Accomplish Your Business Goals in 2021 With OKRs

Using OKRs to accomplish your business goals is a strategic choice because it not only improves employee engagement but ensures employee commitment to company objectives and goals. Research has shown that setting deliberately challenging and focused goals improve employee performance. OKRs allow businesses to act ambitiously using a structured system that seeks measurable results.

OKRs are designed to accomplish the most challenging goals possible, even to the extent that employees feel uncomfortable at the work ahead of them. The good news for employees is that full attainment of objectives is not required in order to be viewed as an employee who is working as hard as possible. The OKR measurements for performance should rest somewhere around 60% to 70%. If someone accomplishes objectives at 100% then their OKRs aren’t challenging enough. By focusing on hefty pursuits, teams learn that they can accomplish more by working outside their comfort zones. 

A Useful Guide 

OKRs are circles within circles. There are outer circles, composed of organizational objectives, and inner circles made up of individuals with smaller goals that serve the bigger picture. With everyone moving towards the same end goal, alignment is cultivated throughout the organization. Aligning team members is important, but it is only one component of OKRs. To implement this strategy completely, here is a useful guide with examples: 

Organize Team Communication

Leaders should organize team communication in the service of key results. Accomplish this by setting a day for all team leaders to meet and discuss the established organizational goals. During this meeting, priorities and timelines can be established, under the guidelines of the OKR system. Leaders and team members want to look for ways to bridge goals together so that they are all working to create organizational key results. Priorities should be able to achieve organizational OKRs while allowing individual team members to creatively invent ways to bring these ideas to fruition. 

OKRs in Action 

Objective: Gain x followers on every social media platform utilized by the x-month mark. 

Key Results: 

• Host social media contests to engage traction and user engagement by x% 
• Hire SEO professionals to generate more traffic flow to online media content by x%
• Model off of competitor strategies while maintaining company brands
• Track best posting times and post accordingly, focusing on customer engagement and product marketing. See an increase in activity and consumer response by x% 

Objective: Improve product popularity and increase sales

Key Results:

• Gather x number of reviews and post x number of testimonials on social media platforms
• Reach out and contract at least x number of social media sponsors and public figures to promote the product
• Optimize social media engagement by narrowing ideal hashtags and posting at times of high traffic by x%. 

OKRs allow teams to set goals that are specific, measurable and promote the focus that is required to meet objectives, diligently. The need to hit specific measurements encourages employee participation as there is more at stake than goals measured arbitrarily.