What is Goal Setting?

The goal setting process involves identifying and defining specific objectives or outcomes that an individual or organization wishes to achieve within a particular timeframe. It involves creating a plan of action that outlines the steps necessary to reach those goals and measuring progress along the way.

Benefits of Goal Setting

Goal setting is a powerful tool for personal and professional development, and it offers many benefits. Here are some of the positive effects of goal setting:

• Provides Direction and Clarity. Setting clear and specific goals helps individuals to focus on what they want to achieve, which provides direction and clarity. It helps to avoid distractions and keep individuals on track toward achieving their desired outcomes.
• Increases Motivation. Setting challenging goals can increase motivation by providing individuals with a sense of purpose and direction. Achieving goals creates a sense of accomplishment, which boosts self-esteem and confidence and encourages individuals to continue pursuing their objectives.
• Improves Task Management. Goal setting helps individuals to prioritize tasks and allocate time effectively, ensuring that they make progress towards their goals while also managing other responsibilities and obligations.
• Enhances Performance. Long-term goals can inspire people to work harder and take on new challenges, resulting in improved performance.
• Boosts Accountability. Setting goals creates a sense of accountability, as individuals become responsible for their progress toward achieving their objectives. This can help ensure that everyone stays focused, motivated, and committed to their goals.
• Promotes Personal Growth. Setting personal goals can help people discover their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as identify chances for personal growth and development.

Tips for Setting Goals

Creating goal setting strategies involves several steps that help individuals to identify their goals, develop a plan of action, and measure progress toward achieving their objectives:

• Define your objectives. Start by defining your goals clearly. Think about what you want to achieve, why it is important to you, and how it relates to your long-term goals.
• Encourage participation in goal setting. It is essential that everyone is heard while defining goals. Everyone on your team should feel free to express themselves openly, provide ideas for goals, and make suggestions for goal achievement.
• Identify potential obstacles. Identify potential obstacles that may hinder your progress toward achieving your goals. This can help you to anticipate and plan for any challenges that may arise.
• Have a plan. Goal attainment is possible if you have a clear action plan. List the specific actions you must take to accomplish your goals. Cross off each stage of your plan as you finish it so you can see how far you still have to go and feel motivated by your accomplishments.
• Visualize success. Visualization techniques can help to increase your motivation and help you to stay focused on goal attainment. Picture yourself achieving your objectives, and imagine how you will feel when you succeed.
• Track your progress. Regularly track your progress towards achieving your goals. This will help you to stay motivated. Additionally, you will be able to identify any areas where you may need to adjust your plan.
• Review and adjust your goals. Regularly review your progress towards the initial goals and adjust your plan as needed. This will help you to stay on track and make progress towards achieving your objectives. Don’t be hesitant to change your goals to better reflect your dreams if you discover that they aren’t relevant or realistic.

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5 Effective Goal-Setting Methods to Try

Here are five goal setting strategies that you can try to help you achieve your objectives:

Make Your Goals SMART

Applying the SMART goal-setting methodology will help you stay focused and motivated, increasing the likelihood that you’ll accomplish your business objectives within a predetermined time frame.

The acronym stands for:

S – Specific: The goal should be well-defined and specific. This means that it should answer the questions of what, why, and how. Rather than setting a vague goal like “I want to boost sales”, try with “I want to increase sales by 10% in the next month by expanding our product line and improving remote work productivity.”

M – Measurable: Setting measurable goals means setting objectives that are quantifiable in some way so that you can track your progress. Instead of non-specific goals like “I want to enhance customer satisfaction”, try “I want to improve our customer satisfaction rating from 70% to 75% within the next three months by addressing customer complaints promptly.”

A – Attainable: You should set realistic goals that are easily achievable, taking into account your resources and abilities. Set an actionable goal, such as “I want to increase the company’s revenue by 70% within the next year by launching new products,” as opposed to “Make a million in sales.”

R – Relevant: The goal should be relevant to your overall vision and mission, aligning with your values and priorities. Turn “I want to hire Spanish-speaking staff” into “Hire and train Spanish-speaking customer reps within the next six months to ensure a smoother entrance of our business in the Latin American market.”

T – Time-bound: The goal should have a specific deadline or timeframe for completion, helping you stay focused and motivated. Instead of the unspecific “I want to increase my social media following”, set a specific goal within a set time frame “I want to increase my social media following by 30% in the next month by posting relevant content and engaging with my followers.”

Set Mini Goals

Whittling overarching goals down to mini goals can provide several benefits that can help individuals achieve larger organizational goals. Mini goals are more attainable goals, and as such, they can provide the team with a sense of accomplishment and motivation. Breaking down larger goals into smaller, more manageable steps also provides individuals with a clear path to follow. As a result, the feelings of overwhelm and uncertainty are reduced.

Moreover, by setting mini goals, individuals can increase their sense of accountability. This can encourage people to take action and make progress toward their goals. Finally, mini goals allow for quicker adjustments, thus helping individuals to stay on track and adapt to changes or challenges that may arise.

Use Incentives

Using incentives as a goal setting strategy can be a powerful way to motivate individuals to achieve their objectives. Incentives are rewards or benefits that are offered to team members as a result of achieving specific goals or milestones. One of the key benefits of using incentives is that they can provide a powerful motivation for people to achieve their individual goals. Knowing that there is a reward or benefit waiting for them at the end of the goal can provide the necessary drive and focus to stay committed to the task at hand.

Using incentives is also a great tactic to increase accountability. Individuals are more inclined to take responsibility for their activities and ensure that they are doing all possible to attain their goals when they know there is a reward at the end of the goal.

Choose Challenging and Inspiring Professional Goals

If you are not passionate about anything after investing a lot of time, effort, and energy into it, you could easily lose momentum. That’s why it’s important to set team goals that are motivating, inspiring, and challenging. 

Achieving a challenging objective can be incredibly gratifying and inspire you to continue learning, developing, and honing your skills. Additionally, overcoming a challenge can provide you with greater motivation to work on other objectives as well as a sense of pride and assurance when it comes to future, bigger objectives.

Reframe Negative Goals

Reframing negative goals involves changing the way you think about your goals and shifting your focus towards positive outcomes. This is an important aspect of goal setting because it can help you develop a more positive mindset and a stronger feeling of motivation, allowing you to attain your objectives more successfully.

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The Bottom Line

Successful goal setting is essential for any business to achieve its desired outcomes. By implementing the five proven strategies mentioned above, you can establish a clear vision, define measurable objectives, prioritize tasks, hold everyone accountable, and adapt to changing circumstances. As a result, you will be able to overcome problems, capitalize on opportunities, and promote a culture of growth and success.

The post 5 Proven Strategies for Successful Goal Setting appeared first on Focus.

Let’s look at how to organize work to boost efficiency and stay on top of task management.

Organization and Efficiency: How They Work Together

Good organization involves methodically approaching problems and tasks. Sometimes, this entails placing an order for tangible materials like files. Other times, it refers to working through activities step-by-step in a systematic manner.

Conversely, efficiency is the discipline of completing things while investing the least amount of effort and time. Efficiency emphasizes the connection between the effort you invest into producing or providing goods or services and the reward you receive.

Efficiency and organization coexist, despite the fact that they are conceptually distinct. In short, efficiency is typically the organization’s purpose, whereas organization is how efficiency is attained.

Let’s look at the top strategies that will help you eliminate bad habits and increase workplace productivity.

How to Increase Efficiency: The Top 11 Task Management Strategies

There are a vast number of methods that can help you to become a more organized leader and maximize employee productivity, making it hard to know where to start. However, the following tips on how to increase efficiency can guide your way.

Set Deadlines

Deadlines are scaled-down versions of project timelines. They assign specific dates to critical project phases. Deadlines are especially important when managing more than one project or task.

Using a specialized calendar app is an easy way to add deadlines and keep them noticeable and easily accessible for everyone. You can manage the workload more efficiently and prioritize impending deadlines by seeing when assignments are due.

Use the 1-3-5 Rule to Complete Tasks

The 1-3-5 rule suggests that in order to enhance work productivity, you must set a goal to accomplish one large task, followed by three medium ones, and five small tasks each day.

Simply list all the things that need to be finished, choose a single task to perform each day, break it down into three medium tasks, and then break those three medium chores into five minor tasks. That way, you can rest assured that you’re progressing on important projects, deliverables, and daily activities.

Complete the Challenging Task First

Anxiety is normal when working on difficult and complex daily tasks. In most situations, we try our hardest to avoid difficult projects or save the hardest duties until last.

We might preserve some sweat using this strategy, but eventually, we’ll have to take on the difficult duties. So, why wait? Just think about all the ideas that spring to you when you have a challenging task, and imagine how incredible or motivated you will feel once you have completed them.

Organize Your Files

Having a well-organized method can help you find your files — whether digital or printed — easily. It can also assist you in avoiding making the potentially expensive mistake of losing important information.

The first step in building your organizational structure is to create file names. Titles, dates, and other identifying details are acceptable here. After that, store your files in folders that are properly ordered and have names that are obvious. 

Set KPIs and OKRs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are performance measures that assess an organization’s or a specific activity’s effectiveness. KPIs can be used for several processes — from sales targets to social media indicators, they can gauge the success of everything.

OKR is a framework for setting goals at a team or company level along with the quantifiable key results that characterize each objective’s accomplishment. Setting OKRs can help you define goal-oriented tasks that will help you accomplish your goals. Although they can be used for annual planning, they are most commonly used to set quarterly goals.

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Implement the 2-Minute Rule

The 2-minute rule suggests making good use of your work time by filling the brief, in-between periods with productive activity. Identifying little tasks that can be completed in two minutes or even less can save you a lot of time.

Although it’s not a guarantee that you’ll succeed in finishing every task in that time, setting objectives is the most important step in achieving them!

Maintain a Collaboration Environment

As a time management expert, you must possess strong task management skills. Maintain regular communication with your team, ask them about progress updates, find out what frustrates them about their current task management strategy, and use their feedback to organize your work effectively.

Ultimately, implementing effective communication and collaboration protocols will foster employee engagement and enhance job satisfaction.

Declutter Your Office Space

The benefits of decluttering the place where you work and transforming the average office into a creativity oasis are comparable to those we’ve already addressed, such as making it simpler to locate the items you need right away. In addition, organizing your physical area enhances your well-being in general.

Functioning in an environment that’s organized reduces anxiety and stress. In addition to being great for mental health, this can improve employee performance by reducing the main distraction at work and allowing for more focus and increased efficiency.

If you’re stuck, decluttering might even help you unwind and find creative insights. Consider what items you need to be at hand before cleaning your workstation. In addition to throwing away anything you don’t need, make sure to let natural light in and stock up on some healthy foods! 

Use the 80-20 Rule

The idea behind this rule is that 80% of the results come from investing 20% of the effort. Therefore, you should identify your 80% and focus on the business practices that actually create a real, noticeable effect.

Consider the following:

• Do you have to have social media accounts on every platform? Or it would be better to concentrate on dominating the two social networking sites that pertain to your industry the most?
• Are there too many workers devoted to a single project? Is it possible that the conflicting viewpoints impede progress?
• Can you narrow down your clientele and your area of expertise?

Use Project Management Software

When working on a project with numerous team members, task management tools can help ensure that everyone on your team is aware of what must be done. Additionally, it automates repetitive tasks and avoids energy crashes.

Advanced collaboration tools like Focus have an easy-to-use interface and offer multiple-user support. From creating weekly plans to setting due date reminders, a project management tool can help you organize your to-do list and delegate tasks, thus boosting your business productivity.

Permit Flexible Work Hours

Employees that work flexible hours are not constrained by a fixed schedule. Instead, they work at their most effective and productive times. 

You might think about letting your employees work remotely or, at the very least, providing additional work-from-home days. That way, they can complete tasks that require deeper focus when their productivity is at its peak. According to Entrepreneur, having a remote team increases employee productivity by 13%.

Photo by William Fortunato on Pexels

How to Increase Efficiency: The Bottom Line

Good organization is a concoction of planning, setting objectives, tracking progress, working in teams, collaborating, and communicating. 

Knowing how to organize tasks is the key to successfully completing tasks. It also brings about more efficient employees, fosters collective energy, and helps develop efficient habits that can help enhance productivity in life, not just at work.

The post Task Management: 11 Ways to Organize Your Work to Improve Efficiency appeared first on Focus.

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

To recap on OKRs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now onto the 7 tips for setting better OKRs:

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

Less is More!

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

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

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

Which leads me to my third tip.

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

OKRs are known for being both ambitious and uncomfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips 4 and 5 both echo the theme of transparency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We always hear that we should shoot for the stars, but what does that really mean? It’s great to set big goals but how big should you aim for? What are these Moonshots and Roofshot OKRs and in which context should you apply them? Which one is right for my company or team? These are all good questions and you’ve come to the right place.

Now that you know about OKRs and the basics of making OKRs, let’s go even more in-depth. This article introduces and describes the differences of Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs. These are the two types of OKRs that you can make. Read about the fundamentals you need to know about Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs and the guide to utilizing them correctly. At the end of the article, there are extra tips for your team to have successful OKRs.

A quick refresher on the fundamentals of OKRs:

OKRs are Objectives and Key Results.

First, the objective is where the team wants to be or what the teams wants to achieve.

Secondly, key results are the metrics or milestones that track how the objective is going to be fulfilled. These are meaningful performance measurement tools. For each objective, there should be at least 3 key results. There can be up to 5 Key results, but 3 is recommend.

OKR is a goal setting framework that adapts to work for your team. It values the bigger picture and measures what matters. Transparency is key and this structure gives everyone a clear goal to focus on. OKRs also provide a clear explanation or impact of what the team’s achievement of the key results will bring.

You can read more on Focus and why our company revolves around OKRs: Founder’s Story.

This article covers 5 main sections:

1. Moonshot OKRS
2. Roofshot OKRs
3. Table Comparison
4. How to use Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs
5. Extra Tips

Moonshot OKRs

Moonshot OKRs are those that seem overly ambitious. These stretched and aspirational goals challenge your team. It’s a new project that no one has touched upon yet. It pushes everyone’s limits and set a new definition for what’s possible. Since it requires the team to “shoot for the moon” and as a result, the goal will seem almost out of reach.

The pathway to this goal is undefined, unstable, risky and require experience.

Often time all the resources are not listed out and the research you have is limited. Your team has to pave the path and should start off having no real knowledge of the step by step of how to attain the end goal. This type of OKR is fluid and has room for variance. The team’s understanding of the status quo is broadened. Most companies, such as Google, use Moonshots. As a result of this formidable objective, success with a Moonshot OKR means achieving 60 to 70% of the key results.

The drawback to this type of OKR is that your team would be highly unlikely to fulfill 100% of the goal. The consequence of this drawback could deter investors or funding, so planning ahead for the unknown is a necessity.

Teams that know how to set Moonshot OKRs and afford the damages should stay cautious whilst realizing that even though they fail to “reach the moon”, where they land is still a remarkable accomplishment.

These types of goals help the team to curate revisions, assess their action plan, and find areas for improvement. The results are used as data to create the next Moonshot OKR.

In short, Moonshots are high risk and high reward.

Example:

Objective: Create a marking campaign and increase brand presence

Key Results:

-Increase daily blog readers from 10 to 100

-Increase social media following by 200%

-Sponsor 10 Influencer product reviews on Youtube

-Curate 2 Business Partnerships with Local Community targeting product demographic

Roofshot OKRs

Roofshot OKRs (also known as committed OKRs) include achievable goals. This second type of objectives are still described as difficult but still exist within the team’s known trajectory. Success for a Roofshot OKR means reaching 100% of the key results.

These OKRs are akin to contracts; Roofshots are a guaranteed commitment and results need to be met. You can expect this OKR to be successfully completed by the end of its timeline.

Once finalized, the common understanding is that the OKR will be completely fulfilled. Hence the reason it’s also referred to as “committed” OKR. An unfinished Roofshot goal should be met with serious discussion. While OKRs in their nature are inherently hard, Roofshots are a defined commitment that includes the tasks easily lined up. Missing the target with this OKR highlights that there is a critical blind spot in the team’s operation.

These OKRs provide the much needed results for teams that are looking for steady goals and stability. It can connect different interdependent teams by having them each know what to expect from the other.

Example:

Objective: Improve brand presence

Key Results:

-Create 5 articles

-Get 15 reader surveys and reviews

-Open Accounts on 6 Popular Social Media Networks

-Start a company hashtag that

Some more general OKR examples can be found here on the Focus blog: HR examples, Product Management examples, and Marketing examples.

Table Comparison

Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs have different purposes, meaning they should be used for different contexts. There are various advantages of each that should be considered. This table reiterates the lengthy description of Moonshots and Roofshot OKRs from above and compares them.

*Just a reminder that all OKRs are supposed to be inherently hard. They are not a list of tasks, but rather goals. No OKR, whether Moonshot or Roofshot, should be taken lightly.

How to use Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs

Start with Roofshots

Due to the overtly ambitious nature of Moonshot OKRs, experts like Felipe Castro recommend that beginners start off with Roofshot OKRs. You want to start off big, but still within reason. New teams need motivation and small successes are necessary. Roofshots provide the stable foundation that set your team off on the right foot. Using Moonshoot OKRs in the beginning can demotivate the team. It might let the team harbor an uncommitted mindset and culture of not reaching the full potential. Additionally, you take a gamble with the Moonshots compared to the guaranteed success of a Roofshot. Moonshots provide an opportunity for growth in the right context, so it’s best to wait till the team is ready to manage and take on bigger risks.

Transition to Moonshots

However, all OKRs should be designed with the intention of pushing the team out of their comfort zone. Some might even prove to be somewhat uncomfortable. Once the team matures, transitioning to Moonshot OKRs keeps everyone on their toes. It would force the team to develop creative solutions and ask more questions. Without changing to Moonshots, the team’s progress could stagnant. In short, the team should start with Roofshot OKRs to build and develop a results-based mindset then transition to adding Moonshots. The team could go further to expand their limits after orienting themselves to this way of thinking.

The Perfect Mixed Approach

The transition to using Moonshots means to combine them; creating a mixed approach. Your objective would include one Moonshot key result and the rest would be Roofshots. A combination of these OKRs when used wisely could prove a powerful strategy. It means having an attainable goal while setting aside 10 to 30% of the key results as a Moonshot. A combined Moonshot and Roofshot OKR allows for the advantages of both types.

The Moonshot and Roofshot OKR combined should be the endgoal because Moonshots on its own require quite a bit of caution and risk-taking. It’s my recommendation that non-OKR experts reach and stay using this combined method. A Moonshot OKR’s profit is not always promised and the pathway is unstable. Your team would enjoy the multitude of benefits listed above and avoid undesired business outcomes with the implementation of a Moonshot AND Roofshot OKR. This way the team finds space for development whilst maintaining most of their current success rate.

Extra Tips

Whether making a Moonshot or Roofshot OKR, labeling is one of the most important steps. The OKR should be transparent and understandable. It’s a signal of the team’s expectations; this is what everyone deems as achievable. Being clear is important because everyone on the team knows where to direct their focus and motivation. Who wouldn’t want to stay on track with the rest of the team?

A team that works with the same objective in mind is a team that conquers Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs.

While Roofshots have easily defined resources, Moonshots instead require the over usage of resources. An example of the usage of resources is involving everyone in the team and all the teams in the company.

A defined objective that everyone can focus on means everyone realizing their role in the big picture.

Another tip I have is to start off with a good team. Read our CEO’s article on building a great team as well as Forbes’ article on workplace team bonding.

Lastly, after learning about Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs, it’s time to make some! Be prepared for the unexpected and proceed with caution, but don’t let that get in the way of your excitement for the future.

The post Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs: Learn about the two types of OKRs appeared first on Focus.

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.

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

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

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

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

Before we start, a short talk about OKRs.

What is OKR?

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

Why do they do it? 

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

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

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

Why do OKRs increase employee engagement?

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

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

OKR example

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

20 HR OKR examples

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

HR OKR examples for Recruiting

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

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

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

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

HR OKR examples for Onboarding

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

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

HR OKR examples for Training and Development

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

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

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

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

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

HR OKR examples for Employee Relations

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

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

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

HR OKR examples for Employee Satisfaction

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

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

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

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

HR OKR examples for Compensation and benefits 

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

What are some Product Management OKR examples and why do you need to set them? Product is probably the most important function in your company. Together with Sales and Marketing they are the ones that make sure the hard earned money you invest in them is delivering the maximum value to your business. This means that a focused Product Team can be the pilot who adjusts the engines (your engineering team) on the rocket-ship you call a company. But this also means that every effort that is not spent on delivering on the main objectives for the company will be a loss multiple times over, loss of the effort put in, and a loss of the opportunity cost of something better that it could have been spent on. OKRs are a great way to get your Product Team focused, but how is it done?

Throughout our content at Focus we are referring to functions with capital letters, such as Product, Sales, Customer Service, etc. When we don’t use the capitalized version, we mean the thing being built. Psst, are you in Marketing? We have 21 OKR examples for you too ?

What is Product Management?

Why are we talking about this in a post that’s about how to set OKRs for Product Teams? We are talking about it because Product is a nebulous, nascent and often misunderstood field. This can lead to the whole OKR thing going sideways for unfortunate Product folk even before the first O is set. So, what is Product Management? Let’s take a step back and see Product within the Scrum framework:

Scrum (n): “A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.”

Scrum Guide November 2017 version

I highlighted the part about value because at its simplest form, that is what Product Management is about. Are you a Portfolio Manager, Product Manager, Product Owner, Business Analyst or god forbid a Project Manager doing Product stuff at an organization that doesn’t understand the role? First of all, make them listen to Marty Cagen and explain to them that your daily activities should be tied to maximizing value to users and, consequently, to the business.

Product Team OKR examples

Cool, why don’t we just set this as our main objective? Not so fast. Product Management is also about finding the balance in delivering this value. Could you deliver outstanding value today by ignoring technical debt? Sure, you could. But what about tomorrow? Could you only focus on your users and shut your internal stakeholders up? Sure, but your relationships would suffer and you couldn’t effectively lead without authority, one of the hallmarks of any good Product Manager.

With this is mind, let’s group some of the activities a Product person does at a company. Since Product can take many different forms and different companies, this list by no means will be exhaustive, but let’s give it a shot. If you have ideas or feedback, do get in touch via the chat bubble on the bottom right.

Let’s group Product Management and Product Owner activities into 4 large areas. Sometimes it’s one person dealing with all of them vertically, sometimes the responsibilities are split between strategic and tactical, so pick accordingly.

• Vision and strategy
• Ideation, alignment, validation, prioritization
• Build, measure, learn
• Release and grow

Let’s break these 4 big areas down into smaller ones and let’s look at some examples. You should only select 3-4 OKRs per quarter per team, so don’t think that you need to have as many OKRs as we have in our examples here. Identify what area needs improvement the most and formulate your powerful OKRs to support you and your team.

Vision and strategy

Without a bold and clear vision and a killer strategy, it will be difficult to prioritize and ultimately deliver maximum value to your customers and the company. What OKRs can help focus your efforts when it comes to vision and strategy? Let’s look at some themes and OKR examples.

Domain knowledge

Objective: We have so much awareness on our competitors that we can sell their product better than they can
Key results:
– Talk to 10 customers who have switched to a competitor
– 8 out of 12 of the Sales Team members can name our top 5 competitive advantages
– Increase the number of new users who switched from a competitor from 5% to 15%

Objective: Become the champion ti the customer
Key Results:
– Conduct interviews with at least 40 of the top 100 customers
– 80% of people in the company can name at least 3 out of our 5 user personas
– Reduce churn rate from 20% to 12%
– Increase NPS (Net Promoter Score) from 47 to 65 
 

Share the mindset

Objective: Everyone at the company should share our awesome vision
Key Results:
– 50 out of 65 of our employees should accurately recite our vision and mission statement
– Reduce vertical feature requests from 5 per month to 1
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 35 to 70
– Time spent in meetings remains an average 8 hours per week for each employee

Objective: Make the Jobs-To-Be-Done approach a core skill for everyone
Key Results:
– 9 out of 10 user stories submitted by sales have a well formulated user story
– 2 out of 10 feature requests can be solved without building new features
– Increase day 30 retention from 65% to 85% 

Turn vision into strategy into roadmap

Objective: Create a culture where metrics and data drive our business and product decisions
Key Results:
– 8 out of 10 user stories have success metrics defined and evaluated after release
– 4 out of 10 user stories have a projected business value attached to them
– New feature adoption is at a minimum of 60%
– Marketing investment on feature launches remains stable at 4 hours per feature launched

Objective: Be radically ahead with your backlog
Key Results:
– There are 4 times as many written user stories in the backlog as stories on a sprint
– There are estimated tickets for the next two sprints - average storypoint: 85 

Ideation, alignment, validation, prioritization

You can be the best PM in the world with the most contacts, stellar industry knowledge, and a time machine. You still will fail if you don’t rally the company around coming up with new ideas, aligning on what to do, why, and in what order of priority.

Empower to ideate

Objective: Make stakeholders the center of the ideation process
Key Results:
– 4 out of 10 completed user stories came directly from stakeholders
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) for the sales team from 32 to 55
– Increase the demo to sign-up conversion rate from 30% to 60%

Align team and stakeholders

Objective: Delightfully transparent and radically aligned prioritization
Key Results:
– 0 sprints are affected by mid-sprint critical priority items
– Stakeholders rate the transparency of the prioritization process with at least 4 out of 5
– Complaints about prioritization come up only at most on 3 retrospectives out of 10
– New feature adoption is at least 40% 

Build, measure, learn

This is the mantra of a well tuned Scrum Team. After the team, together, with the stakeholders has identified problems to solve, created user stories, refined and estimated them, they are ready to be taken into a sprint. 

Seamless maker time

Objective: Create a blissful work environment for the scrum team
Key Results:
– Sprint goal is delivered 8 times out of 10
– Zero new stories are taken into the sprint after it has been started
– Story points delivered each sprint can increase from 45 to 55 

Build with quality

Objective: Deliver a delightfully smooth customer experience while shipping more
Key Results:
– Maximum 2 critical bugs are reported by customers per sprint
– NPS score stays 65 or increases
– Story points delivered per sprint stay flat at 45 or increases 

Measure what matters

Objective: Switch from gut feeling product decisions to being radically data driven to reduce complexity
Key Results:
– Every user story has success metrics attached to it
– Increase eNPS score for the Sales and Customer Service teams from 40 to 65
– No new feature with less than 40% adaption rate remains live by the end of the quarter 

Iterate with confidence

Objective: Bring maximum value to customers with the least amount of investment
Key Results: 
– Every feature must have an MVP version and at least 1 iteration
– No feature shall be delivered over multiple sprints
– Increase NPS score from 65 to 75 

Release and grow

You have identified your customers’ pain points, devised and validated a solution, broken it down to manageable iterations and built it, feels good, right? Don’t want to discourage you, but if you botch the release even the best feature or improvement can fall flat and fail to gain adoption, ultimately not contributing to the most important measure most companies have, growth.

Release smoothly

Objective: Achieve magical CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery)
Key Results:
– Increase number of releases from 4 per quarter to 16
– Reduce complaints on retrospectives about deployments from an of average 2 to 0.5
– Keep number of critical bugs reported by customers below 2 per release

Objective: When we release, our customers can’t help but be impressed
Key Results:
– Increase NPS from 45 to 75
– Increase average first month feature adoption by customers from 30% to 65%
– Maintain newsletter unsubscribe rate in line with the current 6%
– Maintain average product related customer service conversations at 34 a day 

Product Management OKR examples to grow

This is where all the AARRR metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) come into place and where having well implemented analytics is crucial. Don’t worry, a bit further below we’ll give you examples on what to track if you only have limited analytics capabilities. AARRR metrics make for some of the most impactful Product Management OKR examples.

Objective: Convert more visitors, simple as that
Key Results:
– Increase demo signups by 20%
– Increase demo conversion rate to signup by 10%
– Increase self serve signup from 5% to 20%
– Keep cost of a demo booked below $45

Objective: Make a radically smooth user onboarding and activation experience
Key Results:
– Reduce churn through onboarding funnel steps 3 and 4 from 60% to 20%
– Reduce time to wow moment (setting up first OKR) from 4 days to 1 day
– Increase profile completion rate from 20% to 85%
– Increase NPS score from 55 to 75

Objective: Achieve stickiness
Key Results:
– Increase day 30 retention from 30% to 75%
– Increase weekly frequency of usage from once a week to three times a week
– Increase free to paid plan upgrade rate from 5% to 15%
– Keep Customer Success time invested per free user flat

Objective: Spin up the referral flywheel
Key Results:
– Increase customer acquisition through referrals from 0 to 0.2 per existing customer
– Maintain 30% churn for referral cohort, in line with sales acquired 
– Don’t let LTV (Lifetime Value) drop below $50 from $75


Objective: Achieve sustainable profitability
Key Results:
– Reduce customer acquisition cost from $150 to $75
– Increase LTV (Lifetime Value) from $50 to $100
– Reduce churn from 75% to 30%

Objective: Shut_up_and_take_my_money.gif (Increase cash flow)
Key Results:
– Increase value of yearly payments from $130k to $300k
– Increase number of large accounts (50+ seats) from 8 to 25
– Increase free to paid plan conversation rate from 15% to 30%
– Maintain free plan churn at 45%  

Product Management OKR examples when you have limited data

A key tenet of OKRs is that KRs need to be measurable. This assumes you have done the necessary groundwork and have readily available, reliable data. But what if that’s not the case in your organization? A lot of small companies don’t invest in data in the beginning. And I’ve seen even bigger, post Series A companies where data just wasn’t there. Sounds familiar? Don’t worry, there is a lot of data you can get even out of a simple Google Analytics implementation to your website and asking devs to help you with some database queries once in a while. And there is data you can gather just by sending out a simple Google Forms.

Objective: Convert more visitors, simple as that
Key Results:
– Increase time spent on page from 30 seconds to 2 minutes
– Increase number of pages viewed per visit from 1.1 to 2.1
– Increase number of of visitors who sign up for free trial (visitors vs new free users) from 5% to 15%

Objective: Make a radically smooth user onboarding and activation experience
Key Results:
– Reduce steps to wow moment (when customers said in research they definitely will keep using the product) from 12 to 6
– Increase activated users (one who created a check-in) from 10% to 40%
– Increase proportion of users with a profile picture from 30% to 80%

Objective: Make our product well known and well liked
Key Results:
– Increase NPS score from 55 to 75
– Add 200 reviews on Capterra
– Increase average review score on Capterra from 4.1 to 4.6 

Product Management OKRs are Scrum Team OKRs

I’m a big proponent of Scrum Teams having one set of OKRs on a team level. If it’s your first time doing OKRs, it’s probably best to only set them at a team level anyway. This way you can avoid one of the biggest mistakes -having conflicting OKRs.

You should still assign one person to be the lead on the OKR itself though. It is logical to choose your Scrum Master or Product Owner as the lead, but if you want to instill a bit more outcome driven thinking, ask a developer to volunteer.

All right, but how does a Scrum Team OKR look like? In a healthy company, each Scrum Team has a single Product they are responsible for or a group of features within a more complex Product. This makes it pretty simple to pick a set of OKRs as usually you have a clear idea of what makes the Product or feature set successful for the given period. And you can use the examples we shared above and tweak them to fit your team.

Get focused

Having great OKRs set up is only a piece of the puzzle. What is more challenging is keeping the team focused on their objectives day after day, sprint after sprint. This is why we developed Focus, where you can set your OKRs up, but instead of forgetting about them until the next quarter, we devised a solution that can help your team stay on top of them. We incorporated OKRs into daily and weekly check-in rituals. They take no more than 2 minutes a day but the result is a team who knows what they are working on that day is moving the needle. Reduce useless work, drive motivation by clarifying purpose and reach the maximum potential of your team. Check out focus and use some these Product Management OKR examples to get started.

The post 23 OKR examples for Product Managers 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.

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

Table of contents

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

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

Larry Page, a Co-founder at Google

Why Should You Use OKRs?

By using this method a company achieves:

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

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

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

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

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

Example

Objective: Launch an awesome product 
Key Results:

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

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

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

How to Start?

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

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

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

How to Create Objectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to set Key Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

OKR Checklist

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

5 steps to set up OKRs

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

Conclusion

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

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

The post How to set powerful OKRs appeared first on Focus.