Working remotely was an emerging trend. COVID-19 has pushed millions of teams to work remotely at a grant scale and fast pace, that companies are pressed with the need to find new ways of managing employee productivity. Traditional performance practices which are hi-touch. They rely heavily on post-facto feedback and are task orientated. These classic ways are seemingly ineffective and outdated. CXOs and People Leaders are looking at better ways to engage their teams and align their outcomes.
Andy Grove, the co-founder of Intel in the CEO position in 1968 developed OKRs. What are OKRs? OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is a critical thinking framework to enable execute of business strategy. Objectives are qualitative statements addressing the big “Why”, and Key Results (KRs) are “how” for measuring success, while Tasks are the activities to deliver the KRs. The Objectives are generally run quarter to quarter. Besides Intel, OKRs supported Google’s growth from 40 employees to more than 60,000 today! This popular, simple to use methodology is now used widely by familiar companies including Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Airbnb.
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The rapid uptake of OKRs by small, medium and large organizations worldwide to drive business growth and performance is becoming increasingly visible. To give a practical example, when a company takes an objective “Launch our new offering to customers to accelerate revenues”, the measurable Key Results could be “Increase our new-product revenue from R10 to R15 Million” or “Increase customer NPS from 30 to 70”, while a Task might be “create a brochure on our new offering”.
OKRs are setting up remote teams for success with teams coming together to connect and align to a company OKRs, and align their goals with those of the organization in a hierarchical manner. What all teams benefit from is radical clarity on how they contribute to company’s business outcomes, on-the-go feedback and focus on reporting outcomes instead of micro-managed tasks.
While small companies and startups with few staff can manage OKRs on a spreadsheet, online OKR tools are increasingly becoming necessary as teams scale to 20 people, and medium and large enterprises. OKR platforms are versatile, bring intelligent insights, visual performance reporting and highlighting any KRs that are at risk early to management. The team collaborates by assigning tasks in a central portal and regularly updating their progress.
“All companies from small, medium and enterprises are affected by COVID-19, and are asking themselves how to best manage their staff remotely. Spreadsheets do not give an accurate picture and quickly get out of hand” says Vidya Santhanam, CEO of Fitbots. As a woman and co-founder of Fitbots with many years in consulting, she feels OKRs can help businesses especially in these difficult times.
Fitbots is one such online OKR management platform to help companies manage OKRs at scale. Their focus is Africa and Australia, where they and similar international online platforms, draw on their deep expertise to remotely coach teams, and assist HR managers to embrace OKRs.
The OKR market is growing at an impressive 14% CAGR and projected reach USD 1592 Million by 2026[1]. Setting quarterly Objectives has proven to yields superior results. The alignment around Key Results gets all employees to collaborate. It looks like OKRs are the key to this new normal – and might be the North Star in these challenging business times.
