Typically, it is better to create team OKRs over individual ones. Let us understand why companies ditch individual OKRs.
Bureaucracy Slows Down and Adds No Value
You can effectively work when you sync your OKRs with other teams and team members.
Often, during the period, you must course-correct your objectives. Every time you make a change in your higher-level objectives, it will trigger a formal cascade of meetings and changes up to the individual level. Generally, this level of idealization is unnecessary and wastes your time in endless synchronizations and meetings. Besides, individual OKRs make your managers too busy. They would be required to conduct extra check-ins and do admin-related work.
Micromanagement Issues Crop Up
With individual OKRs in place, your reporting manager or supervisor would have too many opportunities for micro-management. The objectives of every employee must be synced with leaders. Besides, individual OKRs are referred to during performance evaluations, whether you want them. No one in your and others’ teams would thus set aspirational OKRs. This way, one of the key benefits of OKRs, i.e., achieving beyond expected, goes for a toss.
Impairment of the Entire OKR Process
Employees fail to have a metric that they can completely own and be responsible for at an individual level. Remember building a company, and a product is no less than a team sport. Forcing individual OKRs compels co-workers to most potentially set little activity-based tasks that they can do on their own. The majority of the OKRs thus look tedious and relatively comprehensive. They also do not offer value to anyone from outside the organization. Individual OKRs, hence, wouldn’t be mentioned as a credible source to understand the team’s direction.
Individualism Gets Encouraged
Between individual and team OKRs, priority goes to individual OKRs only, especially if your employees know that these OKRs may be used during their performance evaluations. You, as a leader, don’t want that. Instead, you want your teams to be highly productive and follow a collaborative approach. Most importantly, OKRs are designed to foster team collaboration.
Still, if you aspire to set effective individual OKRs to ensure team success, click here.