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Have you aligned your employee goals with your organizational goals yet? If not, 2024 is the right time to get started with the practice. Learn how to establish this practice at your workplace this new year!
OKRs have become an important part of performance management in most organizations; many HR managers are adopting them for employee goal setting. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) methodology is one of the most simple and effective ways for goal setting and monitoring at workplaces.
Objectives and Key Results or OKRs is a goal-setting framework that is used widely by organizations all over the world. These organizations include the likes of LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, Disney, and many more. They were first introduced by Andy Grove at Intel in the ‘70s, and later, it was made popular by John Doerr when he introduced it at Google in 1999. To date, it is a central element of Google’s culture and serves as a management methodology, which helps focus company efforts on the same issues throughout the organization.
OKRs consists of two components, namely:
– Objectives: a clearly defined goal to be achieved
– Key Results: measurable steps to achieve the objectives
Here’s a simple guide for you to get started with OKRs in 2024!
It is important to introduce your team to the OKR methodology and give them an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the whole process. While there are a number of OKR guides out there, why not go to the one that is synonymous with the term OKRs. Google has an OKR guide that will take users through history and set up and even teach them how to write actionable OKRs.
Before moving onto the next step make sure that your teams understand why OKRs play an important role in the growth of a company and how the alignment of goals works internally.
Also Read: How To Set Effective Goals
The next step is to create business goals based on your company’s annual strategy. This step requires a lot of brainstorming and collaborating with different departments. Understand the company’s vision and mission to establish these OKRs.
Remember that your OKRs should answer these two questions:
Objectives – What Do You Want To Achieve?
Key Results – How To Know If You Are Getting Closer To Achieving It?
Example:
Objective: Increase market reach by 35% by Q4
Key Results: 2nd largest distributor network in Q2 growing at 15% per month Voted most popular product across 5 leading publications
Objective:Leverage product feature that is ranked most popular in the market<
Key Results: The heat map of the website shows 60% of visitors focus on a primary feature of the product and remaining on secondary features. Feedback received from customers indicates the product’s primary feature provides 2x more value.
Once all your teams are sufficiently familiar with the approach, encourage them to draft their own OKRs. Collaborate with them and help them create their OKRs, this can sometimes lead to conversations that help you understand your teams and their plans better. It allows employees to understand what is expected of them by management.
Also Read: High Performing Teams In Healthcare
All goals need to be aligned with an organization’s goals. That is the true purpose of achievable goals and objectives. Once your employees have set their individual OKRs, align their goals with company OKRs or business goals of your company.
Now that all your teams understand the purpose of OKR methodology for goal setting and have set their individual OKRs and successfully aligned them with company OKRs, all you need to do is review these OKRs before they start working on them. Review the OKRs of all your teams and make sure that their OKRs are aligned with the company properly.
Also Read: Wondering How To Set OKRs For The Engineering Team?
The next step is to monitor these OKRs. You have to keep track of the progress your employees make on these OKRs in the coming days. Monitor how regularly your teams are checking-in on their OKRs and keep track of their progress regularly and modify the OKRs if needed.
Working with a coach is a proven best practice to help implement your OKR strategy and drive business outcomes.
The OKR Launch and Coaching Program is a customized consulting service program designed by Engagedly to help organizations successfully implement and widely adopt the OKR approach.
