As an HR professional within your company, you play a vital part in setting and achieving organizational goals. HR departments are now more and more involved in the process of organizational development. That includes creating and helping execute organizational goals.
Each organization out there uses some system to set and track goals. Of course, that varies by size, industry, and nature of the company. Regardless, it is becoming more common for HR’s responsibilities to include establishing clarity and alignment of goals company-wide.
That means setting up a solid goal management process in place that helps the establishment meet its ambitious targets as well as looking after the professional and career development of each individual.
That is no easy task. For years, teams have been using different types of goal setting techniques to meet objectives. While that works to a certain level, successful goal management now relates to setting company-wide goals and aligning teams to work collectively towards achieving those. This is how the OKRs framework was born.
Since the mid-20th century, different goal management techniques have been implemented in organizations with the intent to create alignment and reach targets within a given time frame. First came the MBOs (Management by Objectives), then the popular SMART goals gained traction alongside the well-known KPIs. OKR was developed at Intel in the early 1970s, gaining broad attention when they were adopted at Google. Some of Google’s success has been attributed to this framework that sets ambitious goals and tracks progress accordingly.
OKR stands for “Objectives and Key Results.” It is essentially a goal-setting and management framework that is used by organizations worldwide to successfully meet audacious objectives.
When using this framework, objectives are supposed to be more aspirational and qualitative, while the results are measurable, time-bound and specific. “Key Results” are outcomes you’re after, not a to-do list.
What makes OKR very different and unique compared to all other goal management techniques is that OKRs are created with the intention to be used organization-wide drive alignment. They should be tied to the company’s mission and vision and should be created with a top-down direction and bottom-up feedback approach. Making them visible to everybody, and making sure that the company OKRs are broken down to team OKRs, is what distinguishes this framework from the others and promotes alignment up and down the organization.
Creating good OKRs is an art. I’ll explain how you can do that in the next section. But before we get into that, it’s important to understand why OKRs can be transformational for your organization and what benefits they offer.
OKRs are stretch goals and are supposed to make you feel at least a little bit uncomfortable. If you imagine that meeting your objective is actually a 120% success rate, then getting 100% of your key results is already a massive success. OKRs are not about fully achieving every objective, every time. They’re about progress.
The main idea of OKRs is to push teams and individuals to think bigger and aim higher. Achieving all objectives on a regular basis simply means that your objectives are not ambitious enough.
The basic formula for creating good OKRs is “I will < > as measured by < >.”
While putting your OKRs together, you need to answer the following questions for yourself and your team:
There are plenty of resources out there that dig deeper into the topic of OKR – what you can do to make sure OKRs are set up correctly and how to make use of them to transform your organization. A good starting point is the “Ultimate Guide to OKRs.”
Your organization is already setting and managing goals in some way. A framework like OKR helps you collect all of that effort under one umbrella and guide teams to implement a top-down direction and bottom-up feedback strategy.
