OKR: The Definitive Guide
What is OKR?
OKR (Objective & Key Results) is a popular leadership process for setting, communicating and tracking goals and results in organisations. The concept was invented at the Intel Corporation and spread to other Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Zynga, Spotify, Airbnb, Twitter and LinkedIn.
OKRs are meant to set strategy and goals over a specified amount of time for an organisation and teams. Their purpose is to ensure everyone is going in the same direction, with clear priorities and in a constant pace. OKRs are generally implemented in an special OKR software.
Structure of OKR
As the name implies, OKR has two components, the Objective and the Key Results:
Objectives are what you want to accomplish. Objectives should be short, inspirational and engaging. An Objective should motivate and challenge the team.
Key Results explain how you’ll get there. Are a set of metrics that measure your progress towards the Objective. For each Objective, you should have a set of 3–5 Key Results.
Here’s an example of OKR:
Objective:
Build a Great Corporate Culture
Key Results:
- Launch an closed loop feedback process for everyone
- Achieve a weekly Employee Performance of 8+
- Increase internal Net Promoter Score from 5 to 7
- Celebrate “small wins” and any type of progress every single week
Benefits of OKR
OKR help companies and businesses:
- Align goals throughout the organisation, teams and employees.
- Establish a disciplined goal setting process for everyone.
- Clarify expectations for employees, ensuring they’re working on the right things.
- Set indicators for track and measuring progress and success.
- Enable better communication and meaningful conversations through transparency.
How to use OKR?
Adopting OKR is a journey, not an event. As in company cultural transformation, change does not happen overnight. But, with the help of specialised OKR software, it is possible to modify the organisation’s dynamics in a few weeks, aligning and engaging the team.
In addition, there is not a single was to use OKRs, each company or team can adapt and tweak them, creating different versions of them as needed. However there are some best practices:
- OKR takes an agile approach, typically with short quarterly goal cycles.
- Objectives should be simple, short and easy to memorise. And don’t make them boring!
- Focus on 2–5 objectives at a time, with 3–5 key results for each objective.
- At least 50% of the OKRs should be set bottom-up in agreement with the managers.
- Are public by default to the company, so everyone can access for increased transparency.
- OKRs progress should be updated frequently — we recommend weekly.
Need an online OKR tool? Try Steer, the simplest yet powerful goal-setting platform, for free.
