Any company with good OKR programs can gain a competitive advantage in its own way. One reason for this is that they place a strong emphasis on team goals and corporate goals rather than individual goals.
After choosing the objectives and ensuring that the key results you’ve come up with are actually the right ones, you must ensure that your OKRs are in line with the organization’s strategy. Whatever your organization’s Goal is, OKRs address a few more important issues and have great rewards.
Focus:
When practicing OKRs, one important rule is to keep the number of individual objectives to three to four and the number of key results to two to five per objective. This policy is in place to help you concentrate on what you want to accomplish. Additionally, this forces you to prioritize and select the most important outcomes at that point.
Alignment:
Once more, OKRs are intended to be public and accessible to all company employees. Employees find it simpler to align with the appropriate goals of those they influence or are influenced by as a result of this transparency. Every employee is able to comprehend and comprehend the impact they are having beyond themselves, their teams, or departments when you are able to express alignments and visualize them. The extent of each alignment will differ at various levels of the organization, and how to straddle between both alignments is your organization’s particular DNA. Organizations achieve alignment using both a top-down and bottom-up approach.
Commitment:
While OKRs are established at all organizational levels, each employee establishes their own OKRs through dialogue and discussion. Managers do give them OKRs, but most of the time, everyone comes up with their own. Every employee will be significantly more committed to achieving their OKRs because they came up with them, as documented in the IKEA Effect.
Tracking:
One of the main differences between OKRs and traditional performance reviews is tracking. You usually check in once a week. Any method of review is acceptable. Profit.co backs the Progress, Plan, and Problems (PPP) methodology, which is widely used. It works best when employees check in on all of their OKRs and then complete their PPP assessment.
Stretching:
Which of the following is superior, assuming that the features are the same size?
- Someone commits to delivering three features and delivers four features.
- Someone commits to delivering ten features and delivers eight features.