What is OKR and how to use OKRs for success?

Businesses that want to grow and thrive, virtually any business really, should know the importance of setting and achieving goals. The level at which a company can achieve its goals is directly related to the success and growth it experiences. 

Sadly, only 5% of businesses meet their annual goals.

Being more effective at hitting goals is crucial. To do that, business leaders must learn how to use frameworks that make achieving goals all the more likely for the organization. One great way to do that is to use OKR or Objectives and Key Results.

What is OKR?

OKR or an objective & key result is a way to identify company objectives better and create key actions that will bring those goals to life. Some OKR examples might be:

Objective: Grow company profit

Key Results: 

• Increase sales by $500,000 annually
• Improve client retention by 50%
• Develop three products that make $100,000 each

Setting OKRs might seem like a simple practice, but it has helped companies like Google and Microsoft grow tremendously over the years. Now, some tools and systems help companies set and track OKRs so they can achieve their objectives at a higher success rate and faster than before. If you’re looking for tips on how to create OKRs and track the data necessary to evaluate and monitor them well, look no further. Here are five tips on how to track and obtain OKR data.

Write down OKRs

The first step might sound obvious, but not all businesses do it. Writing down goals alone increases your chance of success by up to 42%. So write down your OKRs and put them in a place where people can see them. You can include it in every strategic meeting, company report, or digital dashboard. Ensure that it’s somewhere anyone and everyone can see regularly so it’s not lost to them what matters most. This practice helps align everyone’s activities to those goals. 

When writing down OKRs, attach numbers to them. Based on the examples above, for instance, having a quantifiable goal will give people a better sense of how those key results will be achieved.

Set percentage benchmarks for each objective

After setting OKRs, you’ll need to create a way to score OKRs. This step involves developing milestones for each benchmark. Once you hit fifty percent of your sales targets, for example, that will be worth reporting to the team and celebrating so that everyone feels motivated to keep pushing forward.

You can use an OKR app such as huminos to constantly monitor benchmarks and when companies can hit them.

Integrate OKR data or tools with other apps

By setting up integrations, teams can automate various activities involved in OKR monitoring and tracking. For one, companies should integrate their OKR apps with project management tools and ERP solutions so that they can track project completion rates, employee evaluations, client feedback, company revenue, and other metrics that a company might usually track. These examples of ERP software can integrate with your OKR tracking tools. 

Some automation you can set up with the right integrations is data gathering, reporting, and analysis. For example, if your objective is to improve customer service ratings, you can integrate your OKR software with your support hub to gather support ratings and report them to stakeholders. 

Build an OKR committee or team

Your OKR strategy is just as good as the team that will keep these OKR front and center. It’s common for companies to forget what truly matters once the busyness of day-to-day activities invades our objectives. That’s why you should set a committee or team in charge of tracking these objectives and key results. 

Normally, this team would include managers and key stakeholders, but that’s not always a one-size-fits-all rule. There might be instances where administrators or marketing teams could take charge. For OKRs that are more HR-oriented like improving work happiness and engagement, the HR team should be in charge of it. It depends on what OKRs you set.

Set regular meetings to evaluate OKRs

The last part of your OKR system should be a regular OKR check-in meeting. Ideally, this happens in weekly meetings, but you can set monthly or quarterly check-ins too, depending on how lean or busy your team is. The important thing is you have a regular time and date to check how far along you are in terms of achieving your desired results. 

Better OKRs means company growth

When your company can set the right OKRs, company growth should follow. So investing in the right OKR tools and building an OKR system could be the key to experiencing breakthroughs in your organization in the years to come.