7
min read
Organizational effectiveness is integral to success for any company. Explore how companies and leaders can increase organizational effectiveness.
7
min read
Whether you are an HR professional or a line manager or a part of the executive leadership, organizational effectiveness would definitely mean something to you. If you take a close look, you will understand that while many consider it as a mere buzzword without any concrete meaning, some forward-looking organizations are treating it to gauge their success. Put simply, organizational effectiveness refers to how well and efficiently an organization is able to achieve its vision and goals. As a fast growing organization, you must focus on organizational effectiveness as it is essential to impact the bottom line, attract the top talent, as well as, survive and thrive amongst your competitors.
Table of contents
Before diverting any resources to this buzzword, you might want to answer the question on what is organizational effectiveness. In the simplest terms, organizational effectiveness refers to an organization’s ability to meet its objectives. As a growth driven organization, you are bound to have a certain set of goals that you seek to achieve by a combination of operations, processes and people. Organizational effectiveness is all about being able to realize the intended outcomes in the most effective and efficient manner.
It is a comprehensive concept which takes into consideration the performance of each aspect that contributes to the running of an organization. Employee performance, managerial effectiveness, process efficiency, collaboration between different areas and organizational behavior, collectively contribute to organizational effectiveness. Organizations ranking high on all or most of these parameters and others tend to rank in the higher rungs of effectiveness, while those that face gaps in these, struggle with optimal levels of performance.
You can understand the importance of organizational effectiveness by studying its direct correlation with company success. As the effectiveness quotient of your organization goes up, your ability to serve all the stakeholders better as well as make greater profits increases. Here are a few factors that illustrate why you should focus on organizational effectiveness:
Effectiveness is closely associated with efficiency across the organization. Organizational effectiveness will enable you to achieve maximum output with minimum input as the performance level is optimal. At the same time, effectiveness ensures that resources, beyond financial ones, like human resources, technology assets, etc., are used and allocated efficiently. Invariably, organizational effectiveness will help you promote efficient allocation, considerably reducing costs and disbursing limited resources to promote best results.
An effective organization is defined by great performance across all verticals, in a holistic manner. This suggests that employees who work in such organizations are able to deliver top performance, without compromising on their wellness, leveraging the efficient processes and practices. Invariably, this augments their work experience and promotes engagement which results in greater loyalty, retention and commitment, further, accentuating their performance.
Organizational effectiveness definitely takes into account augmenting the efficacy of customer service channels. An effective organization supports its customers in the most promising manner to create a pleasant experience. Right from its offerings to its service, organizational effectiveness plays a major role in helping you enhance customer outcomes.
Finally, overall effectiveness has a direct impact on your organization’s bottom line. When all parts of your company work like a well-oiled machine, the profits are bound to soar high. The bottom line is positively impacted by decreased costs, greater employee productivity, happier customers and overall increased efficiency and efficacy.
From a macro level, you might equate organizational effectiveness with cost reduction. However, this all encompassing concept requires following a strategic and comprehensive approach based on specific objectives and principles. Based on experience of most fast growing organizations, you can follow these 4 organizational effectiveness approaches to commence and accelerate your journey to success:
The first approach to organizational effectiveness majorly focuses on the goals and objectives achieved. Put simply, according to the goal attainment approach, you should start by setting a set of goals and objectives that you seek to achieve through various efforts, i.e. achievement of goals is the reason for existence of the organization. Therefore, for this approach, you can gauge organizational effectiveness by measuring how well your organization is able to achieve its goals, mainly in the form of profits and efficiency. While this approach is important to ensure how effectively an organization reaches its goals, the dynamic nature of the goals and varying scope of long-term vs short-term goals, makes it slightly challenging to use this to assess organizational effectiveness.
The systems resource approach came as an answer to the challenges of the goal attainment approach. While the latter focuses only on the end, the systems resource approach takes into account the means to the end. To adopt this approach, you need to understand that success of any organization depends not only on the goal it achieves, but how it achieves the same. Therefore, there is focus on how effectively you are able to acquire the resources needed to achieve the desired goals or outcomes. Here, effectiveness is not only a result of goal attainment, but rather depends on resource acquisition. However, the challenge majorly lies in the dilemma that higher resource acquisition does not always translate to greater performance or success.
According to the strategic constituency, organizations survive and thrive in an environment where their success is dependent on a number of stakeholders. These include the employees, managers, shareholders, customers, partners, suppliers, etc. Organizational effectiveness is, thus, contingent to the company’s ability to satisfy these constituencies in its environment. Effectiveness depends on how well your organization is able to identify its various strategic constituencies and their expectations and, thus, navigate ways to achieve the same. At the same time, since each constituency has its own goals, power and influence, organizational effectiveness depends on the efficacy of trade-offs between one constituency over the other, in case of a conflict.
The final approach takes into account the competing values and goals that your organization strives to achieve. At any given point of time, you may be conflicted on competing values which lead to different outcomes, all of which are necessary for organizational success. For instance, you might want to induce structure and discipline, but at the same time, might wish to promote autonomy, innovation and flexibility. Likewise, competing values come in the form of increasing profits and customer satisfaction vs augmenting employee wellness. Therefore, organizational effectiveness, according to this approach, assesses a company’s ability to strike the right balance between such competing values to create a win-win situation for all.
Like any other parameter defining company success, measuring organizational effectiveness is extremely important. Without proper metrics to measure effectiveness, you will continue to struggle with performance improvement because of a lack of monitoring and tracking. Following are the top 3 approaches that you can leverage to measure organizational effectiveness:
Using the external resource approach, you can measure organizational effectiveness on the basis of how well you are able to acquire, manage and control valuable resources from the external environment to power their operations. Focus on factors like price of inputs, relations with external stakeholders, quality of inputs and human resources to gauge effectiveness.
You can leverage the internal resource approach to measure organizational effectiveness on the basis of your company’s ability to constantly innovate with agility and responsiveness. Here, you need to focus on the decision making time, level of innovation and creativity, resilience, time to market, level of conflict or collaboration. If you perform well on such parameters you are likely to have higher levels of effectiveness.
Finally, the third approach you can use requires you to measure your organization’s ability to convert or transform the acquired resources into high quality final output by leveraging innovation, agility and responsiveness. The objective is to deliver improved and higher quality of products and services that yield greater customer satisfaction and stickiness. This approach majorly measures the increase in product quality, reduction in defects or rejects, better customer service, etc.
According to organizational development experts, there are six components of organizational effectiveness. You must focus on these components in a holistics manner as they are highly interdependent and an integrated and comprehensive approach to them has the potential to guarantee organizational effectiveness.
Leadership plays an integral role in promoting the effectiveness of an organization. Invariably, leaders have diverse roles to play right from creating a vision to ensuring the vision translates into reality with seamless processes and practices. You need to encourage and inspire your leadership to address three key questions to promote effectiveness. Firstly, the vision and values, i.e. the purpose of the organization and the unique value it brings to its customers. Secondly, the strategy and the approach, i.e. the most effective manner in which the organization will achieve its objectives and derive value. Thirdly, structure and alignment, i.e. balancing and aligning different components like strategy, technology, innovation, etc. to achieve desired results.
Communication is imperative to organizational effectiveness. You need to inculcate the thought across the organization that communication is not only about putting words to one’s thoughts. Strategic communication is all about ensuring that what is said clarifies the real intention behind it, and is not just stringing together some corporate buzzwords. You must spend your energy and efforts on creating a communication strategy for organizational effectiveness that focuses on clear messaging with no scope for ambiguity or excuses. Furthermore, you need to ensure that everyone is aligned on the shared vision as well as clear on what is expected out of them. Communication is not only about getting the message across, but also involves active listening and being receptive to feedback by diverse stakeholders.
Accountability is a key parameter that ensures that a company is able to deliver on its promises and promote organizational effectiveness. You need to focus on building a culture of accountability, both individual and collective. This suggests that while each individual is responsible and accountable for a piece of task, collectively, the entire organization is accountable for the big picture. Accountability involves expectation alignment to ensure clarity in who is expected to do what. Additionally, as the custodian of culture, you need to leverage incentives, rewards, and appreciation to promote accountability and high levels of performance.
Delivery primarily focuses on the experience that your organization is able to create for the end user or customers. Your effectiveness here largely depends on the satisfaction of your customers. It is not only about ensuring delivery, but also about promoting a seamless process of achieving the same. A simple and agile delivery process without too many steps is every customer’s dream. On the other hand, a delivery process fraught with complexities is likely to create a poor experience. Hence, for organizational effectiveness, you need to be agile and responsive to changing market conditions by improving your operations and processes to make delivery efficient and smooth.
Organizational effectiveness is largely dependent on the human capital of a company. Therefore, you need to put in best efforts to recruit, develop and retain the top talent. Start your process by onboarding the right talent with a robust hiring process which not only assesses the talent on their technical and hard skills but ensures a match on all levels for the role. In addition, to ascertain an optimal level of performance, you need to provide your employees with regular and adequate development opportunities. These include upskilling and training as well as mentoring and guidance to promote holistic growth. Finally, you need to facilitate retention and loyalty of employees. This requires fostering a culture of appreciation and acknowledgement, which highlights the impact of employee contribution to the overall company success.
Finally, the last component for organizational effectiveness requires you to focus on key metrics, performance indicators and trackers to measure and monitor business progress. Unless you closely measure each aspect of organizational performance with the right metrics, improving quality becomes difficult. You need to encourage your functional leaders to establish a set of standard metrics to measure performance at regular intervals and monitor the results. The measurement will enable you to gauge whether or not you are able to move the needle on important business parameters which collectively contribute to organizational effectiveness.
Transformational leadership has the power and potential to augment organizational effectiveness exponentially. By promoting effectiveness on the below five parameters, you can enhance overall organizational effectiveness:
Start by creating and nurturing a culture that promotes effectiveness across the organization. A culture of effectiveness refers to one where attributes like efficiency and efficacy are valued. For instance, adherence to timelines, prompt response, agility, etc., are most likely to develop a culture that reaps effectiveness.
Employee experience directly translates to organizational effectiveness. This suggests that the more pleasant and positive experience employees have, the greater performance they will deliver, contributing to increased effectiveness. Higher engagement from experience promotes motivation, retention, loyalty and commitment towards work, which collectively add to organizational effectiveness. Invariably, you need to focus on promoting a positive experience by providing authentic leadership, regular reinforcement and opportunities to grow and thrive.
Your leaders must practice and display a commitment to organizational effectiveness. This involves not only having effectiveness practices and policies on paper, but also preaching them. When leaders constantly illustrate their commitment to effectiveness, it is likely to propagate in their teams, leading to a collective effort. At the same time, effectiveness must be practiced at all levels and across the organization. Be it hiring, or conducting meetings, or planning events, you always need to view it from an effectiveness lens.
As a part of strategy and processes, you need to ingrain efficiency and effectiveness as a part of the core values that define the organization. This suggests that efficiency and effectiveness must become synonymous with the organization for both internal and external stakeholders. Effectiveness in strategy is also about ensuring that the path to achieving the company’s goals and objectives is clear, seamless and simple. Strategy for overall goal achievement must be crystal clear to ensure easy comprehension and implementation.
Finally, your leaders must innovate and experiment with the latest tools and technologies. The idea is to stay abreast with the latest industry trends to maintain a competitive advantage. Leveraging the latest tools and technologies is the best bet to augment efficiency as well as stay relevant.
Promoting organizational effectiveness is a collective responsibility which falls on the shoulders of all the stakeholders of a company. An integrated approach that seeks to understand and serve the interest of each of these stakeholders is key to achieving organizational effectiveness. However, working on all aspects at once can be chaotic and self-defeating. Therefore, you must consider starting your journey to improve organizational effectiveness by focusing on the internal stakeholders, i.e. the employees and the leadership. In such a situation, partnering with platforms like SuperBeings that gauge and augment employee experience as well as offer avenues for leadership development is something to bet on. Invariably, organizational effectiveness is integral to company success and those who start early on in the race are most likely to reach the top.
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The right compensation management practices and policies can make or break your employee experience. Of course, there is merit in linking compensation and performance to drive organizational success, it can lead to several questions and implementation problems as well.
Read on to get all your compensation management related questions answered.
Let’s start with the very basic question of why fair compensation is important and the merits it brings along. It is no surprise that if you are paid more and are compensated according to your efforts, you are likely to give in your 100% and stay with an organization longer. However, there are other factors that support fair compensation:
Thus, fair compensation as a part of compensation linked performance management has the potential to facilitate better employee outcomes such as engagement, experience and performance.
To make compensation fair and inclusive in all aspects, it needs to have a clear foundation. Most organizations have relied on performance reviews as a way of reflecting on performance as a means of compensation decisions. However, there are several competing views both for and against tying compensation to performance reviews.
Clearly, there are both sides to the story.
The most favorable outcome will be to keep performance as one of the parameters for compensation, but not the sole foundation.
Additionally, as one of the best practices, performance reviews can be conducted on a regular basis, where some are only developmental in nature and others can be tied to compensation management.
As discussed, focusing only on performance reviews for compensation management needs a relook. Working with growing organizations, we have curated a list of the top five performance and compensation management practices you can leverage:
Ensure that your compensation structure aligns with the market trends so your employees don’t feel underpaid and leave.
Provide complete transparency and clarity to your employees on what constitutes high levels of performance and what it will take to earn a raise or appraisal.
Have specific, well defined and measurable criteria for the compensation strategy to ensure that there is complete transparency.
Salary in hand or the pay check your employees receive is accompanied by a range of benefits that are a part of the compensation structure and cost to the company, but are often overlooked by employees. Make sure they are widely communicated.
Ensure that there is a base pay range for every role and profile with variable additions based on candidate competencies.
The idea of fair compensation and linking compensation and performance management, leads to a very interesting concept of distributive justice. On a broad level, distributive justice essentially focuses on ensuring that the compensation received by employees is fair and equitable and is based on objective and rational grounds which are uniform for all. Here are a few ways to ensure distributive justice:
Measure potential and market value of the employee in addition to experience and expertise to ensure distributive justice for high potential employees
Another interesting component of compensation and performance management that you must acquaint yourself with is pay transparency. Essentially pay transparency refers to how openly or freely employees within an organization can discuss their compensation with others.
This is not only limited to the check they take home but other perks and benefits they are entitled to. Invariably, many platforms today also enable individuals to anonymously share their salaries online and get insights from others doing the same. However, there are diverse views on when it comes to pay transparency for an organization.
Those who advocate for pay transparency believe that it can enable large scale impact for the organization across performance management.
However, there is a flip side to pay transparency too with some common pitfalls that need to be addressed proactively.
In the last section of this article, we will focus on how managers play an integral role in compensation and performance management and the best practices to guide managers to have effective compensation conversations with their team members.
Almost 58% organizations do not train managers on pay communications
This startling statistic clearly highlights how despite the apparent importance of compensation management, the focus on ensuring a seamless process is rather limited. However, organizations today can play a leading role in enabling their managers to have better pay communication and conversations by following these tips:
It is quite evident that compensation and performance management are intrinsically interlinked and if leveraged well, compensation has great potential to not only drive performance, but also facilitate engagement, retention and much more.
However, to ensure the same, you need to have a very structured, transparent and fair compensation strategy and policy. Furthermore, you must, don’t forget to invest in training your managers to bridge any gaps and constantly gauge and address employee pulse — to ensure fair compensation for all.
10 tips for managers to effectively conduct performance reviews
How often should you conduct performance reviews?
How to use competency framework as a talent management strategy
Talent development is critical for growing organizations which see the workforce as their biggest asset. Focus on developing their talent stack not only leads to a pleasant employee experience, it also augments the overall performance and productivity for an organization.
While you may come across many ways to facilitate talent development, leveraging the competency framework can help you move the needle very quickly.
Let's see how.
Before moving directly to how you can implement the competency framework, let’s quickly understand the 5 stages of talent development.
The first stage involves planning for your talent needs based on your organizational priorities and creating the position profile based on the skills, attitudes and other competencies.
Based on the position profile, you need to start attracting talent for the position. You can do so by spreading the word in the right networks, through job portal platforms, etc. The objective is to ensure that you are reaching out to the right network. You can also explore the right candidate for the position internally to considerably save hiring and training costs.
Once you have identified the right person, the next stage of talent development is extending the offer to the person after a thorough background check as well as a competency and expectation match. It also requires creating personalized onboarding plans for the first 30-60-90 days of the candidate’s journey within the organization. Read our guide to employee onboarding to learn more about onboarding do’s and don’ts.
The main focus of talent development starts with providing the right development and learning opportunities to your workforce. This can involve upskilling for both technical and soft skills, leadership building or any development intervention based on the need of the role and position.
Read: How to create employee development plan based on performance history
Finally, talent development involves undertaking initiatives to retain your talent. While learning opportunities are important, facilitating engagement, wellness, motivation, etc. all contribute to employee retention.
If you are wondering how the competency framework aligns with talent development, you need to start by decoding what the framework actually stands for.
Put simply, a competency framework is a set of behaviors, skills, abilities and attributes that an organization considers imperative for creating a high performance culture.
The competency framework can be implemented at all stages of the talent development or the employee lifecycle within an organization. The idea is to ensure that certain core competencies are kept at the heart of the decision making that in any way impact the workforce.
Competency framework based talent development is very important for employee retention. Talent development practices when undertaken effectively have the potential to encourage team members to stay with the organization for long and at the same time become ambassadors to help attract high quality peers.
Here are the top reasons why competency framework based talent development matters:
Now that we have covered the basics of talent development and competency framework, let’s understand how leveraging the latter to advance the former can create a far reaching impact for organizations.
The first step is to create a competency framework which involves identifying the key competencies which will be instrumental in guiding all decisions around talent development. Depending on the nature of your organization, there can be categories within the competency framework that you seek to focus on. Your competency framework should focus on behaviors, skills and attributes which are critical for performance and overall success. The following steps can help you create a competency framework for talent development:
The responsibility of creating the competency framework is collective. It starts with involving the executive leadership to ensure alignment with the vision, people managers to ensure they are ideal for the culture you are trying to build and functional managers to ensure inclusion of right competencies for each role and position. Furthermore, involving those on the ground can be fruitful as they have the best idea of what competencies are critical and others which are good to have.
Once the competency framework for talent development is ready, the next step is to align it with your recruitment process to ensure precise and effective hiring. There are a few steps along the way:
The onus of implementing the competency framework during selection lies primarily with the HR team and recruiters who assess the candidates with different tests and assessments. Team managers and leaders also play a role in assessing functional competencies and fit.
Irrespective of whether an employee is onboarded before or after you have implemented the competency framework for recruitment, you need to ensure competency based performance management and development opportunities.
From a talent development perspective, the focus of the competency framework should equally be on developing employees for their next or subsequent role based on the specific competencies for the same.
The onus of aligning performance and development with the competency framework lies with team managers as they are best able to determine the performance gaps. Furthermore, employees with their managers can identify competency gaps for better performance and focus on the right learning and development interventions to bridge the same.
Finally, the competency framework must also impact the subsequent rungs of talent development where an employee moves up the ladder from one position to the next. Based on the organizational matrix and competencies for each level, you need to identify key attributes that differentiate one level from another and ensure the same is communicated to your employees.
You should:
In a nutshell, it is quite evident that the competency framework can inform and advance every stage of talent development for fast growing organizations. If you implement such a framework across the employee lifecycle, you will significantly reduce your chances of a wrong hire and will be able to nurture a workforce that aligns on the vision, goals and overall organizational culture.
A clear competency based talent development approach can help you achieve high levels of performance which is observable and measurable.
While most people managers are able to create a business case for setting OKRs as well as for the adoption of an OKR software by leveraging industry benchmarks and best practices, there is a need to explicitly decode the return on investment of using an OKR tool as well.
Unless they are able to clearly illustrate how the return achieved using a goal management software is greater than the investment, it becomes difficult to sustain the adoption and get long-term leadership buy-in.
Continue reading to strengthen your business case on the same.
Let’s quickly understand how the OKR framework is integral for an organization, especially high growth companies. Most fast growing organizations have competing priorities they need to focus on with limited resources at hand.
Therefore, simply setting goals by adopting a top-down approach without supporting parameters can lead to confusion and incompetence. OKRs help drive away this ambiguity by linking measurable key results for each objective and facilitating a collaborative approach to achieving goals.
Here are the top three benefits of implementing OKRs in an effective manner:
OKRs enable employees and leadership to have a very clear focus on what needs to be accomplished and what work is out of scope. The idea is to have complete clarity on —
The last part is extremely important as it helps create a sharp focus and set priorities straight.
93% of employees don’t really understand what their organization is trying to accomplish in order to align with their own work.
This illustrates that there is a big absence of clarity and focus amongst employees when it comes to what needs to be accomplished, which stands in the way of creating a high performance culture. Therefore, OKRs can help reduce such uncertainty and ambiguity, making it easy for the workforce to concentrate on what matters.
Taking cue from the first point, the second benefit or purpose of implementing OKRs foris a need for clarity of expectations and overall team and organizational alignment. In case of fast growing organizations, there is an overlapping of roles and responsibilities and a lack of clarity on expectations from each employee. This leads to lower than average outcomes, productivity and revenue growth and data backs the same.
97% of employees and executives believe lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. Whereas, companies that regularly exceeded revenue goals were 2.3X more likely to report high levels of alignment.
By ensuring organization-wide goal visibility, OKRs help teams to decode what is expected out of each team member and their respective contribution towards achievement of the shared goals. Thus, increasing alignment and collaboration.
Finally, setting and implementing OKRs is often a collaborative process. Employees get involved in and participate during the entire OKR process and feel engaged in the same. This greater involvement and participation leads to deeper levels of engagement and ownership of key results which drive impact.
OKRs also enable employees to also gauge their performance and measure their progress in an effective manner. This motivates them to get more involved in achieving the common weekly, quarterly and annual goals. This higher level of engagement directly impacts key organizational parameters such as retention, productivity, profitability, etc.
The business case for OKRs is very clear. However, for companies that are scaling up, with limited bandwidth and competing priorities, often setting OKRs itself gets left behind due to other business priorities.
If an organization focuses on a manual approach to the OKR system, there are several steps which require a lot of time and effort including setting and writing, implementing, tracking, grading, evaluating and modifying OKRs.
Fortunately, today there are OKR tools in the market, which can help automate all of these aspects to help simplify the OKR journey. The right goal management software can help you maximize the realization of the return on investment for your OKRs. Following are the top five ways in which an OKR software makes a measurable difference on the bottomline —
First, an OKR tool can help organizations document or record the OKRs in a way that is visible and accessible to all. There is supporting evidence to show that what gets documented has a higher chance of being achieved, as what is out of sight is often out of mind.
Individuals are 42% more likely to achieve goals when they are physically recorded.
Therefore, the OKR tool can enable organizations to clearly define the business and team OKRs in a written manner which can be reflected on, seen again and again to create instant recall for employees.
OKR tools are great for creating alignment and accountability. On the alignment front, the OKR software can help achieve high levels of strategic alignment on what is the responsibility of each team member across organizations towards the key business goal achievement.
Highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable than their misaligned counterparts.
The dashboard of a good OKR software can help you constantly gauge the level of goal achievement, ensure that team members are aligned on different phases as well as keep a track of when their responsibility is due. It creates high levels of transparency.
Moreover, greater alignment leads to high levels of accountability. Generally, since there is a lack of alignment on responsibilities, there is an accompanying lack of ownership and accountability, and most employees shirk away from taking accountability.
84% of the workforce describes itself as “trying but failing” or “avoiding” accountability, even when employees know what to fix.
A goal management software like SuperBeings allows you to integrate OKRs with regular meetings and check-ins to keep track of progress. Thus, driving a culture of accountability.
It is very common for companies to set OKRs and then evaluate them only at the end of the quarter/year. There is a lack of mid-term tracking which makes it difficult to gauge whether the progress is aligned with the key results or not.
40% of people that write down goals don’t check whether they’ve achieved them. Moreover, only 5.9% of companies communicate goals daily.
An OKR software can help you address this concern by facilitating day-to-day OKR progress tracking. A daily dashboard and history of 1:1 and team check-ins on OKRs, can help organizations track developments over time.
It can also help identify and resolve any performance issues that stand in the way of goal achievement preemptively. At the same time, even if organizations are tracking and monitoring OKR progress, doing so with a manual process is inefficient. An OKR tool can automate most of these processes to enable HR and people managers to spend more time on driving results.
Another major concern that organizations face when it comes to OKRs is being prepared and ready for the same. Many line managers and others struggle with writing effective OKRs. Many organizations believe setting OKRs once is enough. However, that is far from the truth.
Research says, companies that set performance goals quarterly can generate 31% more returns than those reassessing annually.
Using an OKR software can help eliminate all these challenges.
Finally, an OKR software can promote high levels of collaboration for goal achievement. For many organizations, the inability to collaborate leads to low levels of results, diminishing the ROI for OKRs.
86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures.
Using a good OKR software makes collaboration seamless by aligning cross-functional projects and tracking cumulative progress. Invariably, an increase in degree of collaboration is a direct ROI of an OKR tool which can create far reaching impact.
In this final section of the article, we will talk about the key parameters that can help you gauge the ROI of an OKR software. While the above mentioned are primary impact areas, most of them have a qualitative aspect to them.
Gauging the ROI requires backing of data points from employee experience and business results, which the following parameters can help explain.
Organizations should start by gauging whether or not transparency and alignment on goals has increased. This can be measured using employee pulse surveys to understand their opinion on how well they have visibility of goals and clarity on what they need to work towards. Therefore, the first ROI parameter for an OKR software is to identify the increase in level of transparency to ensure everyone is working in the same direction and there are no gaps or overlap in efforts.
The main purpose of an OKR tool is to facilitate the effective and efficient achievement of the goals set by an organization. Thus, the next parameter to measure ROI should revolve around the degree and time period of goal achievement.
You can start by comparing the degree of goal achievement by leveraging OKR grading to see if there is a significant improvement in percentage terms as compared to pre-OKR tool period. Second, it is important to gauge whether or not the goals/key results have been achieved in a shorter period of time or not. Since the OKR platform facilitates better alignment, collaboration, tracking, etc., it can help organizations achieve or realize the goals faster.
Third, there are several administrative overheads that accompany the setting and implementation of goals/OKRs. These include tracking, grading, etc. for managers and providing inputs on the part of employees. The ROI of an OKR software can be gauged by mapping whether or not these overheads come down.
The next parameter for ROI calculation is to measure the change or increase in revenue after the adoption of an OKR software. Since an OKR tool seeks to enable organizations to achieve their goals faster, cost effectively and to a greater extent, there should be an increase in the revenue realized.
According to Larry Page, co-founder, Google claims that “OKRs have helped lead us to 10X growth, many times over.”
Finally, gauging the value of employee parameters like retention/turnover, productivity, engagement, etc, can cumulatively be leveraged to capture the ROI of an OKR tool. There are several ways to gauge these workforce parameters, along with factors like eNPS, etc. which have a direct business impact. Calculating them can help measure the ROI of the OKR tool for an organization.
It is evident that adoption of an intelligent OKR software is not only good to have, but integral for organizational success. Using the right tool has a direct business impact which can be measured in numbers using the ROI parameters mentioned in this article.
There are both qualitative and quantitative aspects to measuring the ROI and a balanced approach to both can empower organizations to align individual performance with business goals.
If you are considering implementing the right OKR software in your business, try out SuperBeings free 21 day trial. Book today. (No credit card or commitment required)
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