Organizational or Company wide OKRs
Company-wide OKRs provide transparency to the company’s priorities, which then transfers into clarity for each individual team. This can help align teams throughout your organization and also ensures that all departments are working towards a common goal.
That might seem simple, but according to Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, “Some people are working on the wrong things at any given point in time. The challenge is knowing which ones.” Even managers and executives at the top can’t focus on their company’s goals – only 33% of managers know what their company’s top 3 priorities are, according to a survey conducted by the MIT Sloan School of Management and the London Business School. When departmental goals and individual goals don’t match, organizational energies can easily get dissipated into non-relevant activities.
This is where company-wide OKRs come to the rescue by helping the entire organization committed to the same big-picture objectives. These OKRs cascades down through departments, teams, and individuals resulting in increased employee engagement.
Organisational OKRs provide a direction for the company as a whole, empowering teams and employees to figure out the best way to accomplish them.
Example: Company-wide OKRs
source: “Measure What Matters by John Doerr”
Source: Coursera Inc
Team Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Detailing down (or cascading down) a company-wide OKR naturally leads to sub-objectives that can be owned by teams or departments. For example, the company-wide OKR ‘Delight customers’ could include a sub-objective ‘Measure and Monitor customer satisfaction that can be owned by the Customer Success team. Another way Team OKRs can be defined is by prioritizing what team-level goals the team wants to accomplish in a given period. In either case, creating an alignment between the team goals and the company-wide goals establishes a clear logic and purpose for the team as a whole.
Example: Marketing OKR
Individual Objectives and Key Results
Further cascading down Team Objectives results in sub Objectives that can be owned by individuals. Arriving at Individual OKRs is a great outcome as it gives clarity to individuals on the role they play in achieving the larger goals and how their contributions make an impact. Additionally, Individual OKRs can also capture the professional development goals of the employees. A healthy mix of OKRs that directly aid their team and OKRs that focus on individual development focuses individuals on what matters.
Irrespective of the type of goals you are trying to accomplish – personal, professional, or organizational, working on them within the perspective of Objectives and Key Results is going to make the process more practical and achievable because OKRs let you focus on what matters the most and pave the path for goal execution. In addition to this, organizational OKRs bring alignment between teams and the organization, laying the foundation for High-performance culture.
To learn more about how OKRs methodology can benefit your organization and how you can transition your team to OKR methodology seamlessly, schedule a call today.
