OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results: it is an objective-setting methodology designed to track progress and keep your team aligned through the use of measurable goals and objectives. The OKR framework can help improve the focus of your staff, increase productivity and promote transparency within your company. The OKR process helps turn good ideas into excellent execution. They strengthen employee engagement and promote high-performance teams.
Among the companies that have adopted OKRs are companies such as Allbirds, Google, Netflix and many more. Accuracy in achieving objectives is not a critical factor. Reaching approximately 60 or 70% of the current goal will be considered a success. But above all, there are conditions in which your objective must be ambitious and challenging (the method uses the specific term “ambitious goals”).
Other key differences between MBOs and OKRs are that the latter are quarterly, not annual, and are separate from compensation.
Key objectives and results
, or OKRs, have become one of the most popular frameworks for teams looking to plan and measure the success of their work. For Workpath magazine, Markus has summarized six good reasons why you should introduce key objectives and results (OKR), especially in a crisis situation like the current one. If you're looking for some OKR tools to help you set ambitious goals, check out these OKR tracking tools for personal goals and smaller teams and these tools for larger companies.Having access to all of an organization's objectives in an OKR system, whether it's a customized spreadsheet or dedicated OKR software, helps create more transparency in the organization with respect to strategic priorities across teams and hierarchical levels. Objectives and key results (or OKRs), a popular framework for setting goals, are an effective method for planning and measuring success at the team level. For example, if you work with five objectives per set of vertical OKR, the top level provides two of the five objectives; the other three objectives come from below. Some of the best OKR tools are free, such as Google Docs and Google Sheets, or even a good old fashioned pen and paper.
Each set of OKRs must incorporate the organization's comments and be subject to multiple checks and drafts. But no matter what, at the end of each OKR cycle, you must analyze your key results and determine if you achieved them or not. Companies like Apartment Therapy and Zume Pizza do this and not only help complete the OKRs, but also the company culture. The OKR method requires companies to define their vision and mission, since the starting point for working with OKRs is a clear and understandable pyramid of mission statement.
In addition, OKRs make performance and progress visible week after week by analyzing and updating key results, thus promoting recognition. The advantage of this is that, at times of greatest stress (transition to an office environment from home), the pressure immediately dropped significantly and now, in April, the next set of OKRs (all the objectives and the respective drivers of success) can be planned in a specific way.
