“We are surrounded by data but starved for insights.”
– Jay Baer
What do you look at if you are trying to figure how well your employees are doing with their objectives and key results (OKRs)? How can you tell that they are working on them? Ideally, you will be able to see whether or not they are working on their OKRs. The next best thing would be to see whether or not they are making progress towards the goals they have set out to accomplish with their OKRs in place.
OKR tracking is one of the most critical features of an effective OKR system and allows you to measure your progress towards accomplishing your objectives. For example, if you want to set the objective to sell 2,000 widgets by Q4, then OKR tracking will help you determine whether or not you’re on track to achieve that goal. If your progress indicates that it’s highly unlikely that you will meet this objective, then it’s time to adjust your strategy and get back on the right track!
What is OKR and why is it important?
OKRs are a simple but powerful method for setting goals and tracking progress. OKRs were first used by Google and are a way of defining organizational strategy and fostering alignment, motivation, and accountability for key results. It works by encouraging everyone in an organization to set stretching objectives (Objectives) that are aligned with their peers (Key Results). By sharing all their Objectives publicly, people can track each other’s progress over time.
This creates competition and cooperation to work together towards common goals. This helps create a culture of success throughout any organization. People know where they stand in terms of their performance so they are more motivated to achieve more for themselves as well as for their company/organization/team.
What is OKR tracking?
To track and give focus to key performance metrics aligned with business goals, tracking OKRs is the key. In other words, tracking will help you achieve your goals by tracking your progress and making adjustments. For instance, if one of your company’s goals is a high rate of employee engagement, then you will have set specific targets for that objective. Once you reach those targets then it means that it has been achieved. But if not, adjustments can be made to meet those goals. So far so good!
OKR tracking helps you in:
- Keep a close watch on your overall key results.
- Tracking the progress of departmental as well as team and individual goals.
- Keep an eye on whether your employees’ efforts are aligned towards a common business goal.
- Calibrating performances and seeing through your employees’ efforts without any bias.
- Rewarding deserving teams or individuals based on performance and creating a super positive culture.
OKR Examples
Google, Coca-Cola, Facebook, and Harvard Business Review have used OKRs in their organizations. Setting up effective OKRs is the responsibility of the supervisors, business owners, and department heads. Each unit head must create their quarterly or annual objectives based on the overall business goals. Ideally, you should create one main goal or objective and create your sub-goals under it.
Let’s have a closer look at how these goals would look at departmental and individual levels.
Examples of marketing OKRs:
Objective: Generate 100 inbound leads.
Sub-objectives:
- Improve website traffic by 30%.
- Improve website engagement and bounce rate by 20%.
- Create 5 new campaigns for social media.
- Write 10 informative blog articles.
- Optimize landing pages to improve conversion by 10%.
Examples of Sales OKRs:
Objective: Generate 1 million sales revenue by the end of the year.
Sub-objectives:
- Generate 1000 leads by cold calling.
- Achieve lead response time of a maximum of 10 minutes.
- Improve the sales cadence for higher conversions.
- Improve the MQL to SQL conversion by 30%.
- Increase meeting setup rates by 20%.
- Automate the sales follow-up emails for higher efficiency.
- Increase personal contact ratio by 20% in the US.
Similarly, every department can create their OKRs and track the progress of their individual as well as collective performance metrics aligned towards a common business goal.
Automating OKR Tracking
It is easy to underestimate how much time it takes for teams and individuals to fill out their weekly OKRs. Once you have implemented One KR per week, you must automate both tracking and reporting on your progress. It takes time for people in organizations who are new to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) with a weekly cadence, or those who have simply been struggling with tracking, gathering information, or making corrections at a regular cadence.
You might find this interesting too: https://huminos.com/blog/a-comprehensive-okr-guide-for-2023
huminos helps you enfold your business goals under a single dashboard where owners and supervisors can effectively track the progress of their overall objectives within a given time frame, without manually creating reports or managing multiple spreadsheets.
Get a peek at why huminos is the ultimate OKR software that your business needs today. Start with a 14-day free trial now.