Creating and using goal-setting methodologies can help you achieve business goals. You can pull out your whiteboard and come up with ideas any day. Alternatively, you can use a goal-setting method that ensures your team is motivated to succeed. Goal-setting is necessary for multiple reasons; it aligns the overall vision with the individual goal, increases focus & productivity, elevates employee engagement, etc. Before determining goals for your organization, you need to have a goal-setting framework to create a structure and system around your goals.
Various goal-setting frameworks or methods are available that you can use but choosing the one that will work for your organization might be difficult.
Objective and Key Results (OKR), a proven framework that ensures your team is motivated to succeed. OKR is one of the known frameworks that help you focus on growth and achieve better long-term results.
Let us know more about OKR software and how it can drive your business to success.
OKR Software
To focus on specific goals and track progress, Objective and Key Results (OKRs) methodology is used to achieve better results and productivity. The idea behind OKRs is to align teams with the organizational goals and help them attain growth.
In the OKR approach, “Objectives” represent the goal of the organization, teams, and individuals, whereas “Key results” assist in measuring the success of your objective and tracking your progress.
Objectives should be:
- Specific
- Relevant
- Time Bounded
Key Results should be:
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Challenging
Example:
Objective: Increase product availability & performance.
Key Results:
- Drive database availability to 99.5%.
- Guarantee page speed of less than 200ms.
How OKR Software drive Business Success
We use OKRs to define our business goals for the year, and then based on those overall goals, create individual tasks and projects for each team. The basic idea is to keep the employee motivated, engaged and productive.
Precisely utilizing the OKRs can help in improving the performance of employees and thus, enhance the growth of the organization.
Here’s how you can derive the performance of your organization with OKRs:
- Encourage ambitious organizational goals:
The purpose of OKR is to set ambitious yet practical and relevant goals. OKR focuses on setting goals that are capable of bringing employees out of their comfort zone and pushing them toward achieving the target in a much more efficient way, which might seem impossible to them. The goal set using the OKRs is challenging but at the same time, it does not seem impossible and demotivating for the employee.
- Objective and detailed outcome:
Setting the best OKR doesn’t mean just setting up the right objectives and key results, it should be challenging and motivating for the employees at the same time. Through this, employees push themselves to perform better and take that extra step to achieve the goal. Moreover, communicating with the employees and letting them set their OKRs helps them to stay aligned with the overall organization’s vision.
- Employee Growth:
OKRs can also be set at the individual level. They are capable of proving long-term success, along with the career growth of the employees in the organization. Through this, employees feel much more engaged in their work since they can set their OKRs. OKR doesn’t only rely on financial factors to estimate the success of the organization but factors such as performance, principle, communication, and teamwork.
- Aligning team & individual goals to big goals:
Using OKR ensures the involvement of employees at every step and process of the work toward the goal to establish a likable relation between the employee and management. Using OKRs enhances transparency within the organization. Also, weekly reviews and feedback help in fostering a better environment and improves communication within the organization. Aligning every individual goal with the organization’s goal means ensuring that every team and individual is moving in the same direction.
- Tracking Key Results for Individuals:
Regular reviewing OKRs can assist to track the progress. This helps in highlighting the lagging areas so they can be focused on and brought back to track. OKRs should be visible to everyone to make them traceable. With this, employees have clarity about goals and can choose the right path according to them.
- Focusing on what matters:
In OKR, objectives are the goals that are aspired to be achieved by the organization whereas, key results are the small steps that are time bound, achievable and measurable. OKRs are always set to a certain number so that employees are involved and engaged in the process. Pairing them rightly is necessary as it ensures a higher success rate and a much more focused team. As result, employees get clarity about the overall vision and what their role in it is. At the end of the OKR cycle, the scoring and self-assessment make the employees where they are lagging and work on them during the next cycle.
- Tracking & Re-aligning:
Tracking the key results throughout the OKR cycle helps in detecting the small issues that may occur in between the process. Regular and frequent reviews ensure that there are no issues. Later, when new objectives are framed, they are re-aligned easily with the key results. It also helps the organization to understand from the previous OKR cycle whether the goals were inspirational, achievable, ordinary, or demotivating. This observation allows the management to study the objectives to set for the next cycle about the previous cycle and thereby, helping in establishing the required goals for the organization in the future.
Conclusion
OKR framework pushes the team and every individual in an organization towards efficiently achieving the set goals. It is said that when an OKR is implemented properly, it can result in ten times more growth than usual.
Besides this, OKRs are also capable of establishing high-performance work culture by prioritizing the things that matter first, creating a much more committed team toward the goal through effective communication, aligning the company’s overall vision with individual goals, fostering transparency within the company norms, and also, tracking and re-aligning the goals.
The basic idea behind the OKRs is to set inspirational and achievable goals and quantifiable key results. Therefore, an organization can derive better performance and success with OKRs through effective implementation.