5 CRITICAL THINGS FOR A SUCCESSFUL OKR IMPLEMENTATION

We have been talking and helping many organizations to implement OKR concept in their daily operation. If you have understood the methodology but have no tool to assist this activity other than spreadsheets, Goalify could help you.

However, regarding many companies which are not familiar with OKR methodology or companies possessing more than 50 employees, it’s more likely that they are struggling to study how to apply OKRs to their organization during the deployment period.

We carry out this article to share with you five things may help you to get on well with OKR methodology. Moreover, it will support your decisions to draw out the process of working when applying OKRs.

1. OKRs should be backed up by the top management, senior leadership

Like all the new process application, you always get trouble the from individuals, group or small group because of many reasons, that’s kind of the issues will slow down your process application. Sometimes it cannot move further if the leader is not firm enough. To handle the case, having the help of the senior leaders, team leaders, who are working directly and engaging closely with their teams, in order to encourage or work on the “mindset hacking” is always a great support for your success.

Image: MDI Management Development.

OKR will not be a big challenge for the team having under 50 startup spirit members. However, with the company which has the traditional hierarchical enterprise or has the size of more than 50 members, experiences a different story. OKR requires everyone owns a very dissimilar way of thinking and cooperates with others at work. In addition, it needs each of the member to completely commit. Hence, finding out the key senior who could back up and inspire other members is the required task.

What do you need from a senior manager?

• To keep the presentation clear in regarding OKRs, just outline the benefits and business impacts. Having the senior manager helps your organization manage and align the expectation of members is critical to grow the mindset and cornerstone as well as assists manager to collect feedback from employees.
• Most of the time, when working out OKRs with the leader or team members who have not known it yet. Their general assumption is that OKRs only work for your sales team. That’s a very big misunderstanding issue of OKR methodology. Therefore, to prepare and present the case study to help leader and team members learn the idea of OKR primary concept is essential.
• Let everyone discuss and make a firm commitment. Creating the discussion is also a core action boosting internal engagement. Regarding MBO or KPI, they only adopt the top-down approach and do not allow assignee reverting the feedback.

Read our 7 STEPS TO APPLY OKR METHODOLOGY TO YOUR ORGANIZATION here.

2. Getting buy-in from all-hand of the team

When applying OKRs into the organization, someone will embrace it right away, while some others will possibly against with this change.

The initial reaction of people with any change is resistance. As a result, make sure that each of the staff understands OKRs’ outline and its profits, it’s really crucial. OKRs push a great improvement and offer benefits for everyone in the team. However, most of the teammates do not earn the maximum benefit of OKRs in consequence of lacking the tool, which helps to accelerate the OKR concept like Goalify. Most startup use spreadsheets as a tool to apply OKRs in their organization. They are useful. However, it cannot give the team the whole vision of the bigger picture, and help employees realize what their contributions to the organization are, what their team is doing, and what everyone else is working on including their manager.

To get buy-in from everyone:

• Ensure that senior managers support the OKRs (you can try our demo version here, and see how people exciting when visiting the profile of the leaders, and what the OKRs they are handling).
• Schedule the plan step by step to apply OKRs into daily tasks, the plan should be clearly outlined and includes every benefit of the OKRs to the team..
• Share successful case studies of the other organizations.

3. Having OKR master in the team

To handle changes, we need a master to lead the project and understand the concept, processes, and related issues as well as to keep everyone engaged, and make sure people are motivated and the process is operated smoothly.

This master also needs to manage absolutely the working process and monitor the whole timeline, not only the schedule of deploying OKRs into the organization. They need to take care of OKRs applying process as well as frequently check-in for the report because timeline will make sure that you are not losing the momentum of an organization.

4. Letting everyone build up the routine and strength

Writing good OKRs sounds easy, but it could be a huge challenge. Especially for someone who don’t have any experience of defining OKRs, or goals & milestones, for their work before. Training and letting employees get engaged with the concept will help you and your people to see quickly and get it better and better.

At the beginning, everyone will always run a bit slow; people will require a lot of time to build their perfect routines. Ongoing review will help them increase the learning curve drive results better.

Check out our OKR examples here.

5. Making every problem simple & just doing it

Remember that OKR is a popular method because of its simplicity and flexibility. OKRs can be explained for everyone in just a few minutes. It also means that everyone in the organization should be able to work with it. Therefore, always noticing: “Don’t make it complicated!”.

Our fundamental concept of Goalify platform is keeping everything be simplicity and assists your organization in saving time and growing business. The simplicity builds the engagement and drives the long-term adoption.

Goalify is offering a 14-day free trial, you could join us here.