7
min read
Virtual team building activities are crucial to engage and develop a remote workforce. Explore the top 27 remote team building activities to try today
7
min read
Team building is one of the most effective investments that organizations can make in their people practices. For one, it definitely augments engagement in the workplace which has a direct impact on productivity and performance. Statistically speaking, 75% employers rate teamwork and collaboration as very important, which is a direct outcome of team building. At the same time, 86% employees believe that a lack of collaboration is what leads to workplace failures.
While there is no doubt that team building is vital for organizational success, the transition to remote work is definitely adding challenges in the way. Thus, most organizations today are augmenting their capabilities to spearhead and run virtual team building activities in an attempt to ensure seamless collaboration and engagement, albeit remotely.
Virtual team building or remote team building activities are a set of efforts and initiatives that an organization undertakes to bring remote teams together. It is natural for team members to feel isolated and disconnected with one another in a remote setting. This negatively impacts productivity, engagement, morale as well as motivation. Therefore, remote team building activities aim to bridge the gap by leveraging the digital media to facilitate deeper relationships in the workplace.
Why an organization needs to focus on virtual team building is an oft repeated question. The need for virtual team building arises from the fact that as individuals we have an inherent need for belongingness and interaction, which takes a back seat in a remote setting. More often than not, the physical distance of working remotely turns into emotional distance where employees start feeling isolated. This leads to a drop in a sense of belongingness and engagement at work.
The objective of digital team building activities is to foster seamless collaboration between coworkers and create an empowering environment of support and positive relationships. Invariably, virtual team building activities are not only aimed at augmenting workplace productivity, but they also facilitate employee wellbeing, in a situation of complete isolation.
Initially, the shift to a remote workforce was considered to be a temporary measure and organizations did not brainstorm on virtual team building activities. However, now it seems to be the new normal and increasingly organizations are realizing that normal video calls may not be the most effective tool to drive team building. More often than not, normal calls end up as a buffer time for employees to finish other chores on mute and video off, putting in almost negligible effort towards virtual team building. In the same light, there are a few efforts that organizations can explore to make virtual team building a possibility. While we will discuss specific activities in detail in a later section, this will give organizations a macro view of the initiatives that can be planned:
The morning chit chats on reaching office before one gets down to the business of the day were one of most effective means to boost team building. It gave the employees a chance to learn about their coworkers beyond what they do at work. As a part of virtual team building, many organizations are setting up these simple everyday rituals which include an early morning interaction before work. It includes discussing ‘what they cooked last night, or which series or show they are binge watching or which is their latest read’. The idea is to have regular touchpoints beyond work which prompt bonding.
Icebreakers have been a fun tool for organizations to encourage employees to get to know one another before working together. With the rise of a remote workforce, virtual icebreakers are gaining weight. These are important to facilitate virtual team building and prompt strong workplace relationships. Virtual icebreakers can include activities like two truths and a lie where employees share three statements about themselves, two are true and one is not. Others have to make the right guess. At the same time, there can be rapid fire questions or other activities like clicking a picture of your work desk, among others. Such icebreakers would help employees overcome the awkwardness of engaging with one another and encourage them to explore mutual interests.
Another effective tool for virtual team building is hosting gaming tournaments. Organizations can invest time and effort to create virtual teams and have gaming sessions of Ludo, PUBG or any others that employees fancy. This would promote teamwork and collaboration in an unconventional manner. At the same time, hosting virtual scavenger hunts can be fun. Employees will have to work in teams and navigate their way to the final treasure. It would be a good idea to add greater incentive for participation by showcasing winner rewards.
While most organizations are investing in conducting virtual training and knowledge webinars, hosting fun sessions can also boost virtual team building. These activities could range from Zumba and dance to origami. At the same time, hosting stand up comedy or live music concerts can boost team engagement. It would actually be a good idea to leverage inputs from icebreakers to identify the interests of your employees and plan sessions that would generate curiosity. Not only will this add to the entertainment quotient, but will also strike conversations and relationship building among employees who have an affinity towards the sessions conducted.
As we now understand the macro level activities and initiatives that can be explored, let’s move into specific team building activities for conference calls and online games for virtual teams.
Virtual murder mystery or any other online mystery game is a great way for remote team building. Here team members are divided into small groups and are given access to a platform. There are a number of platforms online which provide these games for a small cost. Different teams receive the same clues which they have to solve with their respective team members to unravel the murderer or the mystery. While it is deeply engaging and engrossing, it also encourages people to collaborate with one another and acknowledge the strengths of different team members.
In conventional times, offsites were the prime time when employees got to know each other better and unwind from work. While a physical offsite looks difficult in the near future, organizations can explore the idea of virtual tours together. There are multiple platforms out there that are offering guided trips to exquisite locations across the world at nominal charges. Your team can together visit the streets of Paris, Rome and London, while sitting in their rooms in their pajamas. This will give them a chance to take a break from work and learn about different places that they aspire to visit.
Much like the virtual murder mystery, organizations can explore other online team building games, including virtual escape room. Like its physical version and like the name suggests, employees will be grouped into small teams and will find themselves locked in a room. They will have to explore different things in the room to find clues and solve them to actually find a way out. Not only is this a fun way to engage employees, it will also sharpen their critical thinking and problem solving skills.
One of the final virtual team building activities that will not only promote engagement between employees but also a greater interest and affinity towards the organization is Aliens Have Landed. On a simple level, it is a group activity where a few employees come together and pretend that aliens have landed on Earth. They have to explain the organization to these aliens and have exactly 5 minutes. This will spark conversations among team members, for greater collaboration. At the same time, this would prompt delegation of responsibilities as some would focus on creating the pitch, others would focus on the design and pictures, and some others would deliver the pitch. On the one hand, it will boost collaboration. On the other, it will help you understand how well your employees understand the organizations, its values and goals.
We have all played ‘Guess Who’ during our childhood days where we pick a card and describe the person without taking the name while others guess who the person is. With a similar idea, organizations are reinventing the game to match their employees. Here each team member will try to describe another one in 5-6 sentences and the others have to make a guess. Not only will this create a lot of buzz and excitement, but will also help all team members understand how much others know about them and what impression they carry.
Everyone has a bucket list, a list of items they want to tick off in their lives or before they reach a certain age. Sharing a bucket list with one’s coworkers in a remote setting is something team members rarely engage in. Most of these discussions happened over coffee breaks, which do not exist in a remote setting. Therefore, it would be interesting to schedule a conference call to encourage team members to share the top 5 things on their bucket list. While this will help employees to get to know each other on a personal level, it will also facilitate bonding amongst those who share bucket lists.
Clubs and interest groups are a norm in a conventional workplace, where employees get together based on shared interests. However, transition to a remote workforce, has left behind these acts of togetherness and bonding. Organizations should focus on building virtual hobby groups where those who have similar interests can connect and collaborate. These groups can be over whatsapp or any collaboration platform like Slack, that employees are comfortable with. An upside of having such hobby groups is that gradually, they can also come up with interesting remote team building activities and conduct the same.
Another fun activity to encourage team members to know more about one another and to facilitate bonding is two truths and a lie. The rules are simple, employees put down three points about themselves, out of which two are true and one is a lie. The person themselves or someone else from the team will read aloud those statements and others have to guess which one is a lie. In the end, the person reveals which one is actually a lie and those who guessed it right, score a point.
While outings, team lunches and dinners were a norm during the old days, they have come to a standstill in the new normal. However, we may not be able to go out, but employees can still have happy hours together. Organizations can simply order some nice food items and drinks to be delivered to the homes of their team members, and everyone can enjoy a meal together over a video call, with random conversations and chitchats.
This virtual team building activity also takes everyone down the memory lane. Treasure hunts were almost a daily affair for everyone. So, why not take a stab at conducting the same virtually? The rules are simple. Those organizing the event can create a list of items that are generally available at every household and share a few items every few minutes while those participating have to search for those items and send a picture within the designated time. The one with the most pictures in the least time wins. There can be another twist to the game by encrypting the clues in riddles which employees have to solve and then find the item, click a picture and share.
There are multiple platforms out there which organizations can explore to conduct this virtual team building activity at absolutely no cost. The process is simple, everyone logs onto the pre-decided platform and the platform automatically selects a team member and random and assigns a word. The selected participant has to use the virtual paintbrush to draw the word in the best way possible and others have to guess the same. The one who draws the best and guesses the most wins.
Many employees miss dancing at office gatherings and events. Why not take dancing to their homes. Organizations can either conduct dance or zumba sessions for their employees by collaborating with some expert. At the same time, they can simply get a video from the internet and play it live for all team members, who must copy the steps. Not only will this be a great way to stay fit, but watching others and oneself performing steps in a goofy way will bring on a lot of laughter to the team.
The uncertainty and ambiguity that has accompanied the last year has been stressful for almost everyone. Meditation has been one way that has helped individuals maintain their mental wellbeing. Taking cue from that, organizations can conduct guided meditation sessions to encourage their employees to learn about different aspects of meditation and focus on their wellbeing.
Celebrating birthdays, work anniversaries, etc. have been an integral part of team building for most organizations. It is often said that a team that celebrates together, stays together. Organizations must continue celebrating important milestones, albeit virtually. Simply sending a cake or a goodie basket along with a collective celebration over a conference call can make a lot of impact when it comes to boost employee morale and motivation. This will also enable team members to get to know each other more than just work and create long lasting bonds.
Quizzes have always been a great tool to bring people together and facilitate interaction. Organizations can conduct virtual quizzes on different topics which can either be specific to their industry to ensure that team members are updated on the latest trends, or just for fun with random questions. One of the team members can be the quiz master, while others can participate. Some goodies or prizes for the winners will definitely boost participation for this virtual team building activity.
GIFs are the new thing in town and leveraging them as one of the tools for online team building games is definitely worth a try. Conducting a GIF is actually a piece of cake. The process is quite simple. All participants can connect over any collaboration or messaging platform and the one conducting the activity can share a random phrase or sentence, like ‘The cutest elephant’. Others have to send different GIFs which they feel describe the phrase shared the best. While this is no competition, it is sure to bring about many laughs on the table.
We are all aware of the Japanese paper folding art, Origami. However, in a virtual set up, organizations can add a twist to the ancient art form. The rules are easy to follow. Simply divide all employees in teams of two. Send a list of origami instructions to one of the team members and instruct the other one to collect the required material. Now the one with the instructions has to verbally explain the folding process to the other, to create the end product. On the one hand, it will be really fun to relive the childhood days. On the other hand, it will help gauge the communication level of team members, i.e. how well they are able to express their thoughts and how well the other one listens, comprehends and performs.
The above 17 virtual team building activities have been adopted by many organizations and have proven to deliver great results. However, many organizations also struggle with breaking the ice when team members join the calls. The result is awkward silence and a direct jump to the activity at hand. Fortunately, there are some amazing icebreaker questions that organizations can experiment with before conducting the online team building activities.
The secret to conducting virtual team building activities during quarantine in a way that ensures success lies in using the right platforms and tools. Simply using the same conference call platform to conduct all activities may not be the best way out. Here is a list of tools organizations can leverage:
Mentioned above is a comprehensive list that organizations can leverage to refine their team building efforts and customize them for a remote workforce. However, before embarking on any of these activities, organizations must make an effort to gauge the employee pulse to understand the gaps that these activities need to bridge. Here, platforms like SuperBeings with their pulse surveys can help organizations gauge the level of engagement and areas of disconnect for employees. Based on these insights, the platform shares data-backed action steps for managers, aligned with industry standards and benchmarks for sustainable impact. As the scope and nature of work has changed in the remote setting, so have employee expectations about team building and engagement. Organizations need to stay on top of the new trends to attract, develop and retain the top talent.
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Find more tools to take your employee engagement to new heights, book a free demo today with Superbeings!
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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