The Ultimate Guide To Objectives and Key Results – OKRs

OKR planning basics

What Is Your Strategy?

If you don’t have a long-term Mission and Vision, and a clear a focused Strategy, you can struggle to get OKRs working work well. Think of your Mission as your long-term guide. And your strategy as an expression of the battlegrounds you must win this year. 

OKRs are natural recipients of this guidance. This is why ZOKRI allows you to define your Mission, Vision and Purpose, and even a North Star metric, if you have one, along with Strategic Pillars, and align OKRs to these.

“People who understand and buy into the strategy will work toward achieving it. If people don’t understand or buy in, at best they won’t contribute much, and at worst they will actively undermine the strategy” Management Today

Dave Richards is MIT Innovation Lab co-founder

OKRs and Business-As-Usual (BAU)

As you will see in upcoming sections, OKR are an obvious fit for teams that can control and apply their time where value is identified. Teams like Sales, Marketing, and Engineering for example. These team have KPIs, are already re-assessing goals and priorities frequently, and often already working in an agile way.

There are also teams in companies that are more service orientated, with much of what they do being geared towards following established prescribed processes, business-as-usual (BAU) activities, and maintaining existing levels of performance. 

For example, some teams have roles that exist in a constant state of workload uncertainty, and deal with what happens and is given to them each day, like Customer Service with in-bound support needs, and Legal with Contracts requests. 

Other teams work hard, follow processes, but have unpredictable outcomes, like research based teams that are in a constant state of experimentation and never know when break-throughs will happen.  

How can we make sure OKRs work for the more BAU orientated teams and teams where outcomes are harder to measure and less certain? It’s much easier than you think. 

These teams can and should firstly use get clarity on what these systems, processes, and jobs-to-be-done are. Then assign what are sometimes called ‘health metrics’ or KPIs to track their performance levels. 

Obviously, you need to keep the BAU that’s performing well on-track. Where you think there are improvements to be made, your OKR planning focuses on these areas. For example:

• Customer Service: We can’t predict the number of calls will come in, but how could we ensure we solve customer needs faster and create better results for customers?
• Legal: We can’t target the number of contracts we will create, but how could we capture what’s needed and deliver the final signed agreement more efficiently?
• Research: We can’t predict the number of discoveries we will have, but how can we get better at creating hypothesis for experiments, running the experiment, capturing and sharing the results?

Specific role orientated processes and jobs-to-be-done are also a possibility for consideration, but the outcome could be:

• Payroll: This is running really smoothly, there are payroll delays or errors – no OKR is needed

ZOKRI is the leader at recognising the diversity of roles and responsibilities in an organisation. The software allows Health Metrics or KPIs, and Initiatives to be tracked and have owners and collaborators, as well as OKRs. 

This provides you with a way of valuing BAU work and providing the same level of transparency present with OKR. This way you will avoid a two tier system of employees that are highly visible via OKRs and those who work hard in the background.

Cross-functional Teams

It is OKR best practice to involve other teams in your OKR planning conversations. It’s common when you’re having cross-functional discussions to identify challenges or opportunities that require a cross-functional team to capture the value. If you plan in silos the chances of spotting these opportunities is greatly reduced. 

Other common starting points for a cross-functional OKR teams are:

• KPIs that need big improvements e.g. Retention Team that needs to get churn from 5% to 2%.
• Product launch team that needs to launch a product and achieve X users logging in weekly.

What Percentage Of Time Is Spend On BAU vs OKR

Hopefully you can see that the answer is, it depends on you team, roles, responsibilities, and the quarter itself. 

It’s totally fine to have one OKR in a BAU biased team. Perhaps to improve a process whilst working hard on maintaining a range of team Health Metrics / KPIs. 

It is also fine to have a cascade of related OKRs that are supporting each other. OKRs are flexible and work for all organizations and team types as long as you recognize that a one-rule approach for everyone won’t work. 

Regardless of what team you’re in, or your seniority, ZOKRI allows everyone to be seen and participate in helping a company succeed. The people that are often ‘invisible heroes’ doing the BAU processes and maintaining already great KPIs, and the agents for change that are focused at helping to fight the battles you’re trying to win. ZOKRI sees them all, and everyone belongs and participates.

One Size Can’t Fit All

It’s good to know what can go wrong so you might avoid what are easily avoidable issues. What happens often is teams and employees are told OKRs are going to be used to set goals. What they need to create ambitious and measurable goals that align with company and department goals. Oh, they will be used in appraisals as well.

This blanket ‘one-way’ for all approach does not allow for the variance in companies, teams, roles and responsibilities that exist. It does not recognize that measurement is easier for some and not others and does not recognize that a key performance lever you want to pull is ambition or stretch, and if you link OKRs tightly to appraisals and don’t recognize people as having different ways of contributing, then OKRs will be used in a sub-optimal way.

You can’t just apply OKR basics in an identical way across a company, or even across goals within a company. You need to allow your strategies, the planning period you’re in, and the goals themselves to dictate how you’re going to apply OKR.

Through conversation and collaboration, work out what a desirable future end-states can look like and how best to measure success. For some, that’s just doing the every-day well. For others it’s achieving the near impossible.

Sometimes your OKRs will be specific in what success looks like, like ‘financial goal’, but the path to get there presents a number of possible options. Other times, OKRs are more specific, like when you’re launching a product in a market where your plans are already well defined. The goal then becomes about hitting success metrics and executing.

It’s this blend that makes great companies. It’s knowing when and where to focus your efforts and be ambitious. This usually means putting more than you’d like in the ‘great idea but not doing now’ pile. It’s also about knowing when and where to keep what’s already working doing just that. OKRs and ZOKRI give you a platform to express and manage all of this.

• OKRs are goals, that through discussions, describe where improvements need to be made, and a desirable future end-state that is measurable, and much better than where you are now.
• Choosing to invest in OKRs results in accessing a number of organizational benefits that include:
  • Clarity on where high value improvements are to be found and a plan to capture them.
  • Greater alignment between teams and frequently the formation of new cross-functional goal focused teams.
  • Adoption of more agile ways of working like check-ins.
  • Behaviours like Transparency, accountability and ambition start to become habits and cultural.

• Being able to express your long-term plan as a Mission, Vision, Purpose Statement and your Strategy as key areas of focus or battlegrounds you must win, help to guide annual and quarterly OKRs.
• Different teams have different jobs to do, use different systems, follow different processes and measure different metrics. OKRs are flexible enough to work for everyone if you apply flexibility to how you recognize contributions.