Talk about OKR

What exactly is OKR, and what precautions should be taken when using OKR. Don't use it easily if you haven't figured out these things.

OKR was introduced to China in 2013. It was mainly implemented by some start-ups with a background in Silicon Valley. Now, OKR is gradually being sought after by IT, Internet, and high-tech companies, and it has become popular. Knowing that they all succeeded in implementing OKR within the enterprise.

Know OKR correctly

Encyclopedia definition, OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a set of management tools and methods for clarifying and tracking goals and their achievements. In fact, I am more inclined to the other given by Paul R. Niven and Ben Lamorte A definition:

OKR is a set of rigorous thinking frameworks and continuous disciplinary requirements, designed to ensure that employees work closely together and focus their energy on measurable contributions that can promote organizational growth.

According to this definition, the following points can be made clear:

1. Strict thinking framework: OKR does not simply track the results of execution every cycle, but to go beyond the numbers themselves and think about what these numbers mean to you and your organization.
2. Continuous disciplinary requirements: OKR represents a time and energy commitment.
3. Ensuring close collaboration between employees: OKR's purpose is to promote the collaboration of employee teams and align with the organization's goals, not the performance evaluation of employees.
4. Focus on energy: OKR is used to identify the most critical business goals, rather than a simple list of to-do items.
5. Measurable contribution: to ensure that the final result can be measured, rather than subjective evaluation.
6. Promote organizational growth: The ultimate criterion for judging the success of OKR implementation is to see whether it promotes organizational growth.

In fact, OKR is not new. It is a product of a series of frameworks, methods and philosophy in the development of goal management. Peter Drucker put forward the idea of ​​MBO in the 1960s and SMART goals in the 1980s And KPI became popular, in 1999 John Doerr introduced OKR to Google.

Ready to start OKR

The most difficult part of implementing OKR in an organization or company is the preparatory link. Blind implementation will only lead to OKR flowing into the form, only the form, not the gods, the final effect is actually just another form of KPI However, it cannot bring any growth to organizations, companies and individuals. So I suggest that before preparing to implement OKR, think about the following questions.

Why implement OKR

Before you start to implement OKR, you may wish to ask yourself this question: Why should you implement OKR? Can't answer this question very well, everything done later is meaningless. If the answer is just "because Google, Intel is in use", "want to make the company better" and other meaningless empty answers, then it is better to put it on hold temporarily until you think about the problem clearly, and let all the company understand why Implement OKR.

At which level to implement OKR

Generally speaking, there are three levels of implementation of OKR: company level, department level, and individual level, but this does not mean that three levels must be implemented together from the beginning. A better approach is to select a level, from point to face, gradually promote, and finally implement OKR for all staff.

According to the company's specific business situation, there are two ways:

• The first is vertical implementation. At the beginning, only company-level OKR was implemented. After successful implementation of the senior management, it was promoted to the department level, and finally to the individual level;
• The second is horizontal implementation. Select a business unit or department, and implement company, department, and individual-level OKR implementation in the business unit, and finally promote it throughout the company.

Implementation of OKR cycle

Before starting OKR, you need to consider how long to implement it. The recommended practice is quarterly, but this is not absolute. It can also be implemented on a monthly basis according to the company ’s business situation. For cycles. Too long a period leads to unreasonable goal setting; if the period is too short, the formulation of key results becomes a to-do item that cannot focus on the goal. It is recommended to choose a period between the quarter and the month as the company's implementation of OKR.

Unified understanding of OKR

The last and most important point is whether all people involved in the implementation of OKR have a unified understanding of OKR? Do not implement OKR before reaching a consensus, otherwise in the implementation process, due to deviations in understanding, the final OKR implementation will also be biased. The recommended way is to carry out a unified understanding through the OKR publicity before the start. At the publicity meeting, it is necessary to clearly answer the three questions mentioned above, namely: why to implement OKR, at what level to implement OKR, and the cycle of implementing OKR.

Develop an effective OKR

Next, I will introduce in detail how to formulate an effective OKR, first of all, explain O (target) and KR (key result) :

• Goals: Goals answer the question "What do we want to do?" It is qualitative. Good goals should be time-bound, concise and straightforward statements that are inspiring and inspire team resonance.
• Key results: The key results answer the question "How do we know if we have met the goal?" The question is quantitative. The most challenging part of designing KR is how to translate the qualitative part of the goal into a quantitative digital representation.

Now let's look at an example of OKR from Uber:

In this example, the target's time limit requirement is limited by the OKR cycle. The target is concise (only 7 words), qualitative (no numbers appear), time limit requirement (can be completed within this quarter), and inspiring ( Recruit more drivers). The key result needs to accurately answer the question "what is more" in the target. What is determined here is "the driver base of all regions is increased by 20%" and "the average working hours of drivers in all active regions is increased to 90 hours per week" even if Reached the goal of "recruiting more drivers".

Effective OKR formulation must meet the SMART principle:

1. Specific : clarity, the goal must be clear, not ambiguous or ambiguous, such as "optimizing customer service awareness" is not a clear goal.
2. Measurable : Measurable , the key results must be measurable, and the methods that can be used for measurement are: baseline method, milestone method, positive measurement method, negative measurement method, etc., such as "user retention time increased from 60 minutes to 80 minutes" Is a measurable key result.
3. Attainable : Achievable , OKR encourages certain ambitions when setting goals, but also considers achievable, and can not set a meaningless goal that cannot be achieved.
4. Relevant : Relevance, company-level goals should be aligned with the company's strategy, department-level goals should be aligned with the company's goals, personal goals should be aligned with the department's goals, so as to ensure the focus of all staff goals.
5. Time-bound : There is no time limit, and the setting of the target loses its meaning. In the implementation of OKR, the time limit is reflected in the setting of the period.

Efficient implementation of OKR

When formulating OKR, we proposed that an effective OKR must meet the SMART principle. Now let's take a look at the complete OKR implementation process. This process can also be simply summarized as CRAFT:

1. Create : Create and draft 4 challenging key results for 1-3 goals in a small team operation.
2. Refine : Refine, submit the OKR draft to the entire team, and further refine and refine the OKR through the review meeting.
3. Align : Align, identify the dependencies between targets, jointly define KR, need to discuss face-to-face with other teams, and agree on the dependencies.
4. Finalize : Finalize the final OKR.
5. Transmit : Release, formally publicize OKR by organizing a full staff meeting, transparent and open to everyone, let everyone know what we should focus on in this cycle.

After the OKR is formulated, it is not a shelving, but it requires regular progress follow-up and evaluation. There are three key nodes in the process that need to be paid attention to:

1. Weekly meetings: Weekly meetings assess the progress of this week ’s goals and the risk status of key results.
2. Mid-quarter review: To ensure that the target is completed at the end of the quarter, it is recommended to review and evaluate the progress of the target in the mid-quarter so as to find possible risks and solutions this morning.
3. End-of-quarter assessment: At the end of the quarter ’s assessment meeting, it is necessary to review the completion of the quarterly goal and the final score. The best score should be around 7 points. At this assessment meeting, two questions need to be answered: "To what extent" and "How to achieve this extent."

If a worker wants to do his job well, he must first sharpen his weapon

With a basic understanding of OKR, let's take a look at what tools can assist enterprises to implement OKR:

1. Whiteboard: The quarterly goals and key results are recorded on the whiteboard. The disadvantage is that the historical records are not easy to keep, and the goal scoring results cannot be automatically summarized.
2. Excel: Use Excel to record quarterly goals and key results. The disadvantage is that it is inconvenient to share between team members and the historical version of Excel needs to be maintained.
3. Professional OKR software, using online SAAS software to achieve OKR management.

Meet OKR again

Starting from understanding OKR, we introduced the preparations before implementing OKR in turn, how to formulate an effective OKR, a complete OKR implementation process and precautions, and select the appropriate tools to assist the implementation of OKR. We now look back and rethink a question: What is the relationship between OKR and the company's strategy and vision? What is the relationship between OKR and tasks?

One of OKR ’s greatest strengths is its emphasis on short-term execution, so OKR ’s setting is not a strategy, not a mission and a vision, but it must be set within the company ’s mission and vision framework to be consistent with the company ’s strategy. Will play a positive role in the organization. At the same time, the setting of OKR cannot be a specific action. After setting goals and key results, in order to achieve this goal, we need to formulate specific action plans. These action plans are to-do items or tasks.

1. Mission: What is the meaning of our existence?
2. Vision: outline the future blueprint with words
3. Strategy: Priorities and priorities
4. Goal: Focus on what has been achieved recently
5. Key result: How to know how much we are moving towards our goal
6. Task: Decompose key results into specific actions and tasks

Finally, it needs to be emphasized again that OKR solves the problem of focusing on corporate goals, driving employee goals to align with organizational goals, and finally turning goals into actions.