Getting the most out of your objectives and key results is as important as adopting and implementing them across your organization.
Using OKRs Effectively
Show Employees How Their Individual OKRs Align with Organizational Goals
When your employees feel their work matters to the company and contribute to the organization’s larger goals, they become highly engaged. An OKR tool enables your employees to track progress on their OKRs and see how their work translates into business success. Encourage your staff to develop objectives and key results that align with the organization’s mission, vision, purpose, and values.
Multiple Key Results Make Data More Robust
OKRs are never limited to only one KR per objective. Each objective should have a minimum of 3-5 key results. With a few varied KRs, your data becomes more powerful. This implies that when you achieve your key results, you have access to data that gives you insights, helping you make prudent business decisions.
Regular Updates Make OKRs Effective
The most crucial benefit of OKRs is that they give a clear-cut image of your progress on your KRs over time. Encourage your employees to update their progress on the key results often. You can thus view and track variations, say in productivity, not monthly, but weekly. Tracking progress time-to-time helps to understand if the objective could be achieved in the set timeline.
Using Stretch Goals is a Good Deal
Stretch goals push you and your teams to achieve what they can but haven’t tried yet. A stretch goal refers to an ambitious objective. Typically, such goals must have an average completion rate of about 70%. If your team consistently accomplishes 100% on all their goals, it is likely they aren’t stretching or re-assessing.
To answer what makes an OKR good, it doesn’t matter being familiar with the OKR framework. Remember how to create qualitative, inspirational, measurable, quantitative, time-bound, and actionable OKRs. Your objectives and key results help you set a clear direction and focus on achieving the organizational goals, propelling business growth.
To start writing good OKRs, you might check out this cheat sheet on writing quality OKRs.