Setting OKRs for your Team
Unheard to the general business world just a few decades ago, OKRs have become instrumental to the success of many of the world’s biggest businesses. Despite being strongly linked to tech companies, their benefits actually span all sectors — and apply equally to businesses of all sizes.
This article explains the concept of OKRs, then looks at how you can set OKRs for your team.
What are OKRs?
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a way of defining our goals and measuring our success in reaching them. As the name suggests, each OKR breaks down into two parts: an objective, and a key result (in some instances, there may be more than one key result, but the word key is significant, so you shouldn’t cast the net too wide).
OKRs are a form of performance management framework; as such, they belong to the same family as KPIs — although there are some important differences between OKRs and KPIs.
How to Implement OKRs
It’s the role of management to bring the best out of a team. As team leader, you’re responsible for creating a vision for your team, but you’ll also need to create more manageable short-to-medium-term goals to allow your team to focus and understand what they are trying to achieve. Setting OKRs for your team is the ideal way to achieve this, and the framework will both incentivise success and make performance tracking simpler.
How to Set Objectives for Your Team
The best objectives will pass three tests:
1. Each objective should be actionable — don’t define outcomes which depend on chance or circumstances beyond your team’s control.
2. Objectives should be time-limited — avoid open-ended aims that don’t reach a clear conclusion (or milestone).
3. Objectives should be stretching and ambitious — setting all objectives that you’re certain to achieve undermines the purpose of OKRs.
From the objective you will need to define key results that ladder up to the objective. The key results need to measurable. It’s best to only set about 3 to 5 key results. It is very important that the key results should not be a task list, it should be the outcome. The implementation and the tasks needed to achieved the result are the team’s responsibility and has to be flexible to accommodate the changing landscape of your business.
How to Measure Your Team’s Key Results
The key results should be empirically clear and (in most cases) numerically measurable. This allows us to say without doubt whether an objective has been achieved — and to what degree. By avoiding the need for human judgement, we can eliminate the risk of bias.
If your results depend on a relative measurement — for instance, a percentage-based improvement — then it’s vital to clearly define the baseline. More broadly, it’s always best to define at the outset how you’ll measure results, and involve your team in this. Not only will this expose any weaknesses in the structure of your OKRs, but it will also build transparency into working processes — something your team will appreciate.
How to Review Your OKRs
Since OKRs are used to track and improve your team’s performance, it makes sense to track and improve their own performance in achieving that.
It’s often only when we execute a strategy that we can truly determine its effectiveness. At the end of the pre-set period, look back and ask whether the objectives and results you set were clear and ambitious enough. If an objective has been met in full, then it was probably too easy to begin with. Likewise, if there’s doubt about an outcome, then your results-measurement process will need tightening.
A Test of Leadership
As a team leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your team engages with the implementation of OKRs. Everyone involved should understand the objectives they’re working towards as clearly as you do. While it’s well worth setting OKRs for your team as a whole, it can sometimes help to define OKRs on an individual basis — this approach often works best when there’s a clear division of labour between team members.
Finally, it’s important to remember that OKRs are a means to an end — not an end in themselves. The risk with all performance management frameworks is that they become a hoop to jump through, but by defining meaningful objectives and accurate measures of their success, you can avoid this outcome and reap real-world benefits.
