Setting OKRs

Now that you’ve put the pieces in place, you’re going to need to define proper leadership and establish the methods for achieving your goals as a company.

Read on

What are OKRs?

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) are a goal-setting methodology that makes personal and team goals transparent for the whole organization while providing guidance for individual team-members. OKRs were first used by Intel and popularized by Google. Many high-growth companies use OKRs.

Why are OKRs vital to your business?

  • OKRs motivate employees and management

  • OKRs inspire autonomy in decision-making

  • OKRs enable you to understand how each individual's contributions are holding up

OKRs create a transparent goal system for the whole company. Each key result must be measurable, meaning it can be scored at the end of a business period - usually a quarter. This creates a personal compass for stakeholders and helps with task prioritization. Above all, it makes targets crystal clear for everyone in the company.

By ensuring that everyone understands and agrees with their OKRs, you can offer employees a lot of autonomy. Each individual can measure new schemes based on how well they achieve OKRs and deprioritize those that do not, and all with minimal executive intervention.

What makes good OKRs

  • A maximum of five objectives, though the sweet spot is three

  • A maximum five key results per objective

  • Easily measurable by stakeholders

  • Capable of being defined from your direct reports (up to 60%)

  • Aligned with broader company strategy

How to communicate OKRs to your company

If you are just starting out with OKRs, first pick a small group of people (less than ten) to test them out on. Make the test public to the rest of the company so they know what's coming. If you suddenly impose an unfamiliar OKR system on the whole organization you will probably fail. It’s better to roll out the system gradually, communicating the methodology and benefits along the way through company-wide presentations.