Measure What Matters With OKRs in Your Business

OKRs are a great way to measure what matters in your business. They help you track and prioritize the most important tasks to achieve goals faster than ever before. This article will provide tips on creating effective OKRs for your team: what they should look like, how often they should be used, and, more importantly—how NOT to use them!

What are OKRs?

OKRs are a framework for setting goals and measuring progress that Google has popularised. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results.

Objectives are the goals you want to achieve, while key results are specific, measurable ways in which you’ll achieve your objectives. For example: “I want my team to improve their coding skills” is an objective; “Team members will learn three new coding languages by the end of this quarter” is a key result that helps ensure the objective will be met. In addition to defining what you want to accomplish, OKRs also help you decide how much time it should take or how much money or effort it should cost.

Why should you use OKRs?

• OKRs are a simple way to measure what matters.
• They’re a good way to align teams and ensure everyone is focused on the right things.
• OKRs help you focus on what’s important and avoid getting distracted by things that don’t matter as much.

Key differences between a vision and an objective.

A vision is a broad, aspirational statement. It’s what you want your business to be and do in the future. An objective is a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goal that leads towards that vision.

An objective is the ‘what’ of the business: it’s what you do daily. It’s also how you’ll get there and grow your market share or profitability by 25% in 2019? And most importantly, why: why does this matter?

Let’s look at an example from Uber in 2017 when they were struggling with customer experience issues – specifically, human drivers cancelling rides after accepting them because they didn’t want to go where they were going (or worse – because they wanted more cash). When their CEO Travis Kalanick made his annual OKR presentation, he focused not just on customer experience but also on customer trustworthiness – something that was integral to Uber’s brand image as well as its future growth plans for both customers and drivers alike.

How to create great OKR examples

At its heart, creating good objectives is all about using SMART as a framework. It’s easy to remember and can help you focus on what matters.

A few examples of this include:

• Using examples from other companies. You can find these in books like OKRs for Dummies or on Google by searching the term “OKR examples”.
• Create your own unique version of the template above. This could be done by modifying existing templates or just drawing up your own completely new version! If you decide to take this route, make sure that it still follows the principles above to serve its purpose as an effective tool for measuring progress over time.

The best practices for OKR creation.

The best practices for creating great OKRs include:

• Make them SMART. If you’re unfamiliar with the acronym SMART, it stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. When writing your goals, think about how you can make each of these attributes true to get the most out of this process.
• Anyone who reads them should be easy to understand—including your employees and colleagues across departments. This is especially important when multiple teams work together on an initiative; if one person doesn’t understand what they’re contributing towards or why they’re doing it, things will go awry pretty quickly!
• Review at least once per quarter and revise as needed based on feedback from stakeholders (internal/external). The review process ensures that everyone stays accountable over time while also ensuring that our plans match up with reality before moving forward with new initiatives each quarter – this makes it easier than ever before for managers who want insights into how their team performed last year without having any extra workload during busy seasons like Q4 ahead!

How to avoid the classic OKR mistakes.

When you’re getting started with OKRs, it’s easy to make a lot of mistakes. The most common ones are:

• Vague goals like “increase revenue” or “be more efficient.” These are vague and unspecific, which means they’ll be hard to measure.
• Goals that are too ambitious (and therefore harder to achieve). For example, if you set an OKR goal of growing revenue by 50%, how will you know whether your team has achieved their goal? It’s best if each person on the team has his or her own OKR; then, at least there is some quantifiable way for you as a manager or executive leadership team member to see whether or not they’ve met their individual objectives.
• Goals are too easy or difficult for people without good skills in those areas. For example, if someone who isn’t very good at marketing sets an OKR goal around increasing traffic from organic search results pages by at least 20% over last year’s numbers… well…that might not happen! Instead, perhaps consider breaking down this goal into several smaller pieces so that it doesn’t feel overwhelming but still keeps everyone focused on what needs to do next quarter versus just saying, “grow our SEO traffic!”

Using the right objectives and key results can help your business grow.

OKRs are a simple way to measure what matters in your business. They help you focus on the most important goals and make better decisions, which helps you get better results. And by tracking progress toward those objectives and key results, you’ll find that you can get more done faster than ever before.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a way to make your business more successful, try setting up an OKR system. It’s easy to set up and use. And when done correctly, it can help your team be more productive and focused on what matters most.

If your teams struggle to align with strategy, connect them to business outcomes that matter and make your goal-setting process more transparent through OKRs.

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