Creating Sustainable Change with OKRs, Part 2
Now that we’ve discussed the basics of OKRs, you may be wondering how to make the best of them, or whether you can use them without buy-in from Leadership. Read on!
OKR Best Practices
Less is more! Limit your team’s Objectives to no more than between 5-7, with 3-5 Key Results each. Too many OKRs muddy the waters, and you want them to be your source of truth, not just a To-Do List.
Set OKRs and their progress reviews quarterly. Long-term OKRs, especially aspirational/shoot-for-the-moon OKRs can be rolled over to the next quarter.
Transparency is key! Whether it’s an OKR Google Doc/Google Sheet, a free OKR tool or a paid OKR tool, ensure your team has totally visibility to the OKRs and their progress.
If an OKR just isn’t working, avoid the sunk cost fallacy and recalibrate it, or scrap it if necessary. Those freed resources can go toward another OKR.
How to Use OKRs Even if Your Team Doesn’t
If your organization doesn’t use Objectives and Key Results, that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. You don’t even need to introduce the concept to your manager or even use the term OKRs—though if you’d like to, here is some good guidance on how to introduce OKRs to leadership. Otherwise, feel free to just create your own Objectives and Key Results from the benchmarks handed down to you from your manager. (You can even create OKRs to achieve your personal goals!)
In fact, you can use an Eisenhower Matrix/Urgent-Important Matrix to help define your OKRs. There’s a good chance that you have some Objectives mixed into your To-Do List, probably in the Important, Not Urgent quadrant. The dependency tasks that support those Objectives can be tweaked into Key Results. And the smaller, day-to-day dependency tasks that support your Key Results are treated as tasks to achieve your Key Results.
Combining the Eisenhower Matrix with OKRs allows you to be consistent about the direction you’re going, and confident enough in that direction to set boundaries that would otherwise derail you.