Successfully running your enterprise requires setting and meeting team and company goals. Every enterprise has a different strategy to manage its employees’ performance. One of the more popular goal-setting methodologies used today is OKRs. It stands for objectives and key results. OKRs help set up measurable goals that are communicated efficiently across your enterprise. Using OKR tools can help your employees be more involved in goal setting and allow your enterprise to be more successful in meeting challenging goals. This article explores how your enterprise can leverage OKR tools to help with goal-setting management for tomorrow.

Components of OKRs

OKRs follow a straightforward template that can be applied to any context within your enterprise. The entire system can be summarized with this simple sentence.

I will (Objective) as measured by (key results)

The first component is the objective, which is the goal your enterprise wants to achieve. Goals can be broken down into specific achievements that your enterprise would like to meet. For example, an objective for your enterprise could be to increase customer engagement and brand awareness. Objectives should be clear, concise, and action-oriented. As a bonus, they can be inspirational to motivate your employees into meeting them.

The second component is the key result which is the metric by which you can measure the progress towards your goal or objective. If you were to use the previous objective of increasing customer engagement, the key result could be driving a million visitors to your website. Key results are benchmarks that track the journey towards meeting the objective. Good key results are aggressive but realistic, time-bound, and most importantly, measurable and verifiable.

This combination of objectives and key results focuses on outcomes and not procedures. It also adds accountability to set goals, where individuals within your enterprise feel responsible for meeting organizational goals.

Also Read: Quick OKR Tips for First Time OKR User

Types of OKRs

OKRs are flexible in their format but can broadly fall into three categories. These categories are as follows.

• Committed OKRs are about making commitments to a specific task or goal – There is no beating around the bush to achieve what your enterprise is committed to.
• Aspirational OKRs involve ambitious and long-term goals that no one has achieved before. Since there is no pre-existing pathway to these goals, they last several cycles and are occasionally exchanged between team members to retain employee engagement.
• Learning OKRs are about learning something new that is valuable. If your teams are unsure how to proceed, they can set learning OKRs that can be linked to a committed or aspirational OKR.

Typically, enterprises use OKR tools to manage goal-setting, i.e., the tool can set, implement, and track OKRs to assess employee performance and business impact.

OKR Tools and their Features

• Smart dashboards – measurable key results offer data derived from quantifiable metrics. They cover individual performance, progress, and overall adoption. Therefore, the tool must have actionable dashboards to reveal overall improvement, assess outcomes from a business perspective, and identify and address bottlenecks.
• Scalability – OKRs must be scalable to grow with the changing goal-setting needs as the business expands.
• User-friendly – OKRs must have an intuitive and user-friendly interface for easy adoption across the organization.
• Integration capabilities: OKRs must offer a seamless user experience. Therefore, the OKR tool must integrate with organizational workflow. Such integration enables employees to remain aligned with the organization and stay on track with their progress.

The above essential features in OKR software can go a long way to organization-wide adoption. There are also a few best practices that ensure the successful implementation of OKRs.

Best practices while setting OKRs

The OKRs framework is broad and offers several approaches due to their flexibility. While setting OKRs, you should ensure that they are realistic and measurable.

Connect OKRs to daily work

Goal setting is meaningless if your employees do not understand how they contribute to meeting them. Motivation increases if an employee can see the connection between what they do daily and the organization’s objective.

Communicate OKRs

Ensure that your objectives are communicated clearly, and employees know that they are helping meet them daily rather than semi-annually or in periodic increments. 

Set realistic OKRs

While there is no limit to how many OKRs you can set, it is better to keep numbers manageable. Setting ten or less than ten will make OKRs more manageable. This model is representative of your enterprise’s larger goals, so it is beneficial to set a realistic number of OKRs that can be achieved within a specific timeframe.

Set OKRs at different levels

You can have OKRs for the entire company and OKRs for different teams within your enterprise. You can also have OKRs that are applicable across different departments. It is a good practice to set OKRs at different levels to further collaboration across your enterprise. For example, suppose a company’s goal is to develop the most energy-efficient solution in a specific field. In that case, your marketing team’s OKRs could be to create and demonstrate a product demo proving energy efficiency. The OKRs that apply across all your teams could be to reduce carbon footprint and energy usage by twenty percent.

Conclusion

Goal setting is essential to every enterprise. While the goals are always well-intentioned, they may be unrealistic, or they may not be communicated clearly. It is equally essential to ensure that the goals of the employees are aligned with those of the enterprise. Fortunately, goal-setting can be managed efficiently with easy-to-use OKR software, which can be customized to suit your business needs.

Also Read: How to Implement Objectives and Key Results (OKR) into Your Organization

Also Read: How OKR Helps Organizations Boost Job Satisfaction and Performance?