The top 5 OKR mistakes to avoid [2021]

[Music] more and more companies are discovering the potential of okay ours but if okay ours are not implemented correctly they will not provide the improvements you were looking for and if you don't succeed in moving from initial implementation - ok ours being fully embedded in your everyday ultimately you're ok our initiative will fail I'm Gemma and I want to share with you the top five okay are mistakes that organizations make so that you can avoid them before I do let's have a recap on what ok ours are ok R stands for objectives and key results ok ours are the goal-setting framework that was originally adopted by Intel then Google when Google was small it's now one of the most popular ways to set goals for all sizes of organization most people have used SMART goals well ok ours are like SMART goals just with a little more goal-setting best practice guidance built in the extra guidance includes grouping one to four key results that are measuring what matters often KPIs to give a more complete picture of what success looks like horizontally aligning and cascading ok ours using hierarchical relationships to improve alignment and deliberately setting hard targets because easy to achieve goals have zero net benefit and stretch goals help teams innovate mistake one the first common ok our mistake is creating key results that are actually projects or tasks key results should ideally contain metrics these metrics have a target value that is usually to be achieved by a standard period of time like the end of a quarter or year if key results do not have metrics with target values in and are actually activities to be completed like projects or tasks they are likely to be what are called initiatives let's look at an example imagine a fast growing financial tech company with an amazing online savings app for young people they have a quarter for objective called deposit more more often which is also one of their three strategic pillars the key results have the heart to achieve targets of acquiring seventy point five million dollars of new deposits and increasing the average monthly deposit value from two hundred and forty five dollars to five hundred dollars the engineering team have created an initiative that aligns with this OPR based on the completion of an epic called rounded up savings here a user of the app has their card purchases rounded up to the nearest dollar and saved in their account this initiative has a target completion date of the 10th of November it's not just engineering that's working towards this ok are a cross-functional team made up of people from marketing product management and engineering has created an OPR that is also aligned their q4 objective is called we are scaling their key results our increase the number of new app downloads to a hundred and fifty thousand this is owned by the chief marketing officer increase the download to deposit conversion rate to 25% this is owned by the chief product officer marketing have project boards for each of their marketing channels in Trello these will run for the duration of q4 that are aligned with the download key result product management has created an initiative UI and UX improvement specs this project is aligned with the conversion rate metric once the UI and UX specifications were complete engineering aligned a new initiative to implement them based on an epoch with a target due date of the 19th of November everyone hopes they will significantly improve the deposit conversion rate in this example there was a clear distinction between the goals that have been set and how teams are going about achieving them notice how the we are scaling objective only succeeds if they scale downloads and deposited savings the combination of the two metrics together makes a much better goal mistake 2 the second mistake is related to the first teams can often add poor metrics to their key results the issue of key result metrics Elections is similar to those of KPI selections it's common to see teams selecting metrics that are easy to track rather than what needs to be tracked or teams choose metrics that are not good lead indicators and predictors of future performance both of these problems can be solved with better KPI planning if you do use metrics that do not reliably predict improvements in future KPIs like downloads or website visitors you need to pair them with metrics that can confirm quality not just quantity like conversion to an event like signup or conversion to a commercial event like a paid subscription which brings me to mistake 3 easy to achieve business as usual targets are set hard goals create ambition and drive innovation easy to achieve goals far less so in fact easy to achieve goals have been shown to have zero net benefit the issue is that setting and missing hard goals is often believed to have detrimental consequences or there really are detrimental consequences what you need to do is make hard normal and safe this means agreeing hard targets and adjusting the definition of success in line with difficulty make less than a hundred percent safe success of a hard target is generally 70% to 100% moonshots even less so we've got key results that are not initiatives we're targeting metrics that matter and are good predictors of performance and we've set hard targets the fourth mistake you need to avoid is getting carried away and creating too many okay ours or okay ours with too many key results good okay ours are like a good strategy you are more likely to succeed when you're focusing your resources on fewer areas of maximum impact as opposed to setting goals for everything and never really focusing on anything so now we've got key results that are not initiatives we're targeting metrics that matter and are good predictors of performance we have set hard targets and we're focusing all of our efforts on the okay ours that are going to make a material difference to the organization that brings me to mistake five setting and forgetting your okay ours this happens most when okay ours live in spreadsheets and don't have processes like check-ins and team meetings built around them it is critical that your teams are constantly using okay ours and initiatives as the agenda for regular meetings whether remote or face-to-face in these meetings status progress and confidence are displayed and discussed in addition to what's holding people back and what's going well adjustments are made where necessary and everyone gets on with enjoying the feeling having a clear sense of purpose more autonomy effective collaboration and continual learning all of which is proven to lead to a happier more engaged and better performing workplace you will find more videos like this in the free to access knowledge base and academy section of Zachary good luck [Music]

Channel: ZOKRI - Force Multiply Your Revenue

Views: 7,328

Keywords: OKRs, OKR Mistakes, OKR, Setting OKRs, Embedding OKRs, ZOKRI, ZOKRI OKRs

Id: wZhfwDH43W4

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020