Measure What Matters!!

Having goals gives everyday tasks more meaning and clarifies the reasoning behind company decisions.

Goals are an important part of running a successful business. They can give businesses a clear focus, motivate employees and set targets for the business to work towards. Setting goals ensures employees are working toward a shared vision and can help keep everyone accountable. They can also provide businesses a set of criteria to see if the business is succeeding.

Without a true north, the pieces of a business may work at odds with each other. Business leaders will not know how to prioritize their resources, and individual employees may struggle to use their time effectively. To achieve success with organization’s most ambitious goals, we need each of our departments and the teams within them all pulling in the same direction. 

Traditional Goal Setting

In traditional goal setting, goals set by top managers flow down through the organization and become sub goals for each organizational area. The goals passed down to each succeeding level guide individual employees as they work to achieve those assigned goals.

As the goals travel down the hierarchy, they become more specific and tactical, whereas the goals at the top are more visionary.

 Issue with the traditional goal setting

An effective goal setting process is a critical step in building the foundational skills of leadership in the employees. However, many organizations are having a hard time finding a method that aligns with their organizational needs. 

The traditional goal-setting method is largely managed through top-down corporate hierarchy and is often too slow to adjust to the rapid strategy pivots needed in an agile economy and workforce. Goals are often not adjusted as reality confronts strategy.

Sometimes, the more specific goals can lack unity with the overarching goals of the business, which can cause a disconnect in the operations of the company. In addition, since employees do not have a say in their objectives, they may not be motivated to achieve those goals. Without a sense of ownership, workers feel disengaged and unmotivated. Another problem is that goals are often vague. They leave employees without actionable steps and gives managers no clear way to measure progress.

Once goals are in place, many traditional methods only check back in at the end of their scheduled completion. Waiting once (or twice) a year, is not going to give your employees the direction and support they need to achieve their goals. Without regular conversations about goals, there is little to no insight for managers or senior leaders to understand how the company is executing on their strategy.

OKRs

Good ideas with great execution are how you make magic. And that’s where OKRs come in. A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses on the same important issues throughout the organization.

OKRs surface any organization's most important work, focusing effort, fostering communication, and building employee performance and retention.

An Objective is a concrete, action-oriented thing that needs to be achieved. Key Results are the specific, measurable, and verifiable steps that will meet the objective.

In larger organizations, it is common to find several people unwittingly working on the same thing. By clearing a line of sight to everyone’s objectives, OKR exposes redundant efforts and save time and money.

The OKRs system is built on four “superpowers”.

The first is focusing on the handful of initiatives that can make a real difference and deferring the less important ones; this allows leaders to commit to those choices and makes for a successful organization.

The second is the ability to align and connect. OKR transparency means that not only are everyone's goals openly shared, but individuals also link their objectives to the company's overall game plan, and coordinate with other teams.

The third OKR system superpower is that they can be tracked. OKRs are driven by data, with periodic check-ins, objective grading, and continuous reassessment. They can be revised as circumstances dictate.

The final OKR superpower is the system's ability to motivate people to excel by doing more than they had thought possible. Setting conservative goals stymies innovation; setting ambitious 'stretch' goals encourages people to go outside their comfort zones.

OKRs help create goals that make employees feel more aligned with the organization, incorporate their personal interests, and visualize how they are making a difference, and can be tracked and measured throughout the year.

To summarize, the OKR model is a powerful way to express the goals of any company. It can help achieve mission and vision, aid in employee engagement, and bring to the surface the top priorities of a company.