate across departmental lines to create common OKRs. For instance, development and support teams might set mutual OKRs for reducing production defects. This is a cross-departmental scenario. 
• Bottom-up – a great individual idea might turn into a team’s or even the company’s OKRs. It was with Gmail, which began as a personal project of one of Google’s employees. If we understand that we can make something valuable, then let’s do it as a team goal. It creates goals based on a solution.

Setting Objectives and Key Results is a joint process when half of the goals are created top-down and the other half bottom-up. It’s crucial to achieve a total understanding of the most important goals between everyone in the team. It allows the team to focus on the most important objectives and say no to the less important goals.

How to Create Objectives

When setting up Objectives, you should take the time to discuss your top priorities with the team. It brings your team to the next level of alignment and understanding of what matters. For setting the right objectives, follow these next principles: 

OKRs should be ambitious. It must be hard to achieve the objective. At the same time, it should be possible to accomplish the Objective. Don’t set an objective everyone will not believe in. Here are several of the most ambitious OKRs in history:

• Landing human on the Moon – ambitious goal in 1969;
• Building the plane that can fly – an ambitious goal for Wright brothers in the 1900s.

Ambitious OKRs inspire people and motivate them for high results. People often prefer to set simple goals to be sure that they are able to achieve it. An ambitious and hard objective is the challenge that requires innovations and persistence. Even if you will not achieve this objective, the outcome will be much better than usual.

Don’t create more than 5 OKRs. It’s crucial because it allows the team to focus on these OKRs. The more goals you create – the less focus you have. Also, it builds more productive communication inside the company. If the company has dozens of departments and each of them has dozens of OKRs, it will be pretty hard to create transparent communication. You will spend your time trying to understand what’s going on in each team.

Goals should lead to new achievements. It doesn’t make sense to set goals for routine operations that you are doing every day: answering customers’ questions, doing operational processes, etc. They should be done without reminders. OKRs are not intended for maintaining the status quo.

Objectives should be concrete. We should understand where we want to be, what we should achieve. Vague wording like ‘simplify’, ‘facilitate’ doesn’t explain the finished result. Specific goals allow us to focus on achievements and create a roadmap for it.

• Launch the new product for target market X
• Achieve $2M ARR this year
• Deliver X product to the end of Q3

A usual mistake in OKRs is setting a strategic, but vague goal.

OKRs should be transparent. Make them public. Everyone in the company should see and understand the objectives and key results. Obscure and ambiguous wording leads to misunderstanding and conflicts.

How to set Key Results

Key results should be measurable. If we can’t measure it then we can’t know how to track the progress at the end of the quarter. Here are several examples:

• Achieve 10,000 signups by the end of Q3
• Increase the visitor to customer conversion rate from 3% to 10%
• Reduce site speed from 3.1 to 1.2 seconds
• Launch the authorization through Facebook feature until August 1st
• Reduce time to deliver the order from 12 to 6 minutes 

Each objective should have 3 to 5 key results. Too many key results lead to losing focus. On the other hand, only one key result replaces the objective in fact. 

Key results should have a clear impact on the objective. Working on the key results, which don’t directly influence the objective, will take time and resources and don’t help to achieve the goal.

A key result is about the outcome, but not the way on how to achieve it. The freedom with choosing the way to achieve a key result is the core of OKRs because it gives teams the opportunity to choose the most suitable option and change it if it’s necessary over time.

Key results should be easily affirmed. If you don’t know how to achieve the key result, then you should not choose it.

OKR Checklist

1. OKRs should be short. There is no space for long OKRs for the whole page. 
2. OKRs are not a to-do list. If your OKRs look like a task list then you should change it.
3. The team has at least one OKR that is connected with the company’s goals. Otherwise, it isn’t clear how the team impacts the company’s outcomes.
4. The most important team’s OKRs should be based on the main company’s goals. The core company’s goal should not have a weak priority for the team.
5. Common OKRs should be aligned between teams. For example, if the product team is going to launch a new product at the beginning of the quarter, then the marketing team probably might not have enough time for promotion.   
6. OKRs require the attention of the whole team. OKRs are the top priorities of your organization. It’s your North Star Metrics. Everyone in the team should understand what matters the most right now for the company and how he or she contributes to it.
7. OKRs give solid value to the business. It doesn’t make sense if achieving OKRs will bring small or low-value outcomes for the company. It’s your top priority. 
8. Key results are only metrics that you need for achieving an objective. If key results are not enough for accomplishing the objective, then it’s a bad sign. It leads to delays in work due to search for other resources needed for this OKR. 

5 steps to set up OKRs

1. Executives identify yearly and quarterly company’s OKRs.
2. Teams identify its OKRs to the quarter based on the company’s OKRs. Team leads discuss with their people how they can contribute to the company’s objectives.
3. Teams set the monthly goals depending on their quarter OKRs.
4. A team updates the status of OKRs weekly or bi-weekly.
5. At the end of the quarter, a team runs the retrospective meeting where members analyze the traction and set new OKRs for the next quarter.

Conclusion

Last, but not least, is about OKRs results. OKRs should be ambitious, which means that it shouldn’t be too easy to achieve. In Google, 60-70% of OKRs is an indicator of success. If you achieve 100% OKRs progress, then the objective is too simple. In this case, you should increase the level of OKRs in the next strategy session. At the same time, the result with 50% OKRs progress or lower is considered as a fail cycle. If you have 50% of progress or lower, then analyze the reasons for these results and make better decisions in the next quarter.  

Finally, I believe that identifying top priorities and consistent focus on it day-to-day is the best way for building high-performing teams. That’s why we created Focus, a tool that keeps teams on top priorities every day. Start working smarter with Focus.

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