Isn’t ‘Employee Goals’ the new buzzword these days? If you ask anyone in your organization if they have goals, they’d say yes. But do you think that these goals are effective enough for your organization to achieve success? Well, goals give us a sense of direction and motivation but they do not always lead to success because of not being effectively set. 

If you are planning on improving your company culture and increase your organizational productivity using employee goals, then OKRs are the best way to do it! 

Objectives and key results (OKR) is a popular goal management framework that evolved over time. You can set goals, oversee them and track employee progress using OKRs.

OKRs help you understand the following things about your goal and its results:

1. Clear Idea – OKRs give you a proper understanding of what you are planning to achieve.
2. Concentrate – OKRs help you focus on the right aspect of the goal. It shows you the right direction and makes you ask yourself constantly if doing something brings you closer to accomplishing your goal. 
3. Collaborate – With cascadable/ shared OKRs, employees can collaborate with each other and work on different key results for the same objective. So OKRs also drive team work. 

Also Read: How Can Setting Employee Goals Help Your Organization?

We have understood why using OKRs for goal setting is important, but the question still remains, how to find out if your employees are setting strong and effective goals for themselves?

To answer this question, you first have to answer the following questions about the OKRs your employees set:

Is The Objective Directional?

Understand if the objective actually gives you a proper understanding of what you should do. An objective tells you what you should do and a key result tells you how to do it. It is important for your employee objective to be directional. 

Is It Simple and Time Bound?

An OKR cannot be long and confusing. Make sure that the OKRs of your employees are simple, brief and direct. Always remember to give the objective shorter time span. Having long-term goals can be helpful but not as much as having smaller goals which are bound to time. 

Is It Aligned To Organizational OKRs?

One of the most important questions that you should answer is that if the employee OKR is contributing to organizational OKRs. Employees should align their team OKRs as well as their individual OKRs to the organizational OKRs, as well as their department goals.

Is It Measurable?

It is very important to have OKRs that are measurable over time. Being able to measure your OKRs helps you find out if you have reached your goal or not. Measuring unquantified objectives is subjective and your employees should opt to have a one-on-one meeting with their managers to understand their progress on unquantifiable objectives. 

If the answer to these questions is yes, then your employee OKRs are good to go!

Also Read: Goal Setting: A Guide To Help Organizations Succeed Using OKRs

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Author

Srikant Chellappa

President/CEO and Co-Founder of Engagedly

Srikant Chellappa is the Co-Founder and CEO at Engagedly and is a passionate entrepreneur and people leader. He is an author, producer/director of 6 feature films, a music album with his band Manchester Underground, and is the host of The People Strategy Leaders Podcast. He is currently working on his next book, Ikigai at the Workplace, which is slated for release in the fall of 2023.

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