OKRs: The best way to reach goals
Everything was written down in a notebook, (or whatever he had in front of him) and each task he had, he started it, but he did not finish it. What's more, blogger Tim Urban can perfectly explain what happened to me in this Ted talk:
In short: In my mind there is a little monkey that scatters and I have to tell him every time: “ Hey! Let's go back to what we were working on, okay? " (Hahaha!)
I don't know if the same thing has happened to you, especially now that most of us are working from home, reaching our goals is being a challenge.
Today I want to share with you one of the methodologies par excellence that large companies are implementing and it helps us to be 100% aligned and fulfill each task successfully.
They are called OKRs.
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What are OKRs and what are they for? They were born in 1971 and were created at Intel by one of its co-founders, Andy Grove; who was always in search of innovative management. He said that:
They come from the acronym in English " Objectives and Key Results ". It is a work methodology that serves to align the actions and efforts of an entire team towards common objectives, in order to achieve key results. By implementing OKRs you get many benefits, such as: • You improve communication in your team, • you optimize your internal processes, • everyone on your team will know what they are looking for and how they will implement each task, • you increase your personal productivity and that of your department, • you get results that will grow your business, • and much more… On a personal basis, the OKRs have allowed me to have a very clear starting point and focus on the tasks to be carried out , always relying on the team that knows in detail what the objectives to be achieved are. Breaking myths about OKRs At Efficy we began to implement OKRs in 2019, at Tomi's initiative. Let's find out what he has to say about it: ————————————————————————————————————————- Just to be sure to give my explanation, here are some of the reasons given today for not doing OKRs: 1. "OKRs cannot be done with more than 9 people": Amazon, Google, Adobe, Dropbox, Asana, Intel, Airbnb, Efficy, and more, work with OKRs . Okrs can (and should) be done individually, in small or large teams or even at the C-Level to an entire company. Of course, it does not depend on the size. For example: in our case, Mae, David and I could continue to do what we do at our level, and for a meeting of the whole team, we share the key results of the actions that we are implementing. So the specificity goes up a notch, but we still have the visibility and the shared goal. As you can see, this could go up to level C.
OKRs are based on the main objective of the organization 2. "It's a follow-up meeting": Yes, it's a follow-up meeting, but on steroids (hehehe!). It could be said that "steroids" are the visibility of the rest of the team (or the company), and knowing the impact of your actions on the objectives of your department. (to be corrected) 3. «It is the same as we do in the 1on1»: The 1on1s are great, I really like them, but the purpose of a 1on1 is different. A 1on1 is so the person can tell the manager what they need. But if you do 1on1 like OKRs, just with your manager, you lose track on steroids. 4. "They are not flexible": OKRs are flexible. You can change the actions (even the key results). That being said, it is best if you put OKRs at the beginning of a quarter, and work to get it. Here you are creating a strategy, but with flexibility. I believe that meetings are already invented and do not have to be reinvented. Currently, the most used meetings are the 1on1, the daily, the retrospectives, the OKRs and the siteoffs. These are standard and work very well for many companies. In our case, we carry out the 1on1 and OKrs. ————————————————————————————————————————- How to create the OKRs An OKR is composed of an Objective, which indicates “what we want to achieve” and qualitatively. This can be due to one or more Key Results, that is, what specific actions we will take to reach our objective and at the same time we can quantitatively measure whether we are moving in the right direction or not. Vanesa Tejada , Head of Product at LATAM Airlines Digital, details what elements to consider when defining OKRs: >> Describe a short objective, easy to remember and inspiring, oriented to the value proposition that we offer to the client, >> Select the metrics that indicate progress towards the goal, >> Define the starting point value of each metric, >> Define the result value to be obtained from each metric, >> Identify the data source for each metric, >> Agree how often we are going to inspect the metric, >> (nice-to-have) OKRs thresholds to tell if we are as expected, above or below, >> (nice-to-have) Confidence to achieve the objective, useful for prioritizing.
OKRs direct the actions to be implemented In our case, what we do is that Tomi is in charge of setting the goal and David and I take care of putting the actions that we consider key to achieve it. This is important because both David and I are getting to know the results of our actions, what is the opposite case of micromanagement (which starts from when the team takes actions and they do not know what result they support or towards what objective the company is heading). In fact, Tomi always asks us these 2 questions at OKRs meetings because it helps us to reposition ourselves and to know how “healthy” the team is: • What are you doing? • Why do you do it? Answering these questions helps Tomi know what line we are on. Because it may happen that we are following the wrong approach and a vision external to us helps us to redirect the course in a satisfactory way. Even if you are the leader of your team and you get to answer the second question such as: " because my boss told me " or " because I have to deliver it" etc ... You may have a small problem, because it may be that your commercial is not being responsible for the action that you both established at the time. As mentioned earlier, l os OKRs are a space for strategic and tactical thinking , which can be daily, with commitment and self - imposed discipline that causes things to happen. It may be that as a boss you have the OKRs in your head, but if you don't have it visually and without being accessible to your team, surely someone will get in the way ... So do you want our marketing OKRs? 🙂 Download our template for free here and start it based on your business. In it we explain how to use it, it even has a section that we use called "retrospection", which is the relevant feedback you get in each OKR meeting.
We have this document stored in our Efficy , where we can make changes in real time and it notifies Tomi when that happens. Other than that, you can see every task at hand and the opportunities our salespeople are managing. If you want a free tour, schedule the day and time that suits you here and my friend Javier will get in touch with you. I sincerely hope that this great methodology will help you and if you have any further questions about how you can implement it or what results you are achieving, write to me via mgu@efficy.com and it will be a pleasure to give you a hand 🙂