Stop wasting your time on team meetings. Asynchronous communication is one of the core principles why remote work is effective. 

A growing number of remote companies last year proved dozens of reports about remote work. Employee productivity increases during work from home. For example, Stanford’s research and Cisco’s study told the same.

Why?

Asynchronous communication.

In this article, we will talk about the most important things that make teams’ communication productive:

• What is asynchronous and synchronous communications
• Benefits of asynchronous meetings
• Why you should focus on asynchronous meetings (and should you do it?)
• When you should use synchronous communication (and why you can’t eliminate it)
• 3 steps how to run effective meetings 
• Examples of meetings for asynchronous and synchronous communication
• How to balance both types of communication: status meeting example

Seems a lot? Yeah, true. However, it’s a short guide on how to build communication in your team to increase productivity.

Let’s start with the basics.

What’s asynchronous communication?

Asynchronous communication is a way of communication when you don’t expect to get an immediate answer to your message. For example, email is asynchronous communication.

As opposite, synchronous communication is communication when the recipient is waiting for an immediate answer. The real-time meeting is an example of pure synchronous communication.

However, digital forms of communication might be synchronous too. For example, real-time answering in a messenger becomes synchronous. 

If you want to learn more about both types of communication, you can read our article What is Asynchronous Communication?

Benefits of asynchronous communication?

Better control of the time. As the result, employees are more happier and productive. Employees have almost full control over how to plan their day and schedule. Some of them prefer to work at night, others like to work in the morning. Also, it helps to find a better work-life balance because employees might spend mornings with their children and do work later.

Better quality of communication. Asynchronous communication is slower. However, many companies admit that the quality of communication is higher. People learn to discuss the topic without empty conversations. They have time to think about a question and give a deep and thoughtful answer. 

Better planning = less stress. People learn how to plan like a pro because now they can’t do everything at the last minute. They can’t send ASAP messages to co-workers because response takes time. It leads us to more effective scheduling to complete everything according to the plans. It reduces pressure and the job is done in a better way.

Deep work by default. It’s not necessary to jump on Slack or another communication tool to check messages each hour. Co-workers can check messages 1-3 times per day and get more time for focused work which increases productivity.  

Why should you focus on asynchronous communication?

The benefits of asynchronous meetings speak for themselves. Add to it the cost of synchronous communication and you will get the combo.

According to an article on Inc.com, more than $37 billion is spent on unproductive meetings every year! 

The cost of update meeting

The monthly cost of a weekly status update meeting for a team of 8 people is near $1k.

Duration: 30 minutes
Team: 8 people
Salaries: from $50k to $120k (1 – $50k, 1 -$60k, 3 – $70k, 2 – $90k, 1 – $120k)
The total cost of weekly meeting: $217
Total monthly cost: $868

It means that the cost of weekly update meetings for a team of 8 people is $10k per year. But let’s be honest, this meeting can go more than 30 minutes. 

It’s the main reason why you should eliminate the amount of real-time communication. Peter Arvai, a CEO and Co-founder Prezi, also tells that the async meetings will be the future of work.

Downsides of asynchronous communication

However, asynchronous communication is not ideal, and here are several downsides:

• Wait to respond
• Misunderstanding
• Not so emotional as real-time communication

It shows that you can’t remove sync communication in your process. However, you can balance these two types of communication to be more effective and reduce the amount of stress. 

3 steps how to run meetings in a better way

Step 1: Identify when to start async first

The first step is an understanding type of meetings that really important to keep in real-time mode. And what’s better to use in an asynchronous way. Here are recommendations from GitLab, which we completely agree on. It’s best to avoid real-time meetings for the following items:

• Status updates
• FYIs and process documentation
• Meeting about a meeting

Step 2: Set the agenda and talking points

If you don’t have agenda – you spend the company’s resources to empty meetings. “Jump on a quick call” without agenda might sound good for the participant but it’s counterproductive. 

Always set agenda and talking points that every participant understands the reason for the meeting.

All meetings must have an agenda and a documentarian, enabling everyone to contribute asynchronous regardless of time zone or availability.

Darren Murph, Head of Remote in Gitlab

At Focus, we realized that it’s not necessary to do each morning video standup call. It’s more efficient to run daily check-ins in an asynchronous way. Here is how it looks.

It takes few minutes to answer the main questions. For daily check-ins, you can ask the next items:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• Any blockers?

Step 3: To document takeaways 

If you run real-time meetings, don’t forget to document highlights after the meeting. If you do it in an asynchronous way, you have already documented it. Congrats!

The main point is to make takeaways after meeting to sync the team. It will help to be more accountable and productive in the next steps. Paul Axtell recommends doing these 2 things to recap meetings.

Examples of asynchronous and synchronous meetings.

Asynchronous meetings:

• Daily check-ins
• Weekly status updates
• Weekly announcements
• Monthly updates
• Quarterly team results recaps and celebrations
• Project sprints and milestones
• Backlog refinement
• New team member introduction
• Missed deliverable retrospective
• Alternate times for recurring scheduled meetings (for people who can’t attend synchronous meetings because of different timezones)

Synchronous meetings: 

• Sales calls
• Direct reports (1:1 meetings)
• Celebrations and retrospectives 
• First-time meetings with external parties
• First-time meetings with team members who have not previously worked together
• Difficult decisions for important topics (e.g. when stakes are high)

How to sync a team (daily check-ins case)

Let’s talk about specific use cases. 

How can the team use asynchronous daily standups to sync the team? There are 4 ways of running updates: 

Synchronous

1. Video calls. You can use Zoom, Google Meets, or another software. 

Pros:

• The main benefit of this way of updates is face-to-face communication. You get real-time statuses in the morning and then go back to work. 

Cons: 

• You don’t document your current statuses, which means that you don’t have a history of what you did last week. Don’t have history – you can’t analyze your productivity and find points for improvement. 
• You spend more time compare with async meetings. Everyone should wait until the end of the meeting. Compare it with async check-ins when everyone answers 3 questions (2-3 minutes) and reads the answers of coworkers. Usually, it takes few minutes because speed reading faster than speed talking.  
• Less quality of information compares with written updates.
• Not good for co-workers in different timezones

Asynchronous

2. Manually gather updates in Slack or any other messenger. 

Pros:

• Free
• You have written answers, which is much better than only conversations.
• High quality of answers

Cons:

• You should remind co-workers who haven’t sent an update
• Resources for managing it
• Don’t have analytics (only text answers)
• Still not good for different timezone because someone should manage this process

3. Special standup bot. It’s a bot that runs standups in Slack or MS Team.

Pros:

• Hight quality of answers 
• Written answers
• Integration with Slack and MS Teams
• Automate notification and reminders
• Have analytics
• Good for different timezones
• Reports

Cons:

• Using the whole tool only for this specific process

4. Team management pulse software Focus. 

Pros:

• Hight quality of answers 
• Written answers
• Integration with Slack
• Automate notification and reminders
• Have analytics
• Good for different timezones
• Connected with 1:1 meetings and goals
• Keep a history of goals’ progress and daily check-ins
• Connected with employee development plans
• Get feedback from employees
• Running all kind of async meetings
• Email reports

Cons:

• New tool (even if it’s simple)

Daily check-ins in Focus

How to balance both types of communication for daily check-ins?

Some teams don’t want to run async check-ins because they don’t want to lose personal communication. But status updates meeting is not designed for personal communication. 

How the hell should we run all meetings asynchronously now?

And you will be right – it’s not healthy to stop running synchronous meetings because of 3 main struggles of remote work: disconnecting, loneliness, and communication. You should keep using synchronous meetings but do it wisely.

Here is the better way of running asynchronous daily check-ins and team synchronous meetings:

1. You run daily check-ins asynchronously (choose one of three methods above you to prefer more)
2. And now you set group calls for solving key issues and questions if you want to keep the personal connection. Otherwise, you can use async communication even for solving problems. 

In this case, you don’t waste your valuable time gathering updates. You run asynchronous check-ins to gather this information. And now, you spend your time in synchronous meetings for making an important decision or solving problems. This is the most convenient and cost-effective way to run meetings in this case. 

Conclusion

Asynchronous communication still is not a common process for businesses. Many teams prefer to jump on a call to discuss their current statuses or sharing weekly announcements. It’s a legacy they have from the pre-COVID time when inefficiency was a frequent fact for many businesses.

I’m sure that more success will get companies that are ready to change and be more effective in processes. Teams that don’t require employees to be always in touch, allow asynchronous communication, increase the time of focused work. And create self-organized teams where employees are responsible for results. 

We are happy to invite you to this journey.

The post Asynchronous Communication: How To Run Meetings appeared first on Focus.

Asynchronous Communication is a key element for team productivity even if your team is not remote. Maybe you’ll be surprised – asynchronous communication is not only more effective but also helps people to complete the most important work and feel fulfillment. Let’s check how it works and how to build effective asynchronous communication.

Different studies show that productivity is not deterred by the shift to remote work. Why?

Let me tell you a short story. Meet John, who is a software developer in a tech company. He is a very nice guy who likes to help people. 

Right now, John tries to understand why Sylvia can’t export reports from their CRM. He is close to solving this issue…

At that moment, Ann is calling him.

John is a nice guy and loves to help other people. He postpones his job and answers the call: “Hey John, could you please help me change the button on the website…” Of course, he can. It doesn’t take a lot of time. A few minutes later, John solved this thing. Ann is happy. 

John is trying to remember what he worked on before the call. “Why we can’t export reports? Okay, let’s start from the beginning to find the reason for this problem.” 

Meanwhile, the team lead has created the new tasks for John recently. The to-do list is growing. John begins to feel nervous: “Why can’t I finish everything in a time-bound manner?” His anxiety becomes stronger. However, he is still a nice guy who likes to help other people. 

Suddenly Slack channel burst with dozens of messages. Users complain because they can’t log in to the system. Something wrong with their authentication. John is watching logs now to find out what happened and fix this problem. 

An hour later, everything is fixed. He is glad and wants to take a small break. But Monica is calling him at that moment. 

“Hi John, my client is tortured me. He wants to get more time for trying our product. Can you extend him a free plan for few days?” John is tired and without thinking accepted this request. He spends some time doing it. Also, he remembers that their tech side in pricing is not good and he should find the time to improve it. 

John gets back to the task manager and sees that he has 3 new tasks. And he still hasn’t solved the problem with reports export.

This is how it goes day after day. John often has to answer the same questions. And he still doesn’t have enough time to complete everything in a time-bound manner. 

He even read the book about time management to be more effective. However, the result is the same. He still doesn’t have enough time for effective time management. 

The end of the story. Sounds similar?

The real problem

This story is not about time management. It’s about effective communication. Communication might be 2 types:

• Asynchronous communication – when you send the message and don’t expect to get an immediate answer. Think about email. 
• Synchronous communication – real-time communication when you expect to get an answer at the same exact moment in time. 

Asynchronous communication examples

• Email
• Ticket in help desk system
• Project management tools: Basecamp, Asana, Trello, etc
• Messengers: Slack, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc (the worst example for async communication because people still is waiting for a fast answer in the messenger)
• Focus (for status updates, stands, 1:1 meetings, etc)

Synchronous communication examples

• Live meetings
• Phone call
• Zoom, Skype, etc
• Messengers when you reply in real-time

Synchronous communications have several big downsides:

• Continuous distraction. Any brainwork requires high concentration and focus. There were a lot of researches on this topic – how much time do we need to get back to work after distraction. Numbers are different, but the result is the same. It takes a lot of time and our energy to get back to work and repair the previous level of productivity. 
• As the result, it increases stress. The person achieves less when teammates distract him/her during the workday. We spend more energy to make up for a lost time. Usually, it increases the level of stress. And it leads us to burnout.
• It takes a lot of time. Meetings are an expensive tool for a company. Especially, team meetings with 4 and more participants. 
• Priority on communication instead of focus on what matters the most. I often heard from people: “How can I turn off my phone, so people will not able to reach me?” However, if someone turns off a phone, people who REALLY want to reach the person will find the way how to do it. 
• Reducing the quality of conversations and answers. During a call or a meeting, sometimes you don’t have enough time to think deeply about the best answer. As there result, you make not the best solutions.

The benefits of asynchronous communication

Another way is asynchronous communication. And you get opposite results: 

• No distraction. Nobody calls you and you can do more focused work. Nobody distracts you during eating another “Pomodoro”. Increase productivity. You better plan the work. Reduce stress.
• Better answers. You can better formulate thoughts in the written mode. Also, it helps to document processes. John would like it.
• Communication is saved. You can think more before answer. As the result, you get better answers. And it’s written answers that you can use in FAQ then.
• Better goals. Asynchronous communication requires thinking twice and better formulate goals or tasks. 
• You can work from different time zones and it’s not necessary to be in the same place.  

Downsides of asynchronous communication

However, asynchronous communication is not ideal, and here are several downsides:

• Wait to respond
• Misunderstanding
• Not so emotional as real-time communication

It shows that you can’t remove sync communication in your process. However, you can balance these two types of communication to be more effective and reduce the amount of stress. 

How to balance both types of communication?

It’s hard to imagine how you can achieve your goals when everyone can distract you every time.  

On the other hand, asynchronous communication is respect for your time, plans, and focus. 

The right answer is balancing both types of communication. Avoid meetings and discussions that require much time. It’s important to identify topics that might wait and really urgent questions. For example, Hailley Griffis wrote how they communicate asynchronously at Buffer. And I agree with her:

Most things aren’t urgent. Knowing the difference between urgent and important communication is crucial.

Hailley Griffis

Anne-Laure Le Cunff recommends to document everything. If it’s not documented, it doesn’t exist. 

GitLab wrote Async 3.0, which is a great article about communication in their company. They share examples of asynchronous communication on GitLab teams. 

When to start asynchronous first

Our experience and GitLab shows that it’s crucial to avoid meetings and calls for the following events:

1. Status updates
2. FYIs and process documentation
3. Meeting about meeting
   

It’s better to use asynchronous communication. For example, you can gather daily check-ins instead of daily calls to align your team. In Focus, it takes only a few minutes to complete the form and see what’s going in your team.  

When to keep synchronous communication

At the same time, it’s clear that you can’t avoid sync communication. It allows building rapport faster and quickly delivers context to a group. Here are the main activities that it’s better to keep in a real-time way.

1. Sales calls
2. First-time meetings with external parties
3. First-time meetings with new team members
4. Important decisions (when stakes are high)
5. Supporting your direct reports (e.g. regular 1-on-1 meetings with documenting highlights of the meetings)

Tools for asynchronous communication

These tools we use to not distract each other in the team:

• Focus: for goal setting, daily check-ins, weekly updates, and 1-on-1s
• Github: to maintain the software
• Dropbox: for documents and files
• Google Docs: for documents and spreadsheets
• Slack: for urgent communication 
• Zoom: for video calls

It makes sense to say that we turn off notifications in most cases. Especially, in a messenger. You know, it’s hard to focus when you see the bunch of new messages in Slack.

Conclusion

We believe in the future of work in smart balance in asynchronous and synchronous communications. Use tools that increase transparency and avoid distraction. Set an emergency mechanism for how to connect in the case if you reduce the amount of real-time communication. And join Focus to try async check-ins, updates, and other forms of asynchronous communication. 

P.S. All names and events are fictitious. Any coincidences with characters and facts from real life are pure coincidences.

The post What is Asynchronous Communication? appeared first on Focus.

Teams often lose focus on top priorities for a multitude of reasons. At Focus, we believe that staying concentrated on what “matters” is one of the most important skills for product teams.

Here are some sources of distraction your team may face:

1. The team works on a hard project for too long. Instead of validating the main idea in a month, the team had developed the project for half of the year, which is quite a long interval of time.
2. The team created a new project, but it doesn’t fit the company’s vision and strategy. However, the project is so cool and motivating that the team finds themselves enjoying it.
3. Stakeholders from different teams can’t agree on strategic questions or concepts, resulting in a lack of progress for the project.
4. The team makes a product that’s designated for a non-target customer or the product’s value proposition doesn’t fit the company’s vision.  

How can a product team stay focused?

I talked with many companies and found that there were two main problems when the team struggle to stay focused. Either they don’t know the company’s vision or teams set the big objectives but forget about them in daily routines. We, admittedly, struggled with this issue too and that’s why we decided to build Focus.

We also discussed the reasons why it happens and how a company can fix it. Based on these conversations, we found 3 main pillars that a company should have for staying on what matters the most:

• Clear vision. CEO and CPO should describe a clear vision for everyone. What’s most important for the company? Why does it matter? ‘Why’ is the core question for any company. Learn more about why it matters with Simon Sinek, who explains why you should start with why. Without establishing and communicating your vision, it’s hard to identify if a new project or initiative is a good fit or not for the company on the medium to long-term.
• Right OKRs. Setting right OKRs that fit the company’s vision is the next step to marry strategy with tactics. 
• Constant processes. The challenge is staying focused on OKRs in daily operations. We see that a lot of companies forget about them because of routines and different unimportant but urgent tasks. You know this, it’s called fighting fires. The only way to stay on top of your priorities day-to-day is to create a workflow that enables your team to be more focused. Daily and weekly check-ins where you discuss your OKRs should be a fundamental processes in your company. 

How to stay focused?

Lead by vision

Vision is an inspirational story about a new future when your company achieves new goals. And how your customers and the team will live better when it happens. 

Why should you talk about vision?

Because people love a good story.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his books ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus’ that humanity evolved because of the ability of humans to come up with memes – stories that make people change their behavior and distribute them to others.

During product development, all systems (product, code, architecture, client segments, contexts, etc.) are becoming ever more complex exponentially. However, teams’ competencies increase linearly. It explains why a company changes teams three times on average during this journey:

• First there’s the team that launches product
• Then the team that scales it
• And the team that builds processes for the main market

This has less of an impact on founders because they work mostly with the company’s vision, which is not restricted by complex systems and product architecture.

According to research on presentation methods, messages delivered as the stories can be up 22 times more memorable than just facts.

Great vision, which inspires the team and fits the company’s purpose increases motivation and helps to stay focused on the most important things. It works even for making a small decision because the team will remember the vision and think about how the new decision impacts on the ideal future the company is building towards.

Vision leadership works not only for founders. In this Product Leadership book, authors advocate for each Product Manager to work on creating and delivering the vision for product hypotheses.

In Amazon, all employees learn to talk the vision language. After you have written a document, you read the press release one more time and ask yourself: is it an ambitious idea to work on it? Should we do it or it doesn’t matter so much? It allows us to work and make decisions guided by the vision.

Principles to create a vision for product teams:

1. It is necessary to know your market segment and do customer validation with MVP. The vision should describe the future of target markets with the solution to their current and future needs.
2. The product teams’ vision should be aligned with the company’s vision. Stakeholders should be involved in crafting it.
3. You should find the best vision for your team after several iterations talking with stakeholders and coworkers. By the way, Working Backwards by Amazon embodies this approach.

Set the right OKRs 

If the CEO or CPO doesn’t have the right goals, then nothing will work. Of course you don’t want that. But how to set goals in the right way?

OKR is the most proven tool for setting goals. 

Different teams depending on their sizes might have different OKR cycles. Small startups and companies with few stakeholders often use 2-month intervals. Large companies prefer quarterly OKR cycles. 

Companies usually don’t set OKRs correctly in the first cycles. Using OKRs is a continuous process of improvement. The team runs retrospectives and analyzes what works and what doesn’t. It’s an ongoing learning process. Implementing the framework is hard, however, OKR is the best tool to stay focused.

If you had tried OKRs and it didn’t work, it doesn’t mean that OKR doesn’t work. It means that you haven’t found the right way how OKRs could work for your team.

You can read more about how to use OKRs in this article.

Processes that help to stay focused

1. One on one meetings are a great way to reiterate the vision and tie the employee’s personal development to the goals of the company. It’s the one on one meeting where you can elaborate on what the company is building towards and how each individual team member can contribute to it in their area of responsibility. It’s also a great place to get feedback on any activities that you thought would tie into the vision and the goals set but the rest of the company either doesn’t understand or just thinks it’s not aligned.
2. Automatic daily and weekly reminders of what the team has accomplished. It’s short messages with new updates for a specific channel or chat, which is visible for founders or executives. It helps founders to realize current status and ask the team if something went wrong. 
3. Public channel for check-ins where everyone publishes daily achievements. It’s like daily standups but in written type with outcomes that the person achieved the day before and what they plan on doing next.
4. Ruthlessly say no to ideas that don’t fit the company’s vision and goals.
5. The CEO and CPO should strictly follow their goals and stay focused on it every day. If they run some side projects, everyone would see it. People might start to do side projects too. Leading by example is the best way to show the team that focus on top priorities is crucial for the company. 
6. There is a Weekly Business Review (WBR) at Amazon. Every Product Manager updates key metrics of the team and marks objectives with the colors green, yellow, and red (like OKRs). It explains where they did well and where they fell short. In your company, you can gather all WBRs in Focus or any other software where managers will analyze it and give feedback.
7. Monthly Business Review (MBR) and Quarterly Business Review (QBR) are the same as for other timeframes. It’s analyzed one time per month and per quarter.

What is the focus?

Imagine you changed your vision twice and you are working with the last vision now.

It’s Q2 2020 now, and you set the company’s OKRs and teams’ OKRs to achieve your vision.

You move forward but you see that some teams are doing something that doesn’t fit the company’s vision. You are beginning to close these projects.

In the daily check-ins, CPO should: 

• Correlate team’s route if it moves in a different direction
• Stretch the team for achieving larger goals

Some tips to stay focused for product teams

1. If everything is top priority it means nothing is priority. Limit the number of items you work on at the same time. It depends on the team, but 2-3 maximum is a good golden rule.
2. Having a good manager/mentor in the company who has an incredible way of splitting the product vision into a set of core values.
3. Transparency and clarity of what’s important to achieving the mission are an absolute necessity.
4. Start your day with the most important item that day, finish it. Don’t stop or get distracted by anything.
5. Next move to routine items that should be done daily. This is a boring list that you deal with which contains daily/weekly/monthly tasks. Take them on one at a time and complete as many as your psyche will allow.
6. Lastly, intermittently switch from routine to your ‘bonus list’. The items that are fun but lightly affect the trajectory. This will make your day more fun.
7. At the end of each day ask yourself “What were the 1 or 2 important items completed today that I’d be proud of at the end of the year?”
8. When you get overwhelmed and struggle to focus, you might ask yourself what you should do if you could only do one thing that day.

Summary

Staying focused is the permanent process that starts with the CEO and CPO. Here are 3 main pillars that any company should have to stay on what matters the most:

• Clear vision
• Right OKRs
• Continuous processes

It’s a continuous process that takes full attention of all people in the team, especially C-level managers. There is no silver bullet here. However, to stay focused on what matters is a crucial skill for any company. 

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 How to Stay Focused for Product Teams 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.

Scrum standup is a daily meeting that helps product teams to be more effective and analyze their routines. The recommended length of the meeting is 15 minutes, however, it depends on the team size. All members of the product team participate in the standups, not only the product owner and scrum master.

Scrum meetings or Daily Standups might help product owner to optimize development and prepare the product for the launch without delays and issues. It’s a beautiful theory. In reality, effective and short scrum standups can turn into nightmare routine where no one understands what’s going on in the team. How to run really effective daily meetings?

The main goal of the meeting in Scrum is sharing the statuses of the work for each member. During the standup, everyone tells about the current situation in the job to align the team and create a total vision.

There are no tables and сhairs on the scrum meeting. It’s called standup and attendees participate while standing to make this meeting as short as possible. Difficult and long questions might be discussed after the meeting between a team leader and member who has the issues, but not with the whole team.

Nowadays, scrum meetings sometimes are considered outdated and are criticized by some companies. However, scrum standups generally are very popular across development teams. Product owners claim that standups help them to manage the team more effectively.

Running effective scrum meetings is not a unique skill for product owners. It’s possible to understand how it works, practice, and improve its power. The following recommendations will help product owners and scrum master to run the best standups.

8 simple recommendations to run standups effectively

1. Define the meeting format 

In Agile, standup meetings run while the sprint that is usually 2-4 weeks period. The team should specify the set of features and requirements from the backlog for the iteration.

An important goal of the daily standups is defining a timeframe for the meetings and remember that standup is not a usual meeting or retrospective meeting. 

2. Invite the team and define the roles

The best solution for the scrum meeting is the team of 8-12 people. It simplifies communication and makes it short. 3 main roles should be on the scrum meeting:

• Scrum master, who plays as a coach and helps the team to optimize processes and jobs;
• A product owner or product manager who prioritizes the features and communicates with clients and experts;
• The development team consists of members with different roles and responsibilities (developers, marketers, support managers, etc).

Other people like remote employees or partners might be are invited to the meetings. However, it’s better to restrain the total number of the meeting as it improves trust and confidence inside the team.

3. Choose the type of standups

There are two main types of standups you could run. The first one is the usual type for a team in an office. People gather in a room in a specific time and run synchronous standup. However, not everyone might be able to be in the office at a specific time, especially, it doesn’t work for remote teams. 

The second type of standups is an asynchronous meeting where the team uses a messenger or a special tool like Standuply or Focus for running events. At this type, team members send answers to the bot and managers receive daily reports with all information in Slack or web application. 

4. Pick up the time and place

There are no special requirements for the place where you can run standups. The board with stickers or displays with a special tool can be useful for the meeting but it’s not crucial. You need an empty area for offline meetings or communication software for running standups online. For running the asynchronous standups you might use special tools from the previous rule. 

Experts recommend running standups each day at the same time. Morning is the best time for scrum meetings because it helps everyone to prioritize daily goals. 

5. Participate while standing

Meetings where you participate while standing helps to focus on the main goals and run the event shortly. Some creative teams run standups while they doing some exercises like planks. You should choose the best option for you to run short and effective meetings.

6. Follow the day agenda

Daily scrum meetings follow 3 main questions that everyone should answer:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What are the blockers or obstacles?

Answering these simple questions, the team can find out the problems that they must solve or optimize. It’s the best way to align the team and get areas for improvements. 

Don’t forget to take notes and share information with the team or use bots for standups that made it for you.

7. Simplify the process

It’s useful to visualize day agenda that everyone could see current tasks. You might use a kanban board that helps to prioritize daily goals and statuses. Here are a couple of examples of how you can use boards:

It’s crucial to see deadlines, the list of tasks your team should do, and what should you decline while it’s not a priority. In this case, the product owner should use some of the prioritization techniques. 

8. Communication and partnerships

Remember that daily standup is a valuable time where everyone participates in the process. Each team member should share the most valuable information for the team. The right communication is a core for productivity. A Scrum Master or Product Owner should stop useless communication to make the meeting more helpful.  

Avoid usual mistakes

There are most frequent mistakes on the scrum meetings: 

• A long period of waiting. You should explicitly follow the timeframe. Start standups in the same period. Don’t wait for everyone. If someone is late – it’s his or her fault.
• New ideas and topics. Daily standups are not about planning. It’s a meeting for sharing the statuses of the work.
• Vague and long speech. Long and vague speeches reduce the efficiency of the meeting. Focus on things that matter to the company and team members. 

There is no secret sauce in these recommendations, but it can help you to build high-performing meetings in a scrum team. Thinking about the team and focusing on the main things, the product owner can run useful and interesting 15 minutes meetings where everyone wants to participate. 

To run asynchronous standups and retrospectives, you can try Focus that helps teams stay in sync and work better together.

The post 8 Key Rules on How to run Better Scrum Meetings 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.