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.

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No matter how long you’ve been in business, you’re bound to be overwhelmed by all the acronyms tossed around. In this article, we’ll discuss OKRs vs. KPIs, two popular acronyms that help you set your goals, and measure performances and results.

We’ve covered OKRs a bunch in previous posts, so we’ll start with KPIs. We’ll discuss OKRs down the line. But first….

What does KPI stand for?

KPI stands for 

Key
Performance 
Indicators

They are performance metrics aimed at evaluating success, output, quantity, and/or quality of ongoing activities (i.e. projects, programs, products, and etc), and individuals. KPIs are unique for each team, company, and industry so don’t go implementing someone else’s KPIs into your workflow because it worked for them.

How do I define my KPIs

You define your KPIs according to your core business objectives. They should be linked to strategic objectives and not just anything that can be measured, otherwise, you are wasting time and resources. It can be a challenge, but you can ask yourself 6 simple questions:

KPI OUTCOME

What is the desired outcome
Why is the outcome desired
How will you influence your desired outcome
Who will be in charge of the outcome
When will you track the outcome

Here’s an example of how to answer these questions:

KPI OUTCOME: Website traffic growth
What: Increase website traffic by 10% this quarter
Why: Achieving this target will build brand presence which in turn can make the brand more profitable
How: Adding more SEO-friendly content, improving funnels to the site, adopting new marketing strategies and tools, creating more engaging content on social media.
Who: VP of Marketing will be in charge for this metric
When: The KPI will be reviewed on a weekly basis

Tips for super effective KPIs

• Make the information succinct, clear and relevant to be absorbed and acted upon more quickly
• Focus on outcomes, not business activities
• KPIs metrics should be very carefully thought through. No random numbers for the sake of having a number.
• KPIs need to express metrics that are integral for a business’s success
• Ensure that your KPIs are attainable

When you encounter a KPI that needs improvements, it becomes a starting point in creating OKRs.

What does OKR stand for?

OKR stands for

Objective
Key
Results

Like KPIs, half of OKRs are metrics while the other half is the objective aka your goals. With OKRs, you set your objectives and see your success with your key results. They’re more inspirational and help everyone share the company vision.

Aspects of OKRs:

• Measurable – there should be a significant percentage/number of improvement you need to achieve.
• Ambitious – the goal must seem impossible but can be reached with enough effort. They should be inspirational.
• Flexible & Agile – Your timeline to meet these goals must be to respond to changing conditions.
• Clear – everyone needs to know and understand what your OKR is and how they are contributing.
• Bidirectional – this means that teams define their tactical OKRs (bottom-up) and see how they align with the C-levels strategic OKRs (top-down).

Companies such Google, Microsoft, and Netflix use OKRs. C-level executives set these objectives for everyone to follow, with contributions made by the team. OKRs are both strategic (annual goal) and tactical (monthly/quarterly). Their purpose is to align teams with transparent goals and metrics in which the teams set their own goals in a bottom-up approach. When employees are able to have a voice in company goals, employee engagement increases.

In the battle of OKRs vs. KPIs, the ambitious nature of OKRs means your goals will be hard to achieve 100% of the time. It’s best to achieve 60-70% of your objectives, while anything more means it was too simple and anything less means you didn’t plan well enough to execute it. KPIs measure the metrics to help you achieve your goals by helping you see what areas you can improve or adjust on.

It’s important to note that because you are setting ambitious goals that will be very hard to achieve, failure of achieving an OKR should not be calculated into an employees’ bonuses. If you connect bonuses with OKRs, then employees will not set ambitious goals for themselves that could have benefited the company.

Objectives themselves are not countable, but with key results they are. Key results are the metrics that tell you what you have done and what else needs to be done to get to your goal. Teams can choose one or several key results, but it’s recommended to have three to five. The less you have the more you can focus.

How do you set OKRs?

John Doerr, who brought OKRs to Google, used the following formula:

I will (objective) as measured by (this set of key results)
Here’s an example of how that would be filled in:

I will get people to visit my website as measured by (1) Increasing traffic from 5,000 to 10,000 by the end of the quarter and (2) creating 20 new pieces of SEO-friendly content on the website.

OKRs are commonly written this way:

Objective: Get more traffic to my website

Key Result #1 Increase traffic from 5,000 to 10,000 by the end of the quarter

Key Result #2 Create 20 new pieces of SEO-friendly content on the website

If you remember only one thing about OKRs, then remember they MUST be measurable. As Felipe Castro says, “Measurement is what makes a goal a goal. Without it…all you have is a desire.”

Pros and Cons: OKRs Vs. KPIs

The pros of OKRs

John Doer outlines the 4 superpowers of OKRs

Superpower #1 – Focus and Commit to Priorities

You hone in what’s important and everyone is clear on what is not. OKRs dictate the hard choices leaders need to make and make communication between departments, teams, and individual contributors more precise.

Superpower #2 – Align and connect for Teamwork

Making goals transparent and shared everyone links to the overall company goal, identify cross-dependencies, and coordinate with other teams effectively and share ownership. When individuals connect with the organization’s success it makes top-down work more meaningful.

Superpower #3 – Track for Accountability

As OKRs are periodicly checked, graded, and reassesed thanks to data, if a key result is endanger, you are notified and are able to track it or revise/replace it.

Superpower #4 – Stretch for Amazing

With OKRs’ ambitious nature it motivates workers to excel by pushing themselves more than they thought possible. It tests their limits due to no fear of failure to worry about.

The cons of OKRs

While there are good aspects of OKRs, there are some drawbacks

OKRs, in general, are just straightforward lists that can easily make it hard to find relationships between different objectives and how each objective can feed into another. This creates transparency and alignment issues. Transparency issues can also arise if OKRs are only designed bottom-up creating a lack of clarity on what the business is trying to achieve as a whole.

Because of the difficulty in making different OKRs relate and align, it also comes with a hefty investment. It can a long time to fully integrate a company, or even a single team, to OKRs, and some departments like experimental and research-based, can’t even make OKRs work at all, no matter the effort. People can be hesitant about trying a new approach and end up throwing in the towel because it’s easier to just go back to how things was like before because it was familiar.

The pros of KPIs

KPIs track progress and make performance across teams visible with access given to accurate results and metrics daily, weekly, and/or periodically. This helps to track the progress of a team’s goal and make decisions easier, especially for managers looking to redesign or modify future strategies. It also shows who is underperforming and how to improve upon that as well

The cons of KPIs

Result-oriented and short-term oriented KPIs runs the risk of a decrease in quality of standard and output as workers feel discouraged from implementing innovative approaches and lose the overall strategic vision. If attaining short-term goals begins to take more priority, it gets in the way of long-term goals.

What is the difference in KPIs vs. OKRs?

First, OKRs sit on top of KPIs, but not because it’s better.

OKR is a strategic framework while KPIs are measurements within that framework.

The overall difference between OKRs vs. KPIs is the intention behind setting goals. OKRs are aggressive, ambitious goals concerned with the whole process and improving performance drastically while KPIs are treated as health metrics to check and measure the output of ongoing projects and specific activities.  They are substantially different but will make you more productive and help achieve your goals faster.

Look over this chart for a quick go-to reference:

Conclusion

So, in OKRs vs. KPIs, which one is better?

Well, it’s not that simple. They have different purposes. and so can be used alone for certain things.

Let’s say you want to scale or improve current plans or projects, KPIs are the way to go.

On the other hand, if you have a more broad vision or want to change the full direction of your company or project, OKRs are better.

Instead of seeing it as OKRs VS. KPIs, think of it as OKRs AND KPIs because ideally they should be used together. KPIs can coincide with the Key Results of OKRs. By implementing both OKRs and KPIs, you drive your team to grow and accomplish greater goals.

We built a focus management platform to help companies be more effective and stay focused on top priorities in daily operations. You can try Focus for free to automate check-ins, one on one meetings, and OKRs. Start working smarter with Focus today.

The post What’s the difference between OKRs vs. KPIs? appeared first on Focus.

OKR, in general, and marketing OKR are pretty hot topics right now. A lot of companies talk about how important it is to set the right goals. However, setting OKRs is a challenge for many companies. What marketing OKRs should we set? What key results should we set for SEO and content marketing? And so on. 

We gathered the best practices for setting OKRs for marketing teams all in one place. In this article, you will find OKR examples for the main marketing areas: 

• High-level marketing OKRs
• Inbound marketing OKRs 
• Brand marketing OKRs
• Content marketing OKRs
• SEO OKRs
• Advertising OKRs (PPC marketing)
• SMM OKRs
• Product marketing OKRs

Before we start, here is a brief refresher about OKRs.

What is OKR?

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal-setting framework that is used by high-performing companies like Google, Netflix, Twitter, and many others.

The main benefits of OKRs: focus on top priorities, alignment of the team, increase employee engagement, and connect strategy with tactics.

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 are we losing the focus?

If you want to know more about OKRs, you can read this article on how to set powerful OKRs.

OKR example

Objective: Achieve record marketing metrics  
Key results:
– Boost the number of visitors from 10,000 to 20,000 
– Increase the number of signups from 1,000 to 2000
– Increase the visitor to lead conversion rate from 5% to 10%

Our favorite marketing OKR examples

High-Level Marketing OKR Examples

Objective: Achieve marketing record by the end Q3
Key results:
– Boost the number of visitors from 10,000 to 20,000 
– Increase the number of signups from 500 to 1,000 per month
– Increase the number of MQL (marketing qualified leads) from 50 to 100
– Keep customer acquisition cost of $20

Objective: Increase brand presence on the new market
Key results:
– Hire 1 local contractor for improving marketing materials
– Increase the monthly visitors from a new country from 500 to 1,000 
– Increase the number of leads from a new country from 5 to 25 per month

Inbound marketing OKR examples

Objective: Build a new inbound campaign
Key results:
– Increase monthly visitors from 25,000 to 50,000
– Increase DA score from 30 to 60
– Increase visitor to trial conversion rate from 3% to 10%

Objective: Boost Influencer Marketing
Key results:
– Get product reviews from 10 industry experts
– Run 5 webinars with leaders in the industry
– Increase influencer’s referral traffic from 2,000 to 4,000 per month

Objective: Increase conversion rate on the website
Key results:
– Run 20 split testing experiments on the website
– Increase the conversion rate on the main page from 5% to 10%
– Increase the average session duration from 2 minutes to 5 minutes

Objective: Create an amazing YouTube channel
Key results:
– Achieve 50,000 subscribers in Q2
– Get an average view duration per video at 10 minutes
– Achieve 100,000 hours of watch time on the channel
– Achieve 10% of Impressions Click-Through Rate
– Average 10,000 referral traffic from YouTube  

Objective: Build an industry-leading community
Key results:
– Achieve 5,000 members in the Slack community in Q2
– Achieve a 25% DAU (Daily Active Users)
– Achieve a 20% conversion rate from community member to paid customer

Brand marketing OKR examples

Objective: Boost the brand presence
Key results:
– Get published in the news about us in 3 mainstream media channels
– Run campaigns with top 3 industry influencers 
– Increase the number of followers on social media by 100%
– Increase the traffic from social media from 10,000 to 20,000

Objective: Create a leading industry brand
Key results:
– Get publications in top 10 industry media
– Speak as a partner in 10 industry conferences
– Get 50,000 visitors from industry-related keywords (organic)
– Increase the average brand mentions from 50 to 100 per month on the web

Objective: Improve brand communication
Key results:
– Boost the number of community members from 10,000 to 20,000
– Reduce the first response time from 1 hour to 10 minutes
– Increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) from 40% to 80%

Content marketing OKR examples

Objective: Create a content machine
Key results:
– Create a content strategy for the next quarter
– Choose top 5 writers regarding long-term partnerships
– Increase visitors from 5,000 to 10,000 per month
– Increase visitor to trial user conversion rate from 2% to 5%

Objective: Improve our content strategy and its distribution
Key results:
– Implement 10 new channels/blogs to post our content
– Increase the blog subscribers from 5,000 to 10,000 by the end of Q3
– Increase the referral traffic from 30,000 to 60,000 visitors per month

Objective: Make a great weekly newsletter
Key results:
– Create a content plan for the next quarter
– Achieve a 35% open rate
– Get 20,000 email subscribers

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) OKR examples

Objective: Increase SEO ranking
Key results:
– Increase domain authority (DA) from 50 to 70
– Increase the number of backlinks from 1,000 to 2,000
– Increase monthly organic traffic from 30,000 to 60,000
– Keep the visitor to lead (organic) conversion rate at 3%

Objective: Improve website engagement
Key results:
– Improve organic conversion rate from 3% to 6%
– Decrease organic bounce rate from 90% to 60%
– Increase the number of time visitors spend on the website from 2 minutes to 4 minutes

Objective: Become a significant player on Google search
Key results:
– Achieve a top-3 position on Google for 7 main keywords
– Decrease organic bounce rate from 90% to 60%
– Increase organic traffic for 3 main keywords from 20,000 to 60,000 per month

PPC marketing OKR examples

Objective: Increase ad campaign outcomes
Key results:
– Increase the average CTR of ad campaigns from 2% to 4%
– Reduce CPC (cost per click) from $3 to $1.5
– Increase conversion rate for paid traffic from 5% to 10%

SMM (Social Media Marketing) OKR examples

Objective: Be bold on social media
Key results:
– Increase followers on Twitter from 1,000 to 2,000
– Increase followers on Instagram from 5,000 to 10,000
– Increase leads from social media from 500 to 1,500 per month

Objective: Increase engagement on social media
Key results:
– Increase average shares from 50 to 100
– Increase average comments from 10 to 20
– Increase average clicks per post from 100 to 200
– Increase the traffic from social media from 5,000 to 10,000

Product Marketing OKR examples

Objective: Clarify our positioning
Key results:
– Run 40 customer development interviews to identify why they buy our product
– Get 1,000 responses on an online survey about our positioning
– Run team brainstorm session meeting to determine our positioning and messaging
– Run 30 customer interviews to validate the new positioning
– Achieve 30% sales conversion rate with the new positioning

Objective: Optimize marketing funnel
Key results:
– Run 20 user interviews with the target audience
– Increase visitor to trial conversion rate from 5% to 10%
– Increase trial to paid conversion from 15% to 40%

Summary

You can copy the examples or create your own based on these. By making your own OKR, you create goals that fit your needs much better. These 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 focusing 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 for daily operations. Start working smarter with Focus.

The post 21 Marketing 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.

This is a story about how we increased team performance and the quality of work by using OKR. Here are the topics of the article:

• What is OKR?
• Weaknesses of OKRs
• Benefits of OKRs
• Top 3 mistakes in OKRs
• How to use OKRs

It was several years ago when we began using OKRs in the company Kepler Leads, which is a conversion rate optimization software. Being a CEO at Kepler Leads, I struggled with crucial problems in management, which were losing focus and decreasing team motivation. 

The team didn’t see the main picture and didn’t understand why they did what they were doing at that time. There were many side projects in the development because we didn’t have a clear focus. Employee engagement was very low. It was a classic team management problem.

Then, we began to use OKRs and we have come a long way from the “it doesn’t work for us” stage to the “wow, it works and it’s amazing” stage. At that time, my friends from other companies, which saw our results, asked me to help them to implement OKRs too. This was the moment when Focus was born. 

In this article, I will share the main mistakes companies usually make trying to implement OKRs and how to set them in real life, not just in theory.  

It’s crucial to say, however, that OKRs don’t fit everyone. It’s not a magic stick that empowers your organization and makes a dream team. OKR is a framework, which has strengths and weaknesses.

Before speaking about strengths and how to set OKRs, I want to mention the main OKRs strengths and weaknesses.

OKR weaknesses

• It’s hard to implement. There are two reasons why it isn’t easy to set in the company. First, making inspirational and ambitious objectives is not as simple as it may seem. Second, not everyone likes to use new things in life or work. At the same time, it’s crucial for OKRs implementation that people in the team want to set ambitious objectives for themselves. People can hesitate about trying something new and end up going away because it’s easy to keep everything as usual. 
• Implementation and setting OKRs take up a lot of time. Discussing objectives, team meetings, attaining the consensus, choosing the right key results, and defining really inspirational objectives, destructuring companies objectives to the teams… All of that needs time and you cannot set objectives top-down because OKRs don’t work like that. Otherwise, it will not be OKRs.
• The Psychological barrier when the person doesn’t complete the goal. An OKR that was accomplished at 70% is a great indicator. However, not everyone likes it. For some people, it’s crucial to complete the goal at 100% or they will think that they didn’t work well or hard enough.

OKR benefits

• In our expertise, a team increases its engagement. The managers begin to see the fire in employees’ eyes because of interesting goals, which they set for themselves.
• OKRs increases transparency in the teams. Everyone begins to understand how his or her job impacts the total result. Also, it helps employees see what their colleagues do and why it matters for a company. 
• It gives clear focus. We stopped doing different side projects, which grabbed our attention and focused on the main things for the company. It’s hard to achieve ideal focus (probably, impossible) because you always have operations like customers’ requests or bug fixing, which take your attention. However, we see that using OKRs helps teams to understand the main focus and make decisions based on core things. 

 If these benefits are important for you, then you should take a look at OKRs.

What is OKR?

Few words about what OKR means.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is the methodology for setting the goals, which is used in companies like Google, LinkedIn, Uber, etc. It aligns the teams with transparent goals and metrics. Using OKRs, a team sets goals bottom-up and it helps increase employee’s engagement because people feel more responsibility when they create their own goals

An objective is a big and very ambitious goal, which should motivate the team. It’s not a SMART goal. It’s more about vision and inspiration for everyone.

An ambitious goal means that it’s really hard to achieve 100% of it. For instance, 60%-70% achievement is the best result for an objective in Google. 100% OKR achievement shows that that objective was too simple. 40% or less tells you that you either didn’t plan it well or you didn’t achieve a solid execution.

And yeah, ambitious goals mean that you should not calculate employees’ bonuses based on achieving OKRs. If you connect bonuses with OKRs, then employees will not set ambitious goals for themselves to be sure of completing objectives.

An objective doesn’t have metrics and it’s hard to understand how well it is achieved. At this moment, Key Results are coming to help us, which are the other letters in the OKR acronym.

Key Results make an objective countable. They are the metrics that display traction and how much is left.

A team might choose either one key result or several. It’s crucial to set fewer key results. The ideal amount of key results is three, with five results the maximum. The less is better. It allows the team to focus on what matters. 

OKRs examples

Objective: Achieve record acquiring new customers

Key Results: 

• 25,000 signups
• Keep CAC on the same level $20
• Increase Visitor-to-Trial conversion rate from 5% to 10%

Objective: Close maximum deals

Key Results: 

• 100 new companies
• Increase market share from 10% to 15%
• Hit quarterly revenue of $500,000 

Objective: Make clients love our service

Key Results: 

• Reduce average response time from 20 to 5 minutes
• Reduce average closing tickets time from 40 to 12 hours
• Increase NPS to 80%

Top 3 mistakes in OKRs

Mistake #1: too simple or too complex OKRs

We did it twice in the beginning. At the first iteration, we had the second worst OKR:

Objective: Triple sales

Key Results: 

• Get new 1000 leads in Q1
• Increase trial-to-customer conversion from 10% to 30%
• Hit $100,000

What’s wrong: There are 2 crucial mistakes. Objectives shouldn’t be measurable and must be more realistic. In this period of time with the resources we had, there was no real way to achieve triple sales in a quarter even for 50% achievements.  

How it should be: 

Objective: Achieve the sales record

Key Results: 

• Increase the number of monthly leads from 100 to 200
• Increase trial-to-customer conversion from 10% to 30%
• Hit $20,000

Setting the right OKRs is the most difficult part of implementing this framework. Also, I saw a lot of times when a team chose very low goals and finished at 100%. Here is an example of this case:

Objective: Launch eCommerce shop

Key Results: 

• Make a store design
• Create a website 
• Sign contracts with 5 suppliers 

What’s wrong: This objective doesn’t inspire a lot and doesn’t link to the more important key results. 

How it should be: 

Objective: Get first sales in the new store

Key Results: 

• Launch eCommerce store in Q1
• Sign contracts with 5 suppliers 
• Get 50 sales in Q2 

The right goal setting is always a balance between identifying ambitious, but possible goals.  

Mistake #2: Too many key results

We prefer to choose 3 key results for an objective. A team might lose focus with four or more key results. It’s better to keep the focus on a few metrics in a month/quarter for achieving better outcomes. However, it depends on the team size. 

Here are some examples of bad OKRs:

Objective: Achieve the sales record

Key results: 

• Attract 1000 new leads from Google ads
• Increase trial-to-customer conversion rate from 10% to 30%
• Reduce CAC from $30 to $15
• Attend 10 conferences 
• Increase LTV up to 50%
• Start sales in 3 countries

What’s wrong: Each of these key results requires a pretty solid time for testing many hypotheses. As a result, we didn’t execute it well because of the loss of focus.

How it should be: 

Objective: Achieve the sales record

Key Results: 

• Attract 1000 new leads from Google ads
• Increase trial-to-customer conversion rate from 10% to 30%
• Maintain CAC below $30 

Mistake #3: dependencies from other teams

We don’t recommend setting goals that have direct dependencies from another team. For instance, we had several cases when 2 teams set one OKR, together. Afterward, one of the teams stopped working on it during the cycle because of some internal issues and priorities. It became hard for the second team to achieve because it couldn’t complete the whole objective alone. 

Not good key result: Increase NPS from 50 to 60

Much better key result: Increase monthly retention from 30% to 40%

We learned that it’s better to not track NPS in OKR because NPS is a very slow metric. It takes a decent amount of time to correctly measure it. The team usually doesn’t have the time to change NPS and measure it in quarters. In that case, it’s better to track monthly retention than NPS. 

How to implement OKRs

The first rule is to understand why your team needs OKR. Setting OKRs takes time and team alignment. Often, it’s not easy to do the first time. You should remember why you want to do it while you are setting OKRs. 

Bad reasons to set up OKRs:

• “Let’s try it because everyone uses it”
• “We need OKRs because Google uses it”

Good reasons to set up OKRs:

• “We want to increase the team’s alignment in each level”
• “We want to improve employee engagement”
• “We want to focus everyone on strategic goals”

5 steps to set up OKRs

1. Executives identify yearly and quarterly company’s OKRs.
2. Teams identify its OKRs on a quarterly basis with 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.

OKRs lead the game

It’s time for our conclusion. OKRs are not a magic tablet that gets jobs done. It’s a continuous process of searching for balance with ambition and reality while setting objectives. 

It’s also crucial to remember that a team should work with OKRs at least once every 2 weeks. I will share details on how to work with OKRs in future articles.

There are two types of companies with OKRs – the ones that tried to set OKRs and gave up and others that were successful in setting them up. In our case, OKRs increased focus and engagement inside the organization. It’s hard to imagine working without OKRs now. We’re using some modifications in goals, however, not pure OKRs. I’ll share that later.

Finally, we created Focus, a tool that keeps teams on top of their priorities every day. Try Focus for free to start working smarter.

The post What is OKR and why everyone talks about it appeared first on Focus.

They’ve already achieved outstanding results in the area your organization operates. They are full of energy and tell anyone who will listen how awesome it is at work in your company. If you ask for working overtime, they do it – and happily. If you don’t, they unquestionably would if you did. They are the least likely to quit, and the most likely to pull others in your company. 

How did you do that? How did you create this team?

To answer those questions, let’s turn the clock way, way back — the time when the people were hired in your company. In this article, we talk about 5 crucial steps that help you to build a fantastic team.

1. Hire the best

You know, I don’t want to be captain obvious, but it’s easier to recruit the right candidates and give them all opportunities for achievements then hiring people whom you will be trying to motivate. The road from hundreds of resumes to your best employee is started with understanding the ‘right’ resume. 

Think about what’s really necessary for an individual to achieve the job’s goals. Define the job before hiring an employee. For example, persistence, listening skill, and learning ability often are more important for a sales manager than a degree from a cool university or work experience in your industry.

2. Company goals

To manage your team effectively, let’s try to do a little test. How many employees know your company goals? Just ask them about it. It’s crucial for team management that people know the main organization’s goals and understand how they participate in it.

Start asking employees about 1-3 main goals of your company. It gives a lot of insights into what people are thinking about the organization. Once you’ve understood all the opinions, keep going through the employee’s value. Show the individual how he or she impacts the company’s goals. It’s super important for people for getting value out of their job.  

Also, notice how different opinions you have now from your team members. Don’t forget to implement the workflow that helps you to make company goals transparent and show employees’ influence on it.

3. Personal goals

Alright! Now, that you’ve already built a transparent company’s goals in your workflow, let’s take the next step and create an outcome-driven culture. When approaching this, it’s really, really important to remember that employees do not want to devote their life to complete the company’s goals. They want to be passionate about what’re they working on and see their self-development. 

For that reason, your experience shouldn’t be defined by the milestones you create, but instead by the improvement of their life your company provides. Create individual development plans with employees that give your employees roadmap with measurable goals and timeframe for achieving these goals. You can read this article to get more information about individual development plans.

Take the time to get very clear on what kind of ‘better people’ your company makes. It will inform everything that follows from here, so it’s super important to get right. 

4. Communication

Communication often challenges for many teams. We receive a lot of new information in our email boxes and messengers. Everyone wants to get our attention in different ways. While you’re trying to avoid a lot of noise from various channels, it’s hard to build alignment across the teams.

You want your entire organization to be not only aligned around company goals but also has a workflow where everyone clearly understands each other. It’s hard, especially in that volume of communication. Many teams spend their time in the meetings to do their work better and build alignment. But you know that often meetings are not really productive. Regarding a Microsoft survey, an employee spends 27 hours per week for meetings. Wherein only 10% of employees called these meetings useful. People like to solve issues and make deals, but not discuss it.

When you design workflow for goals achievements, not discussing – it relieves a huge amount of employees’ energy and time. But how to set this kind of workflow, which reduces the time in meetings and synchronize the team? 

For each touchpoint, think about outcome-driven culture – what’s important to the company at that particular time? What the real goal of a meeting? In most cases, it’s planing, problem-solving, making decision, or synchronization with the team. And it ends with improving employees – the kind of people who can deal with all staff better than before that.

For most of these reasons, you can use a simple framework, which helps people understand what’s going and simplify communication between members. For example, you can use three questions to synchronize the team every day:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What was the biggest obstacle?

You can use it in different cases either on short meetings aka standups or on online meetings via text. Also, you can set asynchronous conversation when everyone answers to the questions when it’s convenient for the person. It takes several minutes per day and helps to focus on the main goals. No long meetings – more time for work. You might even automate this process by using special bots or software like Focus that helps to run standups each day.

It’s only one piece of communication that you can implement in your workflow. Just start thinking about focusing on outcomes and simplifying current procedures. It gives you a lot of insights that the company’s processes, which were invented long ago, are not optimized for the current structure. 

5. Recognition

68% of companies who implemented an employee recognition system report a positive effect on employee engagement. At the same time, employees don’t feel recognized in most companies. There is a huge potential for managers on how you can increase employee engagement. Just implement a recognition system. To understand better how to do it correctly, we need to talk about common issues there.

The main problems with recognition are:

i. Wrong recognition

It’s kind of like a bad-suited jacket – you’re giving appreciation to the employee, but he or she doesn’t like it. For instance, a person can avoid public recognition because of a person’s modesty. Sometimes you can give appreciation either in the not right moment or situation. It’s a manager’s job to know the characteristics of each member of the team and understand how and when sharing appreciation. 

ii. Non-specific recognition

General “thank you” or “great job!” are good, but you know, it’s not the best way for appreciation. To get them, a significant recognition begins to be specific like “Thank you for your help with launching a new product, especially, with creating the awesome design in a short time.” Also, show them which value you recognize in their work.

How to implement a recognition system?

That’s why it’s crucial to implement a recognition system in the team that helps everyone to be specific and recognize co-workers at the right moment. You should understand the character of each employee in the team and the ways how they react to appreciation. The common practices for building recognition system correct are:

• Do recognition regularly
• Do public or private appreciation, depends on an employee character
• Do it online to write down this moment. It’s like a ’success diary’ with their achievements. It helps you to see the traction and motivates employees to reach the new accomplishments.

Sketchdeck says feedback is the key to navigation remote-waters and we agree 100%.

Conclusion

Building an amazing team is challenging for any founder or manager. There is no secret mechanic that you can use for creating a really powerful organization. It’s always about a combination of things where you should be the pro. To summarise crucial parts for team management: 

• Hire the best candidates
• Set clear company goals and ask your employees about its
• Create an employee development plan with personal goals
• Build a simple and outcome-oriented workflow in communication
• Implement employee recognition correctly

In Focus, we eat our own food while creating software that helps teams increase performance and build high-engaged culture. Our goal is to simplify workflow with transparent goals, clear communication, and employee recognition. In Focus, it’s easy to create a company and personal goals when everyone will be able to see how he or she impacts the company goals. In fact, managing a company is hard, and we want to make it better when everyone in a team gets benefits from that. 

Share in the comments below your experience on how to create an exceptional team. 

The post 5 Essential Steps to Building an Amazing Team appeared first on Focus.

Why employees hate their jobs?

There are many reasons why people don’t enjoy their jobs which impact on the final outcome. We consider three leading causes for teams where employees lose their motivation over time. However, there are lots of other core reasons why people don’t like their jobs. For example, an employee hasn’t found himself yet and isn’t an appropriate fit for the current position. Or perhaps a new worker doesn’t have the vital experience needed. We can also consider cases where employees work well in the early stages, but then they lose their motivation. Let’s try to figure out what’s going wrong.

Reason 1: They don’t know company goals

The first reason is about the company’s goals, particularly the employee’s understanding of them. I see many times when only a few employees in the company know the businesses goals. Research concludes that the majority of employees don’t understand them; in fact, they don’t understand why they do their job. Vital understanding of how goals impact on the business, what is of value and whats is not. How the worker can best align with company goals? They don’t know the answers to these questions.

So often, founders think that each employee clearly understands the company’s goals. A team leader can quickly communicate this through a 1:1 conversation with employees. Just ask people what the company goals are. It helps you to get the real status of employees’ vision.

To be specific why it matters, employees who doesn’t understand the company’s goals generally consider themselves as a small part of the system. In many cases, it impacts their level of motivation. It’s easy for anyone to lose a desire to work if he or she doesn’t understand their contribution and impact on the total results. 

Reason 2: Employees don’t get recognition

If you’ve had some recognition issues, you should know that it influences the whole team mood. Value of material motivation goes down by the time; in contrast, non-financial motivation means a lot for people. But managers often forget to give recognition to their employees.

Most articles and presentations about motivation focus on large things like a motivation program or corporate culture. It makes sense, but I want to underline that simple, basic things like recognition and qualitative feedback work pretty well. Yeah, it’s simple and gives superior outcomes, but often managers don’t do it. They have so many meetings and routines that they forget to provide feedback for their employees or colleagues.

Recommendations or some magical exercises don’t fix this situation because each manager knows what should he or she do. The only right decision in this area is implementing a feedback system every week. That is why we created Focus, which assists you in making employee recognition as simple and effective as possible. It allows team managers to be better leaders and helps employees receive consistent and well deserved feedback.

Reason 3: Absence of employee development system

Employee development is an essential process for improving motivation for long-standing team members. Routine jobs absorb many engaged team members. Each day repetitive tasks lead people to unmotivated behavior and drudgery. People generally don’t like it because it’s so boring. But we can’t replace people with robots for these routines jobs in many areas. Not yet.

That’s why it’s crucial to implement employee development. It improves people’s engagement and loyalty to the company. And I’m talking not only about training, but about constant practices for personal development every week. Managers should do a 1:1 meeting with employees to discuss their job and performance. 1:1 sessions help you improve employee engagement, not to mention, the opportunity to give quality feedback. Though weekly catchups you will know what’s important for your employees and what’s on their minds.

At Focus, we believe that people are the top priority for any company. Employees, clients, profit. These are vital factors for any business. And I believe that employees must come first because focus on your team helps to build a sustainable and long-term company. Focus on employees not only increases efficiency but also makes a great workplace for everyone in the company. It gives you as a manager superior outcomes in all cases.

How to increase employee engagement?

There are a lot of recommendations on how to improve employee engagement on the web like ‘how provide a beautiful environment, encourage flexibility, always be authentic’, and so on. It makes sense because it matters for people in all cases. But I want to talk about practical examples of what you could implement today.

Step 1: Measure current employee engagement

You should measure employee engagement regularly. It helps you investigate what’re your employees thinking about your company. And it’s an essential step for increasing engagement because if you can’t measure it how can you understand the outcomes of your improvements. One of the most reliable ways to do it is through Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which is a survey to measure employee satisfaction.

eNPS is built around Net Promoter Score and has similar mechanics. You can find out different templates on the web or use eNPS module in Focus, which helps you understand what are employees thinking about your company. We provide anonymous eNPS survey to get honest feedback for improvements.

Step 2: Start doing daily and weekly standups

Unclear goals are one of the reasons why people lost their motivation. Create a workflow where everyone will be aligned with the company’s and colleagues’ goals. Simplify your teamwork without meetings, which often take a lot of time and distract productive employees. It doesn’t mean that meetings are a terrible habit for employees productivity, but it’s better to use modern tools and mechanics for team synchronization. For example, you can set daily and weekly updates in several minutes in Focus. Each event takes from one to five minutes per day for the employee, let alone that everyone will know what’s going on in the company.

Step 3: Improve employee development

To improve employee development, you should create the next two things:

• individual development plans,
• implement performance management.

Individual development plans give your employees roadmap with measurable goals and a timeframe for achieving these goals. People must have a clear vision of what should they do and what you, as a manager or founder, expect to see as outcomes of their work. Take time to discuss people goals and their development, which directly impacts on company success. Understanding performance metrics will help your employees to be more productive.

Another essential mechanic that every manager should do is one-on-one meetings with employees. Managers often don’t know what’s going on in an employee’s life. 1:1 session will help you to build reliable connections with employees and improve their engagement. It’s a profound topic of how to implement 1:1 meeting in the company, how to provide it with the best results, and which questions use in the meetings. We will consider this theme soon with more details.

Recap

Let’s recap some of the essential concepts to improve employee engagement.

1. Measure employee engagement

There’s only one thing that you need to benchmark your employee engagement against your own. If you can measure improvements to employees engagement over time, then you know you are working on it. To do that, we recommend providing eNPS survey at least one time in 6 months. How to provide eNPS survey? You could find a 3rd-party agency or use special software like Focus or an alternative. Check methodology and provider’s results, to be sure that it’s the best-suited option for you.

2. Set concrete performance goals

We recommend creating individual development plans and implementing performance management in your company. Also, managers should implement 1:1 meetings with employees weekly for improving performance in the company. 

3. Start doing daily and weekly updates 

Daily and weekly updates help your team stay in sync without meetings. It allows employees to understand their impact on total outcomes and keeps the whole team up to date with current projects. Remote employees are also able to stay in the loop easily and boosts feelings of inclusivity.

It’s hard to build a strong culture in a company, especially when the company begins to growth. It’s crucial for managers to use modern tools to organize their work and create a better work environment for employees. You can trial Focus for 14 days completely free to find out firsthand how effective project management software is for you and your team. At Focus, we help companies stay in sync without meetings and built a high performing culture.

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