Attacking OKRs.
What is an OKR and why is it important to Operations?
An OKR standards for an ‘objective’ and ‘key result.’ These three letters have fundamentally changed the way our team operates and helped on our journey to becoming a high performing group. If you just googled “Is an OKR different than a goal?” you’d probably find ten articles from ten smart Stanford grads telling you why they are nothing alike. The honest answer, they’re nearly the same thing. And that’s okay.
What value does an OKR bring?
An OKR rallies a team against a common company objective, which is not as easy as you’d think. An OKR breaks it down to a very tangible, functional result that enables an employee or team to directly align. The number one issue in our employee engagement survey a few years back was that our team did not feel connected to the company strategy. Since we have implemented OKRs, this has completely changed. An OKR aligns an employee (maybe a shareholder) to a strategic goal. This is SO important for day to day operations, as many people live in contributing roles and are on a constant treadmill of tasks. Giving the most junior folks at a company transparent access to strategic endeavors builds synergy.
So how does an OKR work in practice?
An objective is set at the highest level of the company. It is generally broad and strategic. For example, the CEO may set out a company objective to “be more customer centric.” This then is followed by a key result, which is directly tied to that objective in a measurable manner.
An example of a KR against this objective is: “First line of customer response to an incident is in < 30 seconds from ticket submission in at least 98% of all incidents.” It is important that the KR is set up as a metric that needs to be achieved, not a task that needs to be executed. A bad KR against this objective would be: “Execute a failure mode effect analysis against our customer support process.” This is a task that may be executed to achieve the metric you want to, not necessarily a result. Don’t get too prescriptive with KRs.
How do you lift off an OKR program?
Nothing fancy here (excel-based OKRs work just great to start).
It must (I repeat, it must) start top-down perspective. You need the most senior leadership bought in and promoting the idea for this to work. After all, it is 100% predicated on your OKRs enabling achievement against a greater company strategy.
If you start bottom up with OKRs, you will fail (guaranteed).
I would not invest in any sort of fancy OKR tool at first (there are many out there). Instead, focus on the cultural shift and gaining buy in on the process.
It’s relatively simple to lift off in an excel-based tool, but be aware this does not scale well. You will absolutely hit a point of diminishing return once the program catches steam organizationally. It will become too big for many teams to handle in one file, version control becomes an issue and updates are clunky. At that point, you’ll want to move it out of excel and into a big boy tool.
How to align with your manager?
Make sure that your manager’s OKRs are well documented before setting your team’s. By now, you’ll know that a theme of mine is making your boss successful through aligning with his or her goals. This is an awesome excuse to do that.
Assuming your manager’s OKRs are completed, distill this into your own version with your team. You can steal (word for word) some of your manager’s Objectives or Key Results, but I also encourage you to rewrite yours to make sense for your function and team. Simplicity here is key.
If you so choose, you can even put in a column that says “tied to” and drag in your Manager’s OKRs so that you know how they layer up. This may also be good for your people to see.
How to involve your team?
This is where it gets fun. I tested an approach this past year where I involved literally everyone in my group of 15 in achieving our KRs. Many folks became “drivers” of the initiative, some were defined “contributors.” A driver is on the hook for achieving the results each quarter, a contributor helps them get there. This became part of everyone’s annual performance plans. Side note, I would recommend doing quarterly sprints and changing KRs each quarter, vs. creating only annual ones.
This approach forced them out of their comfort zone and even stretched them beyond where they perceived their capabilities were. Most importantly it gave them ownership over the strategy we had set out as company. They were all the sudden shareholders in something special. At the beginning, it was clear they viewed OKRs as an extracurricular task. At the end of the year, everyone was enthusiastic about their participation in the endeavor and they had no desire to go back to ‘just their day job.’
We reported out our progress every two weeks, which started as a giant Zoom meeting where we went top to bottom with each driver reporting on statuses in the excel file. Although this was effective, it was time consuming. Pretty quickly, I realized that people were tuning out the colleague’s status reports and there was more idling on the call than actual conversation.
Slack had just released a video feature that I liken to Twitter. It allows any user to record a < three minute video and post to a dedicated Slack channel and enabled quick, concise content bursts. So I pivoted and we tested a new approach. Every other week during the same hour (it was kept on everyone’s calendar), all drivers would record an update for their KR. They’d discuss their progress, any blockers and next steps to close the KR. I would respond to each in a thread and we’d dialogue virtually. This kept the ball rolling but did not waste an hour of everyone’s time.
What results did we achieve?
As mentioned, OKRs are an amazing accelerant to getting your people closer to company and functional strategy. Our employee engagement results went up notably year over year and I have no doubt that this was a major reason why. OKRs are not meant to be 100% completed. As a manager, set stretch KRs and watch your team exceed your (and their) expectations. Track things diligently then look back at the year in review. Acknowledge how far you’ve come with your group and let them get excited about it. At the end of 2021 we achieved about 68% of our KRs. This was okay by me, as I knew many would blend into the next year’s strategy and we simply ran out of time. Most importantly, our team now knows where we’re going and knows how we can get there.
