OKRs Software to Improve Your Business Performance

Why Do You Need OKRs to Improve Your Business Performance?

About the Speaker

Mr. Yatin Pawar leads the Product Marketing team at iMocha – An AI-powered Digital Skills Assessment Platform. Yatin enjoys the varied roles and responsibilities of being a product marketer, which allows him to collaborate with all the other teams, plan his initiatives, and make an impact by enabling the Sales, CS, and AM teams with their customer acquisition and product adoption goals.

In his previous role, Yatin was heavily involved in promoting the importance of setting goals using the OKR methodology, performance management, and continuous feedback. Apart from multiple blogs, Yatin has also created a comprehensive guide and email course for OKRs with department-wise examples. And, it still is one of the biggest organic traffic sources.

Also In his spare time, he enjoys reading fiction, fantasy, and mythological novels. Currently, he is wrapping up Sapiens, a highly recommended read.

A peek into the Podcast

01:05 – 02:34 – How Objectives and Key Results (OKR) helped your company to evolve and thrive?

02:37 – 06:50 – What are the challenges you confronted while implementing OKR? How did you overcome it?

07:02 – 08:54 – How to successfully cascade OKR to an entire organization?

08:55 – 12:31 – Can OKRs boost the employee engagement rate?

Transcription

I believe the OKR concept is very powerful as it helps organizations focus on performance. Why OKR is deployed in your organization, and how it helped your company evolve and thrive? Can you tell us about that?

Our company was involved in creating OKR software, and with that in mind, it was mandatory for us to have a belief in OKR in our own culture i.e.., everyone in the organization should start using it before we propagate it to others, our customers and prospects.

Of all the goal-setting methods out there, OKRs have been a driving force for growth, and most of the Silicon Valley companies, from Intel to Google, and also many other companies follow OKR. That’s is the reason why we wanted OKR to be a part of our culture and we started working on it.

OKRs have been very useful to set both professional and personal goals. It helped us align the management’s thinking to the junior-most employees so that we all could go in one direction. Using a methodology that we ask our customers to leverage has been a really good start.

So, while implementing OKRs in your organization, were there any specific challenges you faced, and what are the measures you took to overcome them?

Challenge & Solution. The first and foremost challenge is that getting everyone on board. To make the process seamless, we had a few sessions and ran through some of Google’s videos including the one by Rick Clough, where he demonstrated how to use OKRs.

After having a basic understanding of how OKRs work, the management listed down the company goals as to what they plan to achieve and what is the goal for the next one year. Based on that, they asked the employees to create their respective OKRs with their understanding of the methodology. Besides, it was okay to fail because you do not know what will work and what will not if you do not fail. This is how we started.

The fun way of going about OKRs was that we did two things. Apart from professional goals, we also set up personal goals. It could be anything even reducing weight by 10 kgs. And then, we met in a week and started analyzing if the wordings that we used for these goals were correct.

Personal OKR Examples. To continue on the reducing weight example, one of us was a fitness freak. He set 10 kgs weight to reduce as his goal. So, we started to identify, if you say 10 kgs, does it have to be your muscle weight or your fat weight? What should it be exactly?

And then, we started to narrow down the terms. The right terminology for going about this was, “I want to reduce my weight from 80 Kgs to 70 Kgs with most of it being the muscle mass and getting to a BMI of 22 percent.” This sums up what a specific objective is.

From this, one could tell that people are understanding the working principle of OKRs, and when you make it personal, people will be more involved in it. And, it is actually going to help him to get fit, in this case. That’s how we started to get an understanding of OKRs.

Let’s say someone else had an OKR of “I want to read three books in a month.” The OKR should be clear with how many pages per day you should be reading.

We did this exercise for one whole month and we could understand that this is how we should set OKRs. This is one of the major challenges we addressed initially.

Challenge & Solution. Everyone understood OKRs, now we can start moving to the professional goals. For company goals, what we did was, if the goal was XYZ or increase the revenue or market share by this percentage, every department had to work on its own goals.

In my case, let’s say, product marketing, I am responsible for the website. For me, it was not about getting x number of prospects or increase page views by Xyz person. The actual metric would have been, increase the visitor to lead conversion ratio and then the lead to MQL conversion ratio by XYZ percent. So, the way of tracking becomes easier and tie it back to revenue.

Therefore, it is not just about increasing page views but actually contributing to the revenue. Once you contribute to the revenue, you will be tying it to numbers and you can understand that the company goal is to increase market share, so this is how much revenue you should be achieving and this is the market that you should be capturing. That is how we started going about it.

Within three to four months, we all understood the concept of OKR, which posed great difficulty in the initial stages of implementing OKR.

What in your thoughts do you think When implementing OKRs, how to set the best cadence (for strategic, tactical, and operational levels) if the organization still works with annual budgets?

Setting Cadence

What experienced professionals suggest is that your company goals should be annual and your departmental/individual goals should be OKRs. That is tried and tested technique.

Unless you are in a very dynamic industry, where everything changes every few months, this is a good enough way to go about it. That is set, company goals for a year, follow it, maybe have a bi-annual check-in, and then you know whether you are on track or not. For individual goals, quarterly cadence is good enough.

For individuals, let’s say there is someone who is just starting out or is not aware of OKRs, then very short cadences like monthly or twice a month will let you know whether they are on track or not easily.

About Annual Budget Organizations

In our team, we were not tying OKRs to our annual budget initiative, so that not every department has to work on it. We were a lean organization and so there was not much of an issue with that. As I understand, seen, read through, and observe our customers, the annual budgets are here to stay unless and until there is something very drastic that needs to be changed or needs to be acquired, the budgets won’t be moved.

If you are on track and focused, you will stick to that budget. So, it won’t be much of a challenge unless like I said, it is a very dynamic industry.

In this remote-working age when managers find it hard to keep the Employees engaged and productive. Do you think OKR could be a huge support if leveraged in the right way?

The first and foremost thing is OKRs are not magic pills irrespective of whether the managers are trying to get people to be productive or not. That depends on how the company culture is, even without OKRs.

If you are working in an office, and the culture is about micromanagement, then if it is an office or home, people are not going to be involved with your desire to be productive. They just get the bare minimum done and that’s it. So, only if the culture is right and the team is working together to contribute, then it will really make an impact and OKRs will help and complement this process.

Now, that you have everything clear, what you want to achieve, what you don’t want to achieve, let’s say, for two weeks, this is the goal that you have set up or one activity i.e., one KR that needs to be done and achieved in two weeks, this will help because definitely being in remote, the challenge is that you don’t know exactly how much work has taken place or how much work has happened over or how much percent of goals have been achieved or not. Due to the cadence of OKR, that will definitely help understand and identify the gaps.

Let’s say if you are supposed to achieve 80% growth in this period and complete 200 calls within this year and only 100 are complicated, then there is something wrong. That’s how we need to fix it. This is why culture and your OKR goal-setting methodology will work together and then, it will have to help employees to be more productive and contribute more to their goals and organization subsequently.

Considering the dynamic situation now, everything is changing at such a rapid pace that we need to be flexible, and OKRs as a goal-setting framework provides that flexibility modify your goals based on your situation.

For example, if you are in HR and everything is changing, people need to come to the office or don’t need to and manage their work from home, how does HR help with that? So, their goals will need to be very crisp and precise. Perhaps, they change every few months, every few weeks, and OKR provides that flexibility.

I want to mention Management by Objectives would have been very rigid. There are many benefits of MBO but still, it would have been inflexible and for an HR, OKR would be much more helpful. And a definite yes to OKR in these times is going to be a boon.

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