What, why and how OKRs?
In this article, i’ll try to explain what is OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and why and how do we use it? Enjoy!
What is OKRs?
OKR is a goal-setting framework driven by outcomes that includes two components: Objectives and Key Results. This framework has successfully been used in many large organizations such as Google. Twitter and LinkedIn with an increasing popularity over the past years due to its effectiveness.
Objectives are ambitious, clearly defined goals but might feel somewhat uncomfortable.
Key Results are specific measures used to track the achievement of those defined goals. It should be easy to grade with a number such as 0–1.0 scale.
OKRs represent more than progress, they represent the meaningful changes/improvement you want to see in your teams and organisation.
Why should you need it?
OKRs promise several key factors critical to organization moving towards increased human-centric and value-driving ways of working such as:
Agile and Lean ways of working where OKRs are built on short review cycles so that you can be nimbler, and staff can reach to changes much faster.
Transparency, which means OKRs are public; everyone in the company should be able see what everyone else is working on. Objectives should be aligned with the overall company strategy as a guiding star. Clarity and purpose makes people feel motivated and engaged.
Ambitious: Objectives are ambitious, challenging and inspirational. This makes people think outside the box and inspire them to achieve their best possible work.
What are the benefits of OKRs?
Capture cross-functional dependencies across teams.
Helps to steer development through data-driven decision making.
Focuses on outcome, not output by measuring delivered value.
You can achieve remarkable results when you’re engaged with a purpose. OKRs help communicate the bigger picture in a way everyone understands.
What makes good OKRs?
Effective OKRs detail the criteria that help communicate to your team if you’re successful or not in the actions that you decided to take together. That information helps your team understand if they need to course correct of change action. And that’s also the reason why OKRs are transparent or public, they end up being this very transparent communication tool that your entire team can rally behind.
A good objective, which has three qualities such as meaningful, which articulates a top priority and provides clear direction.
audacious means it should be pushing your team to do what you thought wasn’t possible and inspiring which means it’s memorable and empowering for your team.