Author | Mr.K Editor | Emma
Source | Technical Leadership (ID: jishulingdaoli)
In May last year, Google, which made good use of OKR, announced that it would reform the performance management method of Google employees-Google began to use a new performance evaluation process called GRAD. It is understood that this adjustment is mainly based on employees' dissatisfaction with Google's cumbersome and burdensome performance management system.
How serious is this dissatisfaction? A survey of Google employees found that only 53% of Google employees believed that the previous performance evaluation process was "worth the time", and another 47% of Google employees believed that the work involving performance management in the past Too cumbersome and a waste of time. This dissatisfaction, along with "uncompetitive salaries," ranks among the top two most dissatisfied aspects of the company among Google employees. In order to prevent brain drain, Google, which does not plan to increase the salary of all employees, had to choose to optimize the performance management system (enable GRAD) to alleviate employee grievances.
01
From OKR to "Chinese pastoral KPI"
Coincidentally, in February this year, Byte CEO Liang Rubo sent a letter to all employees internally, saying that the cycle of setting and reviewing performance goals would be adjusted from bimonthly to quarterly. Specifically, change bimonthly OKRs to quarterly OKRs. Liang Rubo explained that this is because most of Byte’s businesses are relatively mature and complex, and the bimonthly changes are not obvious, so the review period can be longer.
No matter what the official statement is, these two incidents have been interpreted by many managers in the workplace as OKR, known as the "artifact of involution", has begun to become exhausted and "weak". Looking back at the introduction of OKR to China, from the initial myth touting, it has been reduced to being dismissed by many big factory people. The main reason is that many pragmatic migrant workers, after trying to experience OKR, found that not only the curative effect is far inferior to the advertisement, but it also causes new problems. Only then will it continue to complain about it and label it "Chinese Pastoral KPI".
OKR (Objectives and Key Results) stands for "Objectives and Key Results", which is a set of management tools and methods for clarifying and tracking goals and their completion. It was hatched by Intel as a management tool, and then successfully applied by Google and carried forward. Later, it was introduced into the country by ByteDance and fully implemented, which caused a wave of imitation by other major companies. This is why after the two giants, Google and Byte, made the above statements, everyone would invariably think of OKR's "decline and fall out of favor".
As a proactive, coarse-grained performance management method, OKR sounds like it fits well with today's technology enterprise management model and logic, and has been endorsed by Zhang Yiming, Ren Zhengfei and other bigwigs, but in practice, this so-called " The model of "respecting employees' creativity and not aiming at assessment" has encountered many real challenges.
02
How do OKRs drag down companies?
1. Time-consuming alignment
Everyone knows that the O of OKR is Objective, which is the goal, and the ideal OKR setting is a combination of top-down and bottom-up. The connection of O between the superior and the subordinate should be an alignment relationship.
For example, at the end of the quarter, when you need to formulate the next quarter's OKR, you first need to ask the employee, from his perspective, what he thinks he should do the most next month, and what are the goals and key tasks in his mind . Then the team leader communicates with the employees again, from the perspective of leadership, from the goals of the entire team, as well as the cognition and understanding of this employee, and repeatedly sorts out and discusses with this employee, and then determines what should be done in the next quarter, and finally Form such an OKR. This process is the process of alignment.
It is easy to say, but it is not so easy to do it, but it is a very rigorous and time-consuming process. In the process of using OKR at many companies and team levels, they did not repeatedly sort out, consider, and discuss, but simply discussed in a mere form, or simply "take the leader's meaning as meaning" in order to avoid being called back again and again. Setting goals and plans is neither rigorous nor reasonable.
Moreover, the action of OKR alignment is not once and for all. Sometimes it is necessary to dynamically align with the team's "O", which is brain-consuming and time-consuming; what's more terrible is that if there is a "roll king" in the team, write OKR eloquently , The challenge is extremely high, and it will be more difficult for others to align. It may take a long time, but there is still no real alignment, only false alignment or sorry (alignment).
2. Double assessment with KPI
The original intention of setting OKR is to stimulate employees' innovation and vitality, and to encourage the challenge of higher goals, rather than requiring that all results must be achieved.
Take Google, which uses OKR the best, as an example: in Google, the best achievement rate of OKR is 60%-70%, and the average expected value of all OKRs is generally between 0.6 and 0.7 (1 point full mark). 100% complete; on the contrary, if the score is too high, or the goals are all completed, it means that OKR has a problem with the goal setting, just like the score is too low.
But in our actual operation, it is often not like this. When many companies formulate OKRs, they continue to encourage employees to set challenging goals, and they do not require that these goals must be completed. But when it comes to implementation, it often turns against the water and turns bad, turning "encourage you to complete" and steal the beam into "must complete". If you fail to complete it, it will become a "stain" for you. The superiors have long forgotten the OKR "commitment" of "no assessment, no linkage", and they use this "stain" to link with various performances.
For those workers who originally had KPI pressure, and now come to the OKR realization assessment, it has become a proper two mountains, double assessment.
3. Boss "OKR tyranny"
The application of OKR requires an implicit basic premise, that is, the boss must have a long-term vision and broad-minded thinking, and the enthusiasm of employees must be fully mobilized. Only in this way can OKR really come into play.
But in many companies in reality, regardless of the actual situation of the company's talent system, no matter whether there is a corporate culture that can be nested, the boss wants to "seek benefits" from OKR. The company has only been established for two years and has a total of 10 people. The boss dared to slap O as "the most influential xx company in the industry". The KR of the following employees can only be matched with the boss’s “ambition” and written as “open more than 3 personal self-media accounts and short video accounts within 2 months, promote the company’s products, and have a cumulative click volume of 100,000+”
The boss saw that it didn’t cost the company’s budget, and he was secretly happy, but he still encouraged the employees to take a step forward, "3 accounts are a bit small, there should be more than 5, and the number of clicks should be set at 200,000+..." The boss said, the employees Let’s change it accordingly. Originally, I was also performing with the boss, and I just wrote about things that I couldn’t do at all. Are you afraid of adding more, there is no need to make the boss angry.
In this way, a serious issue of OKR setting turned into the tyranny of the boss and the echo of the employees' smooth sailing. It really has no meaning except to let OKR recruit black people.
4. Apply OKR mechanically
The popularity of OKR in Google has made byte management even more powerful, but this does not mean that other companies can copy the operations of these big companies, whether it is suitable or not, they will apply it to their own companies.
For example, the OKR model has an important principle that must be followed, which is "timely communication". However, if the culture and atmosphere of some companies is a strong paternalistic style, and every leader thinks that he is superior and is only used to arranging his subordinates to work according to his own instructions, then the meaningful communication required by OKR is impossible. . In other words, in this company, the basis for implementing OKR does not exist at all.
If you don't consider the actual situation, if you rashly move OKR to your own company for implementation, not only will it not have positive effects, but it may bring bad negative effects.
5. OKRs are not sustainable
Some large foreign companies such as Google and Microsoft, when formulating OKRs, although they summarize every month and every quarter, they do not manage projects on a monthly or bimonthly basis. Generally, major adjustments are made every six months or a year. But the domestic environment is different. The biggest difference between OKR and KPI is the emphasis on rapid iteration. Various external variables may affect OKR. Therefore, the task formulation cycle is usually not a year or half a year, but two. Once a month, some even once a month. Brother K once saw a company that implemented a single-month OKR, and their OKR was adjusted 3 times in a quarter.
I also met a VP-level corporate executive who set very unrealistic "challenging" goals for the team at the beginning of the bimonthly, and called it ambitious and daring to break through. But near the end of the two months, the executive realized that the implementation situation was too far from the goal, and finally adjusted the OKR in a "low-key" way. Although OKR can be changed, this kind of unrigorous and unscientific behavior completely deviates from the original intention of establishing OKR, and it will also make team members resent and distrust the OKR system. In addition, frequently adjusting OKRs can easily lead to deviation from the final goal. Just like when driving, the driver should drive in a straight line, but the driver always deviates from the direction once every 10 kilometers. After a long time, he may completely deviate from the destination.
03
Which companies are not suitable for OKR?
The introduction of any management method needs to consider the actual situation of the enterprise. It needs not only the recognition of the new method in the concept, but also the support of the internal and external environment and conditions of the enterprise. If the conditions are not met, blind implementation will only increase the difficulty of management and weaken the implementation effect. For example, the following three types of companies are not suitable for OKR:
1. The industry itself is not changing quickly, just follow the steps
The market environment of some industries is relatively stable, the market is not changing rapidly, and the competitiveness of enterprises is relatively stable. At this time, OKR may not be the most suitable method of goal management. This is because OKRs require setting longer-term goals and using key results to measure achievement of the goals. If the industry environment is relatively stable, companies can use traditional target management methods, such as KPI and SMART target methods, to make the business run effectively without increasing management costs and complexity.
2. It is not suitable for quick trial and error industries, sometimes failure is fatal
The OKR method emphasizes quick trial and error and learning, which may be suitable for companies in the fields of technology and the Internet. However, it may not be applicable to industries such as medical care, finance, and aviation. Because in these industries, the product development process is long, the fault tolerance is low, and the space for trial and error is limited. If OKR is adopted, quality and risk control may be ignored in the pursuit of product innovation progress, resulting in irreparable losses. For these industries, failure can be fatal, which is definitely not something OKR can afford.
3. Enterprises have no basis for institutional change
Whether OKR can be implemented, there are two very important points, one is the corporate culture; the other is the talent system. A corporate culture with equal communication and active collaboration, and a talent team with strong self-motivation and pursuit of excellence are the necessary soil for implementing OKR. This is because OKR requires a high degree of transparency and cooperation within the enterprise, as well as mutual trust and support among employees. If the enterprise lacks these foundations and there are high "departmental walls" everywhere, OKR will not only not play a positive role, but may also lead to unnecessary conflicts and tensions.
Brother K once provided consulting services for a family business. Their second-generation helm always felt that the management system of their company was relatively simple and tried to introduce OKR. The answer I gave him was that it can be considered as a long-term consideration, but it is not recommended to implement it now. . Because they are traditional family businesses, they have the typical conservative culture and organizational structure of family businesses. From corporate culture to employee quality, they do not have the conditions to introduce OKR. In order to pursue the so-called modern management, the blind implementation may affect the normal operation of the enterprise.
04
Which companies are suitable for using OKR?
Reasonable use of OKR can indeed bring substantial help to some adapted companies. For employees, they can clearly understand the team's top priority; establish easy-to-understand specific goals and clear success or failure criteria; for companies, it can be better. Understand your progress accurately, optimize your strategy, and achieve rapid growth and team collaboration. Enterprises with the following characteristics are more suitable for implementing OKR:
1. Internet startups
For enterprises at this stage, the strategic goals are usually not particularly clear, and constant exploration is required to confirm the development strategy of the enterprise. OKR can associate goals with results, which not only strengthens the traction role of the company's goals, but also ensures the stability and correctness of the general direction through periodic review. At the same time, it can also focus superior resources on important matters and reduce valuable entrepreneurial efforts Internal consumption of resources. Bytedance is a good example. In the second year of its establishment, it introduced OKR and promoted its use by all employees, making their team even more powerful and more effective.
2. Innovative enterprises
Innovative companies usually need to quickly adapt to market and customer needs, and need continuous trial and error and learning. The OKR method emphasizes quick trial and error and learning, so it is suitable for this type of business.
By setting clear goals and key results, innovative companies can better understand their progress, optimize strategies, and quickly adapt to market changes. For example, for some Internet technology companies, OKR can help them quickly determine the development priorities of new products and new businesses, dynamically adjust resource allocation, and launch innovative products more efficiently.
3. Project start-up enterprises
Generally speaking, companies with a flatter internal structure are more suitable for using OKR, so that the goals of project management will not be too scattered due to layer-by-layer grading, increasing the difficulty of alignment, but will gradually converge due to continuous revision. By quantifying and disclosing the process, the project can be implemented and promoted more efficiently.
4. Enterprises in change
At this stage, enterprises often lay a certain foundation and begin to seek changes from stock to incremental. They need the overall cooperation of "up and down with the same desire" and rapid and profound changes to adapt to changes in the market environment. OKR can guide the team to think deeply, and help enterprises formulate transformation paths and promote strategic transformation and organizational reshaping when the goals are open and transparent. Google has introduced OKR in an all-round way, with only 40 employees. The implementation of OKR at this stage is related to Google's internal needs for transformation and transformation.
Is OKR an artifact that can help managers clear up stubborn ailments, or is it an involuntary artifact in the eyes of employees of large factories, another shackle on the body? Perhaps it is not decided by OKR itself, but depends on who is using it, whether it is suitable for it, and whether it will be used. This matter can neither catch up with fashion, nor should it be criticized irresponsibly. OKR is just a tool, and a rational, comprehensive, and objective view is the attitude that mature professionals and managers should have.
Profile
Introduction of the account owner: Mr. K , Huang Zhekeng, a well-known IT management expert in China, the founder of "Duwu Hill" consulting, and the founder of the technology media "Technical Leadership". The author of the best-selling books "The Way to Cultivate a Technician" and "The Top of Technology Management". He once served as the technical VP of Yiyao.com, the technical director of Yihaodian, and the CTO of Haier's agricultural e-commerce. Share individual growth, team management, enterprise digital transformation, and technology reviews.
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