The term OKR stands for Objective and Key Results. It is a framework that helps organizations set goals, measure and track their outcomes. The OKR framework helps organizations reach goals in days or weeks instead of months.
OKRs help business organizations set achievable, measurable, goals and reach the targets. It helps them focus on what is at hand and use all the resources to get quick and accurate outcomes. An organization can define objectives for each person, team, or the entire company and track the outcomes. It aligns the teams’ goals with the managers’ goals so that they are on the same page.
Unlike status reporting tools that only let the organization know about the outcomes, results, or targets reached, Objectives and Key Results help create, set, measure, track, reach, and report goals.
Components of OKR
Objectives:
This can be termed as an alternative for a goal. One sets realistic goals. The target, time or deadline, and scale are all included in this. For best results, objectives should be short, engaging, and inspiring to the person. It should motivate the team to work towards achieving the goal.
Key Results:
Key results are mainly numbers or metrics that help an organization understand to what extent the tasks or completed. It also tells where the work is lagging in and ahead of the prescribed timeline. Depending on the metrics, the organization can make modifications or assign tasks in order to fit them in the given timeframe.
An ideal set of key results for each objective can fall in the range of two and five so that the employees can remember them easily.
What Are The Benefits Of Objectives And Key Results?
Short Goals
Instead of setting long term goals, OKR sets short term goals according to the requirement which helps the team or individual work enthusiastically towards them which is directly proportional to the level of productivity. By setting agile goals, a company can easily adapt to changes and respond at a quicker rate.
Simple and Easy to Understand
Objectives and key results are simple, straight forward and self-explanatory. The goals that take months to achieve can be achieved in days. As a result, the employees work more towards completing the task at hand rather than investing their resources in setting them.
Transparency
This is one of the main focus factors as each person’s progress is trackable. All the assignments are accessible by everyone else, and the managers can easily keep track of what is happening. Additionally, maintaining such a level of transparency motivates the employees to work better since nobody likes to fail.
Organized Manner
More often than not, an organization can incline towards completing assignments in an unorganized manner which only delays the goals. To avoid such situations, OKRs help everyone stay in track, prioritize their goals, and work towards them.
The entire organization stays aligned in the right path which contributes towards their growth.
Other goals include an increased level of productivity of each person, focus on important tasks, clear communication, meet the expectations, and accountability.
The organization can save a lot of time in conducting meetings or briefings to discuss the results or outcomes as OKR clearly understandably shows each activity. To conclude, OKRs are both quantity and quality oriented with the Objectives focusing on the quality and the key results concentrate on the quantity in the form of numbers and metrics.
They not only add value to an organization but also increase the overall productivity, manner or working, and accountability of everyone in the organization. OKRs also offer flexibility which can be utilized to make changes at any time and update their goals, in case required.